Review 1 of 6
Price Paid:
$3.00
from Ebay Summary: Whenever people gripe about modern cameras and noise or saturation, they should pick up one of these and see how far we've come.
My particular example is a Dimera Relisys 3500, but aside from the name they're all the same camera. My particular reason for owning one is this was literally the first digital camera I ever owned, and I guess it shows how far I've come. For $3 plus shipping I thought why not go back to the egg and see how it was.
History wise this camera was made when an "affordable" SLR like the D1 was $5,000, and had a resolution of 2.74 megapixels, and 640X480 was considered an acceptable resolution for consumer cameras. Sony was cleaning up with their floppy disc based Mavica cameras, which made the Dimera/Mustek the equivalent of a 110 film camera.
This was also one of the earliest cameras to use a removable flash memory, although it was a "serial flash" unit available in 2mb or 4MB sizes, and quickly left the market. There are no readers for these cards and they are now very rare.
Shooting it is like stepping back to a 110 film camera, it's all automatic so you simply point, click, and hope for the best. You have no manual controls and no ability to view your images whatsoever.
But enough with that, on to the rest of it.... Strengths: It will take a picture. In color. Weaknesses: The most outstanding weakness is the horrible image quality; a grainy noisy, smudgy thing that makes 110 film look like large format. The images look like stills from a contemporary webcam, and the sensor likely came from one. As the adage goes a photograph is better than none at all, and my first camera did let me take pictures of a few important family memories.
It's a serial based connection and no readers are available for the serial flash card. I was able to get mine working on a Windows XP box by installing the driver only and then using acquire in Photoshop Elements 2.0. You can also take a grainy b/w soundless video when the camera is tethered, which could have some artistic potential.
Uses a non-rechargeable lithium battery, but at least it's a standard one you can get at the store.
Default image format is BMP, which was very unusual even then, but nothing virtually any photo editor can't work with. Similar Products Used: Similar to this camera really none. Customer Service: Didn't use
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