Fujifilm F402
The Fujifilm FinePix F402 is a small, square, metallic-silver compact digital camera that occupies a slightly odd position in the history of consumer photography. Announced on 19 September 2002 and on sale in Japan from 13 October 2002 at a suggested retail price of around 50,000 yen (about $349.95 in the US from November 2002), it was the simpler, fixed-lens sibling of the FinePix F401 — the camera that introduced Fujifilm's distinctively chunky, blue-accented "F-series" body style earlier that same year.
Where the F401 added a 3× optical zoom and a small folding lens cover, the F402 stripped the design back to a single fixed-focal-length f/3.2 Super Fujinon lens hidden behind a circular swivelling cover on the front of the body, and squeezed the whole assembly into a package barely larger than a credit card and substantially lighter than the AA-cell compacts most people were still carrying in 2002. Inside that small aluminium shell was Fujifilm's then-current third-generation Super CCD Honeycomb sensor, a 1.5-inch low-temperature polysilicon TFT rear screen, and one of the first cameras anywhere to take the brand-new xD-Picture Card memory format that Fujifilm and Olympus had launched in July of the same year (DPReview, ITmedia).
I bought my own F402 in May 2003 from Dixons in Canterbury, not as a replacement for any of the film cameras I was using at the time but out of straightforward curiosity to find out what this new-fangled "digital photography" actually looked like in practice. The EOS 10 was still doing perfectly good service as my main camera, the EOS 20D that would eventually mark my real switch to digital was still a year away from launch, and the F402 was bought with no particular plan beyond seeing what happened when you took the film out of the equation. What did happen was that it lived in my coat pocket for most of the summer of 2003, came out for every casual photograph I might previously have used a film camera for, and — without my ever quite making the conscious decision to switch — got steadily more use than any of my 35mm bodies over the following twelve months.
A short history of the camera
The early 2000s were the period in which compact digital cameras stopped being expensive curiosities and started becoming the default way that ordinary people took photographs. The technological building blocks had been in place since the mid-1990s — Kodak had launched the DC40 in 1995, Casio the QV-10 the same year, and the Nikon Coolpix 900 of 1998 had set the template for the swivel-lens enthusiast compact — but it was the gradual collapse in CCD sensor prices, the increasing sophistication of small Li-ion battery packs, and the appearance of the first practical small-format flash memory cards that finally made truly pocketable digital cameras viable around the turn of the millennium. By 2002, the global digital still camera market was growing at something close to fifty per cent a year, every major Japanese camera manufacturer had a serious compact lineup, and the question for the buying public had shifted from "is digital good enough yet?" to "which of these dozens of similar-looking little cameras should I actually buy?" (Wikipedia).
Fujifilm's answer to that question, through the late 1990s and early 2000s, was twofold. First was the Super CCD Honeycomb sensor design that Fujifilm's research arm had patented in late 1999 and introduced commercially in the FinePix 4700 Zoom in March 2000. In a conventional CCD, the light-sensitive photodiodes are arranged on a regular square grid, with small spacing gaps between adjacent diodes to accommodate the wiring and readout structures; the Super CCD design instead used octagonal photodiodes rotated 45° relative to the image frame, packed in a honeycomb pattern in which each diode's vertices sit between its neighbours' edges, producing a substantially larger photoreceptor area for a given chip size and substantially smaller gaps between sensors. The honeycomb layout required a more complicated processing pipeline — the camera's image processor had to interpolate the rotated octagonal photosite data back onto a conventional square pixel grid before output — but the larger photoreceptor area meant noticeably higher light sensitivity, better signal-to-noise ratios at high ISO, and (Fujifilm's marketing claimed, somewhat contentiously) an effective output resolution noticeably higher than the raw photosite count would suggest (Wikipedia).
The Super CCD design went through several generations through the early 2000s — the first generation in the 4700 Zoom of 2000, the second in the FinePix 6900Z of 2001, the third (used in the F402) in 2002, and the fourth in 2003 — each successive generation refining the photosite shape, the colour filter array, the on-chip noise reduction circuitry, and the interpolation algorithms. The F402's sensor was a 1/2.7-inch third-generation Super CCD with 2.1 million effective photosites, and Fujifilm marketed it on the basis of the interpolated output file size — a nominal 4.0 megapixel image at 2304 × 1728 pixels, produced by upsampling the 2.1-megapixel raw photosite data using the honeycomb interpolation pipeline. Whether the resulting files were genuinely "4 megapixel" in any meaningful sense was a matter of considerable industry debate at the time, and continues to be a matter of slight embarrassment for Fujifilm now, but the practical effect was that an F402 file printed at A4 looked broadly comparable to a contemporary 3-megapixel competitor, and the camera positioned itself in 2002 as a genuinely capable family-snapshot machine (PCSTATS).
