konica aiborg user manual
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konica aiborg user manualWith its fairly high-specification 3x zoom, non-traditional styling, and high level of automation, this was Konica's entrance into market segment for designer cameras briefly in the late 1980s and early 90s.An LCD panel on the top shows the camera settings, and a further small LCD display in the back shows the date settings. The AiBORG has a 3x zoom lens - with a hinged transparent plastic cover, motor drive and built-in flash. There is no facility for external flash.The focus distance is shown on a small arc-shaped dial in the viewfinder. The small viewfinder eyepiece has a rotary dioptric adjuster carefully placed to be on the cheekbone when in use, leaving little room for a finger to adjust it. Please try again.Please try again.Please try again. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Register a free business account To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness. But, that’s precisely what attracted me to it, I couldn’t not buy a camera that looked like this, I just had to find out more about it. After handing the chap in the charity shop I found it a crisp ?5 note, I took it straight back to the office and sat it on my desk, proudly exclaiming “look at this thing!”. After some discussion around the office we came to the conclusion that it was best described as what would happen if Darth Vader and The Predator had a child together. It can’t have been the spawn of evil, as it’s likely none of the aforementioned nemeses would allow their child out the door with such terrible makeup on! And with all those buttons on the back, surely it’s capable of some useful functions too? Or just a toy?
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5 The lens and autoexposure 6 My Concluding thoughts on the Konica AiBORG So badly in fact that I was actually taken aback by how shit it felt to use. It fails summarily at the first hurdle with the position of the shutter button being so clearly wrong. You would think that with a camera of this size the shutter button would sit under your finger when you naturally grip the camera. It doesn’t, in fact so far I’ve had to look at the camera almost every time to find the button. It’s so far down the front the camera, when you do put your forefinger on it, the grip isn’t comfortable and the camera feels top heavy. Not satisfied with putting the shutter button in the wrong place, it seems they were also keen to make it a tactile nightmare. It’s a little like the sort of 4 way control you might find on one of those cheap 1990’s GameBoy knockoff toys. Then there’s the vast array of little buttons across the back, all countersunk and fiddly to press. To top it off, the whole thing creaks and feels bendy and flimsy in use. In summary, however bad it looks like in the pictures, it’s worse in the hand. Mine is also filled with dust and is basically blurred when zoomed in. I think the latter is because of the dust, so I can’t really hold this against it I suppose, it is quite old, but a viewfinder that obstructs the view has certainly not done it any favours. It also let’s you know when the flash is going to be used, or if it thinks you should have it mounted on a tripod, but I’d probably forgo all of that stuff to actually just see clearly though the thing. It has a range of buttons across the back with a set of icons that look like the designer was trying to make them appeal to an 8 year old motorsport enthusiast. Once again, they bare similarity to the sort of thing you might find on a knockoff GameBoy, maybe one with a knockoff version of road rash installed on it. Well, I’m not going to deny it, I’m not its biggest fan. But, I have had fun using it. Not because of how it is to use, but for some of the fun things it does.A simple auto, on and off are the modes available. These modes can be set independently of the rest of the following modes, some of which come with their own default flash setting that can then be changed. The first one switches the camera into its scene mode, the second button scrolls through the modes one-by-one. It can also be used with the flash to balance the foreground an back lights. I guess this works by measuring the distance to the subject combined with an understanding of the average size of a person. Bluntly, this mode appears to me to be completely pointless, I’m perfectly capable of zooming the camera to an appropriate focal length for a portrait. Maybe folks needed help with this in the early 90’s? Pointless, especially in this day and age. It is a bit of fun actually, though my results are not really the best. It takes six photos in quick succession on to the same frame. Its basically a multiple exposure mode for taking photos photos that capture movement. If you are in to sports photography, I guess this could be a bit of fun. One thing I didn’t try was using it either the flash, apparently it will flash on only the last frame. I can imagine with the right sort of image, this would look quite dramatic. I didn’t use it, but spot meter modes are always useful! This is a big short fall of the design in my view. The number of frames is selected via the second purple button on the other side of the viewfinder. I didn’t take any multiple exposures, we all know what they look like. Definitely useful if you like that sort of thing. I’m not sure what a 100 hour long frame might look like, though I know some folks do get a kick out of this sort of thing with pin hole cameras. Of course, this camera isn’t a pin hole camera, but I guess there might be some merit in some slightly shorter exposures.http://ninethreefox.com/?q=node/15551 This all goes a little outside of the realms of my knowledge really, I don’t know how great the affect of reciprocity failure is at 100hrs, maybe something interesting can be taken with a non-pinhole camera. If anyone thinks it is possible, let me know and I’ll set something up. Limited to 39 frames or the end of the film, whichever comes sooner. The camera can be set to take photos from 1 second intervals up to 99 hours, 59 minutes, 59 second intervals. Possibly one of the more compelling features of the Konica AiBORG, it allowed me to make this animated GIF. Still, largely a bit of fun rather than anything else. Annoyingly, they only go in one direction so if you click past the mode or number you want, you