Fujifilm's Z300 Camera Radically Reinvents the Familiar Camera Interface

As soon as Apple introduced it, the iPhone’s slick, multi-fingered, touch-screen interface redefined the way people interacted with their mobile phones. In exactly the same way, Fujifilm’s 10-Mpixel FinePix Z300 compact digital camera with its touch-screen interface redefines the way people take photographs. Sure, you can scroll through images in the camera using gestures similar to those used for the iPhone’s interface. However, it’s the way you shoot those images that’s caught my attention. Fujifilm has revolutionized the way the camera user indicates the central focus of the shot; they point to it.

Since the camera was invented in the 1800s, the photographer has been responsible for setting the camera’s focus. Camera’s cannot read the photographer’s mind to figure out what the focus of the image is, so they cannot set focus themselves. Even autofocus cameras simply make a guess and hope they’re right.

The introduction of compact digital cameras changed the way people held and used cameras. Instead of holding these cameras up close to the eye to peer through a viewfinder, photographers using most digital compact cameras hold the camera at arms length and compose the shot by looking at the rear-mounted LCD. Fujifilm’s Z300 exploits that changed usage pattern by making the display touch sensitive and allowing the photographer to point to the part of the image that should be in sharp focus. This adaptation of existing autofocus and touch-screen technologies represents a breakthrough in the camera’s user interface. If you want to see some very short videos of how this all works, go here.

It’s not the first time camera makers have tried to help connect the photographer’s mind to the camera’s AF system. For example, Canon developed multiple generations of “Eye Control” systems as in the Canon EOS-3 and Elan7ne. These cameras attempted to figure out where the photographer’s eye was pointing within the viewfinder’s composition and then weighted the cameras’ AF points accordingly. The fact that eye-controlled systems aren’t dominant in today’s markets clearly demonstrates a lack of adoption for this approach. The new custom of deleting viewfinders entirely from most compact cameras would seem to put another nail in this feature’s coffin.

Unlike eye-controlled AF, Fujifilm’s touch-driven AF seems a natural progression based on current, widespread photographic technique. We’ll have to wait a while to see if the idea takes hold the way the Apple iPhone’s user interface seems destined to sweep the mobile phone handset market. For now, the Fujifilm FinePix Z300 is only available in the Japanese market for ¥40,000.