The second part of Fujifilm's answer was the xD-Picture Card, jointly developed with Olympus and announced in July 2002, just two months before the F402 itself. xD was Fujifilm and Olympus's replacement for the older SmartMedia format, which both companies had backed through the late 1990s but which had hit a hard ceiling at 128MB and had no realistic upgrade path to the higher capacities the new generation of multi-megapixel cameras was about to demand. xD cards were physically tiny (20 × 25 × 1.7mm, smaller than a postage stamp), manufactured for Fujifilm and Olympus exclusively by Toshiba, and at launch offered capacities of 16MB to 128MB with a 5MB/s read speed; the format would eventually scale to 2GB, but never broke out of the Fujifilm/Olympus walled garden, never matched the price-per-megabyte of CompactFlash or Secure Digital, and was effectively obsolete by 2009-2010 (Wikipedia). The F402, along with the F401 before it, was one of the very first cameras anywhere to use the new format.
The F-series itself — small, square, metallic-silver compacts with a circular swivelling lens cover on the front and a blue accent stripe across the body — ran from the F401 of May 2002 through the F402 (September 2002), F410 (March 2003, with 3× optical zoom and fourth-generation Super CCD HR), F420 (September 2003), F440 (March 2004) and F450 (April 2005), with several other related bodies (F455, F460, F470) following the same general design language into 2006. The series shared the same approximate body size, the same blue-LED front illumination, and the same family of xD-Picture Card slots, USB ports and Picture Cradle accessories, and represented one of the more distinctive industrial design exercises of the early 2000s compact-camera era (Wikipedia — FinePix F420).
What's inside
The F402's specification sheet, read with twenty-three years of hindsight, looks rather charmingly minimal — small sensor, fixed lens, two apertures, no zoom, no viewfinder, no flash hot shoe — but it was put together with considerably more care than the spec sheet alone implies, and produces images that are noticeably better than its bare numbers would suggest.
The sensor is the third-generation Super CCD Honeycomb described above: a 1/2.7-inch chip (effective imaging area roughly 5.27 × 3.96mm) with 2.1 million effective photosites packed in the rotated octagonal honeycomb pattern, with a primary-colour (RGB) Bayer-equivalent filter array, on-chip noise reduction, and output files at one of four selectable sizes — 2304 × 1728 (the interpolated "4M" mode), 1600 × 1200 (2M), 1280 × 960 and 640 × 480 — all stored as JPEGs at one of two compression levels (Fujifilm Japan).
The lens is a Super EBC Fujinon fixed-focal-length unit, 6.0mm f/3.2, which on the F402's 1/2.7-inch sensor gives a 35mm-equivalent angle of view of around 39mm — fractionally wider than a true normal lens, broadly equivalent to the moderate-wide-normal focal length that almost every other point-and-shoot of the era used as its default. The optical design includes a moulded aspherical element to correct astigmatism and field curvature at the corners, and the front element is recessed inside the body behind the circular swivelling lens cover (which the camera opens automatically when the mode slider is moved into the shooting position, and closes again when powered off). Focus range is 50cm to infinity in the standard mode, dropping to a 6-65cm macro mode that engages automatically when the camera detects the subject is close enough to warrant it. Autofocus is TTL contrast-detection with a single central point.
The genuinely unusual thing about the F402's lens is its aperture mechanism, which has only two settings: f/3.2 and f/8. There is no continuously variable aperture and no in-between stop; the camera automatically selects whichever of the two apertures the metering system decides is appropriate, with the f/8 setting engaged for brighter scenes and the f/3.2 setting for dimmer ones. This is an unusual approach but a reasonable one for a small-sensor compact — with a 1/2.7-inch sensor, depth of field at any normal subject distance is enormous regardless of aperture, so the only real reason to vary aperture is to manage shutter speed and image brightness, and a two-position aperture takes care of that simply and cheaply. The image quality difference between the two stops is real but small — slightly less corner softness and slightly less vignetting at f/8 — and the EXIF data of any F402 image will report exactly one of the two values.
The shutter is a small CCD-electronic shutter giving speeds from 1/2 second to 1/2000 second, with no provision for longer exposures or any bulb mode. ISO is selectable as 200, 400, 800 or 1600, with the 800 and 1600 settings restricted to the 1280 × 960 image size (the noise penalty at high ISO was severe enough at the small sensor sizes of 2002 that Fujifilm sensibly limited the highest sensitivities to lower output resolutions). Metering is 64-zone TTL evaluative, linked to the central AF point, with ±2 EV exposure compensation in 1/3-stop increments. White balance is automatic, with five preset overrides (daylight, shade, fluorescent ×3, incandescent) and a custom manual setting.
The rear LCD is a 1.5-inch low-temperature polysilicon TFT panel with 117,000 pixels — small by any modern standard but, in 2002, properly bright and reasonably sharp, with enough contrast in daylight to be useful as a real-time framing display rather than just for image review. There is no optical viewfinder; framing is done entirely on the LCD, which puts the F402 firmly in the early wave of compacts that had abandoned the viewfinder in favour of a screen-only shooting workflow. The display also shows the live histogram-equivalent exposure preview, the menu system (driven by the four-way pad and OK button on the back), and image playback with up to 9-image thumbnail browsing.
Storage is on xD-Picture Card, with a 16MB card supplied in the box at launch (good for around 14 frames at the camera's maximum file size). The xD slot sits behind a small spring-loaded door on the bottom edge of the body, alongside the NP-40 lithium-ion battery compartment. The NP-40 is a small flat 700mAh / 3.7V Li-ion pack — also used by the slightly later FinePix Z-series, the F410 and F420, and several Pentax Optio bodies — rated for around 155 minutes of continuous operation or 4,000 still frames per charge, which were unusually impressive numbers for a camera of this class in 2002 (the AA-cell competitors typically managed 100-200 shots on a fresh set of alkalines). The battery is charged either via a small in-box external charger or, optionally, via the Picture Cradle CP-FX402 docking station — a 5,000-yen accessory that combined battery charging, USB image transfer to a host computer, and a small status indicator into a single tabletop dock that the camera sat in vertically.
The flash is a tiny built-in unit with a guide number around GN3 at ISO 100, offering Auto, Force, Slow Sync, and Off modes plus a red-eye reduction pre-flash. Continuous shooting is rated at 2 frames per second for a maximum of two frames at 0.5-second intervals — almost vestigial by modern standards, but consistent with the buffer and write-speed limits of small cameras of the period. The camera also offers a 10-second self-timer, a movie mode at 320 × 240 at 10fps with monaural sound (recorded as Motion JPEG in AVI containers, with a 60-second per-clip maximum), and a voice memo function that lets you attach a short audio annotation to any still image.
Connectivity is USB 1.1 (5MB/s) via a small mini-B socket on the side of the body — used for direct image transfer to a host computer when the optional Picture Cradle isn't being used. There is no video output. The xD-Picture Card can, however, be removed and read via any xD-compatible card reader; the camera's connection to its host computer was reasonably well thought out for the era, and a 2003-vintage Windows XP or Mac OS X machine would mount the camera as a generic mass-storage device with no driver installation required.
The body is a small aluminium shell measuring 77 × 69 × 22mm and weighing 125 grams without battery (145g with battery and card), finished in metallic silver with a single blue accent stripe across the front face and the "FinePix" wordmark and "F402 DIGITAL CAMERA" etched in the same blue at the bottom corners. The "Super CCD" badge in red sits prominently above the lens cover. A distinctive small blue LED behind a translucent panel on the front of the body illuminates whenever the camera is powered on, blinks during the self-timer countdown, and pulses during charging when the camera is sitting in its Picture Cradle — a piece of decorative industrial design that has aged surprisingly well, and that makes a powered-on F402 visibly distinguishable across a dark room (PC Watch).
The Controls
A raised, circular, stainless-steel plate dominates the front of the camera. The left-hand side of the circle is effectively the main Power Switch that slides outwards to turn on the camera, revealing a curved blue LED strip that glows when activated. At the 9 o’clock position on the sliding switch is the lozenge-shaped self-timer LED. At the 12 o’clock position, you can see the flash, and the lens opening is at the 2 o’clock position — protected by a metal plate that slides out of the way when the camera is powered up. Outside the circular plate, in the top-left corner, there is the FinePix logo with three small holes below it for the microphone. In the top-right corner, two small oval windows: the viewfinder on the left and a light-sensor for the flash on the right. The top surface of the camera sports only the shutter release button, which naturally falls under the right index finger.
On the back of the camera, the viewfinder window is at the top left corner (as viewed from the back) and moving across to the right of it, a small green indicator LED, a sliding switch for Video, Playback and Camera modes, and three buttons for Macro mode, Digital Zoom and Flash. The lower part of the camera's back bevels out slightly. There’s a row of three buttons: Display, Back and Menu/OK, below which the LCD dominates the space on the left, and on the right, a small raised thumb-grip. On the left-hand edge of the camera body, there’s a 5V power socket at the bottom, and just above it, a USB port that doubles as the cradle connector. On the right edge of the camera is the lug for a camera strap. The base of the camera has the Battery and xD Card compartment door.
The Super CCD and the interpolated megapixel
The single most distinctive piece of technology in the F402, and the piece worth dwelling on at slightly more length, is the Super CCD Honeycomb sensor design and the slightly contentious pixel interpolation that went with it.
The conventional CCD sensor design Fujifilm was trying to improve on in the late 1990s had the photoreceptors laid out on a regular orthogonal grid: a rectangular array of small square or rectangular photodiodes, with thin spacing strips between adjacent diodes carrying the transfer-gate wiring and the column-readout channels. In a typical late-1990s small-format CCD, those spacing strips might occupy 30-40 per cent of the chip's total surface area — light falling on a spacing strip rather than on a photodiode contributed nothing to the image, and the effective fill factor of the chip was correspondingly limited. The colour filter array on top of the chip used the standard Bayer pattern (two green photodiodes, one red and one blue in each 2×2 cell), and the camera's image processor demosaiced the Bayer-pattern data back into full RGB pixels using one of several well-known interpolation algorithms.
Fujifilm's Super CCD design changed two things about that conventional layout. First, the photodiodes themselves were octagonal rather than square — a shape that more closely matched the actual point-spread function of light passing through the microlens array on top of the chip, and that packed more efficiently into a given area. Second, and more importantly, the entire array was rotated 45° relative to the image frame, so that the photodiodes sat in a honeycomb pattern in which each diode's vertices interlocked with its neighbours' edges, eliminating much of the spacing-strip area that wasted light in the conventional layout. The result was an effective fill factor noticeably higher than a conventional CCD of the same chip area, which translated directly into higher light sensitivity, better dynamic range, and lower noise at any given ISO (Color.org).
The complication this introduced was that the rotated honeycomb photosite layout did not correspond to the rectangular pixel grid that every JPEG decoder, every print driver and every monitor expected to see at the other end of the imaging pipeline. The camera's image processor therefore had to interpolate the rotated octagonal photosite data onto a notional rectangular pixel grid before output — and Fujifilm took the position, throughout the early 2000s, that the interpolation could legitimately produce a higher output pixel count than the raw photosite count, on the basis that each interpolated pixel contained information derived from multiple neighbouring photosites and that the resulting file genuinely contained more spatial information than a simple one-to-one mapping would produce. The F402's sensor has 2.1 million photosites and its maximum output file is 2304 × 1728 = 3.98 million pixels, marketed by Fujifilm as a "4-megapixel" file.
The contemporary photography press was split on whether this claim was technically defensible or marketing nonsense. The sympathetic view was that the Super CCD interpolation pipeline was genuinely extracting more information than a flat 2-to-4 megapixel upsample would, and that an F402 print at A4 was visibly sharper than a contemporary 2-megapixel competitor printed at the same size; the unsympathetic view was that pixel counts ought to mean the actual number of photoreceptors on the sensor, and that calling a 2.1MP chip "4 megapixel" was the kind of marketing manoeuvre that gave the early digital camera industry a slightly tarnished reputation for honesty. Both views are partially correct: the interpolated files do contain real additional spatial information compared to a simple 2-to-4MP upsample, but they emphatically do not contain as much information as a genuine 4MP conventional sensor would, and the marketing claim glossed over a distinction that a more scrupulous industry would have made more clearly. By the late 2000s, regulatory pressure from advertising standards bodies in several countries had forced Fujifilm to start quoting the raw photosite count alongside the interpolated output size, and by the 2010s the Super CCD line itself had been quietly retired in favour of conventional CMOS designs.
What is genuinely true about the F402's sensor, regardless of how the megapixels are counted, is that the small Super CCD chip produces images with noticeably better low-light performance than its straightforward small-CCD competitors of 2002, with a slightly warmer and more saturated colour response that suits skin tones and indoor lighting particularly well, and with the slightly grainy, slightly soft, slightly painted-looking rendering that has become recognisable in retrospect as the distinctive aesthetic of early-2000s Fujifilm digital cameras. Photographs taken on an F402 are immediately identifiable as F402 photographs, in a way that is not really true of any of its mainstream contemporaries.
The Lens
The F402's single fixed lens — the Super EBC Fujinon 6.0mm f/3.2 — is, on the face of it, the kind of small fixed-focal-length compact-camera lens that does not normally warrant detailed discussion. It has no zoom, no manual focus, no aperture ring, no filter thread, and is engraved with the bare minimum of identifying information ("SUPER FUJINON LENS f=6.0mm 1:3.2") on the small black ring surrounding the front element. But it is, considered as an optical design, slightly more interesting than its simple specification implies.
The 6.0mm focal length on the F402's 1/2.7-inch sensor gives a 35mm-equivalent of around 39mm, somewhere in the region of a 50° field — what most people would intuitively recognise as the angle of view of an "ordinary" lens. This is slightly wider than the 50mm equivalent that the SLR world treated as the canonical "normal" focal length, but slightly narrower than the 24-28mm equivalents that most modern smartphone main cameras use, and corresponds roughly to the natural framing that the human eye notices when it is paying attention to something specific in front of it. It’s a focal length that produces images that look unremarkable — neither obviously wide-angle nor obviously telephoto — and that get out of the way of whatever the photograph is actually about.
The Super EBC designation in the lens name refers to Fujifilm's Electron Beam Coating process, a then-proprietary multi-layer anti-reflection coating applied to the glass surfaces of the lens to reduce internal reflections, ghost images and flare. EBC coatings had been a Fujinon trademark since the 1970s — they appeared on the medium-format Fujica GS645 of 1978, on the various rangefinder GS/GW/GA bodies through the 1990s, and on virtually every serious Fujifilm consumer lens since — and the "Super EBC" variant used on the F402 was a refined version with additional coating layers and slightly different thermal-evaporation deposition process. The practical effect on a small compact camera lens is small but real: F402 images have noticeably less ghosting against backlit subjects than contemporary uncoated or single-coated competitors, slightly better contrast in mixed lighting, and slightly more saturated colour rendition overall.
The aspherical element in the optical design is a single moulded-glass element used to correct astigmatism and field curvature at the edges of the frame — a feature that would have been unusual on a small compact lens in the late 1990s but had become standard by 2002 as the cost of moulded aspherics fell. The F402's lens has slightly soft corners at f/3.2 (visible in the studio image rendering as a small drop in resolution at the extreme edges of the frame) but sharpens up substantially at f/8, and is well-corrected for chromatic aberration across the visible spectrum.
The two-position aperture mechanism — the slightly unusual feature mentioned earlier — sits inside the lens barrel as a small flag-shaped piece of metal that swings into or out of the optical path under solenoid control, blocking down the effective aperture from f/3.2 to roughly f/8 when the metering system calls for it. There is no continuously-variable iris diaphragm of the kind that conventional film and digital camera lenses use; the choice is between fully open and partially closed, and the choice is made automatically. The arrangement is unusual enough that the EXIF data from any F402 image will show exactly one of f/3.2 or f/8 in its aperture field, with no intermediate values ever appearing.
Monty’s Arrival, July 2003
The example frame above was taken in early July 2003, at the Kent & Canterbury Hospital, less than an hour after the birth of our second son Monty. The frame is a close-up photograph of his tiny feet, against a white knitted blanket over a brown-khaki cot sheet. The plastic hospital identity bracelets that the midwives had fastened around his ankles are just visible, the handwritten name only partially legible.
The EXIF data on the file records a focal length of 6mm (which is to say, the F402's only focal length), an aperture of f/8 (the small one, which the metering system had chosen on the basis of the bright morning light through the window of the maternity room), a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second (handheld, no flash, which the F402 had probably suggested with a small wobble of its shake-warning icon on the LCD), and an ISO of 200 (the lowest the F402 offered, and the one it defaulted to in bright conditions). The image is sharp from edge to edge, mostly because at f/8 on a 1/2.7-inch sensor the depth of field at a 30cm subject distance is roughly "everything", and the warm pink of newborn skin against the cool white of the knitted blanket is rendered in the slightly painterly, slightly saturated, slightly grainy way that has become recognisable in retrospect as the F402 look.
This was, in retrospect, one of the moments that I noticed how comprehensively digital was going to change photography for me. With a film camera, the photographs of a newborn baby's first hour are exposed onto a roll of film that then sits in a sealed cassette until some unspecified later date when it gets taken to be processed. By the time the prints come back from the one-hour-photo counter or the Snappy Snaps round the corner, the moment they document is often days or weeks old, the prints arrive as a sealed batch with their results not really revisable, and any technical mistakes in the shooting are permanent.
With the F402, the image of Monty's feet was visible on the small 1.5-inch screen literally seconds after the shutter clicked, the exposure was confirmed by the small live histogram-equivalent preview the camera offered in playback mode, and I could see immediately that the photograph had worked. I took perhaps a dozen frames that morning — Monty's feet, his small clenched hand, the back of his head, his crinkled face, Vanessa holding him on her chest — and by the time we left the hospital that afternoon I had already chosen the foot photograph as one to print and send to family.
The F402 stayed in my coat pocket for the rest of that summer, came out for every casual photograph through the autumn of 2003 and the spring of 2004, and got steadily more use than any of my 35mm cameras. By the time I bought the EOS 20D in late 2004 and made the formal switch to digital, the F402 had already done most of the persuading.
What it's like to own one now
The Fujifilm F402 in 2026 is one of those small early-digital cameras that has begun, very quietly, to attract a slightly devoted collector following — partly for nostalgia reasons, partly because the distinctive Super CCD aesthetic has come back into fashion among the kind of young photographers who are now using compact digital cameras of this era as a form of analog-adjacent aesthetic statement, and partly because the F-series body design has aged surprisingly well as a piece of industrial design. Clean working bodies sell in the UK in 2026 for around £40-£90, depending on cosmetic condition, whether the original Picture Cradle and battery are included, and whether the seller has done the slightly tedious work of locating and testing an xD-Picture Card in a known-good capacity (16-128MB are the cards the F402 reliably reads; later 256MB-2GB cards are theoretically supported via firmware but in practice are intermittent on this generation of body).
The failure modes to know about, if you are thinking of buying one, are essentially three. First, the xD-Picture Card slot itself — the small spring-loaded mechanism that grips the card has a habit of weakening with age, and some surviving F402 bodies will read cards intermittently or refuse to recognise them at all. There is no realistic repair for this; if the slot has gone, the camera is finished. Second, the rear LCD has a small ribbon cable connection at one end that is known to develop intermittent contact with age, producing flickering or partially-failed display; this is occasionally repairable with patience and a steady hand, more often a write-off. Third, the NP-40 battery has gone out of mainstream production but is still available as third-party replacements from various Chinese manufacturers at around £10-£15 per pack — original Fujifilm-branded NP-40s are increasingly hard to find and increasingly expensive when they do appear, but the third-party packs work indistinguishably and last roughly as long.
The xD-Picture Card itself is the bigger practical obstacle to using an F402 today. The format went out of production in 2009-2010, the cards are no longer manufactured anywhere, and the secondary market for used cards is small and slightly unreliable — the smaller-capacity cards (16-128MB) are still findable on eBay for around £10-£20 each, but later large-capacity cards (256MB-2GB) are increasingly rare. An F402 with no working xD card is a substantially less useful camera than an F402 with a working xD card, so factor a card purchase into any acquisition budget.
What you get for the trouble is a camera that produces immediately recognisable Super CCD images, in the slightly grainy, slightly saturated, slightly soft early-2000s digital aesthetic that has become genuinely fashionable again over the last few years; a body that fits comfortably in a coat pocket and weighs almost nothing; a battery that holds an impressive number of frames for a camera of its size and age; and a small piece of industrial design that has aged into the kind of object that people now keep on their desks for the pleasure of having on a desk, regardless of whether they ever take a photograph with it. The blue front-illumination LED still glows in the dark when the camera is powered on, the small mode slider still moves between movie and playback and shooting positions with the small mechanical detent that early-2000s consumer cameras still bothered to engineer in, and the circular swivelling lens cover still snaps shut with the small audible click that announced the end of a photographic occasion in 2003 and announces it equally well in 2026.