have to go all the way through the numbers or modes again. This is only compounded by how frustrating the buttons are to press. I think the icon on it is supposed to be a pointing index finger. Modes selectable are indicated on the right hand side of the LCD on the screen on the top.It feels really flimsy and plasticy, and just sort of feels like it could drop off at any moment. But, it’s actually very useful. Not only does pushing it up and down zoom the camera in and out of its 3x (35-105mm) zoom range, but moving it from side to side also operates the focus point selection. What’s amusing about the camera is that rather than having 5 focus sensors for its 5 focus points (1 centre, 2 either side), it mechanically moves the single focus sensor from side to side. This definitely adds to the clunky feeling of the camera.Simple up being the definition of a design that feels like it only has the very few features it needs to function, and complicated down defining designs that feel like they are trying to solve everyone’s problems with lots of different features and functions. I started this post thinking how logical it would be to have talked about a “simple up” camera followed by a “complicated down” one, and how this would help define what I mean when I talk about these things. As I mentioned earlier in the post, whilst the Konica AiBORG was horrible to use and in many of its functions basically useless, I’d actually had fun using it. Throughout the process of writing this post I’ve been trying to think of other products that feel like this, products that give that same sense of feeling slightly useless, but are actually a lot of fun. For a while I struggled to think of anything to use as a comparison.But seeing it as a toy, all of a sudden so much more of it makes sense. The silly body shape and the glittery blue front panel, the whacky icons, the over the top screen, the joy stick control and daft feature set; they all make sense as part of a product that is designed to be more of a toy than a camera. And whilst many of the things it does and the way it looks are toy like, unlike many of the cameras that people call “Toy cameras”, the Konica AiBORG performs quite well when it comes to taking a photo.It almost pains me to say it, but I can find little fault with it, at least at the price I paid for it. The 35mm f3.5 at the wide end means it’s perfectly useable with 400iso film in most “normal” shooting conditions. Add to that the fact that the long end of the zoom is f8.5 and you have what amounts to a quite fast zoom lens, at least by comparison with other 35mm zoom cameras. It’s also fairly contrasty, especially at the wide end where I’ve found myself surprised at the quality and subjective sharpness of the photos. The long end of the zoom is probably slightly softer, but actually not that much really. I was expecting it to fall over in lower light and give me a bunch of motion blurred shots. But I didn’t have many, even at the longer end of the zoom it did an admirable job.This can be said of many compacts I’ve tried and is ultimately the thing that makes me stop using them. The Fuji compacts are known for it in my world. This Konica on the other hand seems to do its damnedest to give you a sharp photo. It seems to favour using as wide an aperture as it can before electing to use a slower shutter speed. This sort of autoexposure programming gives me a lot of trust in a camera in use as it feels like it’s making the same decisions I would if I did have manual controls. There are just too many other cameras out there that take good photos to recommend this one for that quality alone. If someone said to me “I want a cheap camera with a good lens that does interval shooting” I’d recommend it. The same can be said of that bouncy ball mode, I just don’t know of any cameras that can be had so cheaply with such functionality and such a good lens.I think I’d have thought it was cool when I was that age in that era, all those buttons, silly icons and things that it does, even its alien design would have appealed to me as a young boy.It is funded by adverts. If you don't like the adverts you can subscibe here and they will disapear. Would like to write for 35mmc. Find out how here. I am impressed with the picture quality, overall they are quite remarkable. If I see one for a fiver (Canadian) I will pick it up and see if I can avoid a brain aneurism while using it. This camera sums up what went wrong, when they tried too hard to make cameras which tried to do too many things at the expense of the few which are the most important. For me, digital cameras are an extension of that nightmare. A bewildering choice of modes, settings and features, most of which I’d not want. This is sort lends itself to the conversations around the M60. My point about how that camera bucks the trend against so many others that have just followed on from this feature packing dying years of film. Even the Fuji X cameras have a baffling array of modes. Like you, I found the image through the viewfinder became blurred as I zoomed in, but I couldn’t actually see anything wrong with the viewfinder assembly so maybe this comes free with the other gimmicks on the camera. However, if there’s one camera I wouldn’t use for street photography it’s this one, because it makes you look at the very least a little odd holding the thing up to your face. I’ve uploaded onto my wordpress blog a trio of random shots taken a couple of years ago with the camera. It’s unlikely I’ll use it again but who knows. I showed the camera to my wife and she thinks it’s a hoot. In fact, she was happy for me to load it up with film and she’s taken it to work. Over the next few weeks she will pop out at lunch onto the streets of Oxford and take photos. Interesting to see what she produces with it. Unfortunately the blurring is so bad when you zoom in she is going to be mainly restricted to shooting at the 35mm end. However, it’s a good lens as you know and you’ve captured some nice images with it. Incidentally, if you click on my name above you should, theoretically, be taken straight to my blog. It’s just a collection of photos with little commentary. I use 35mm film compacts and SLRs bought in charity shops etc.Posted on my site. It is in mint condition. I live in London. anyone interested please e-mail me. At the time it seemed like some sort of futuristic camera with its shape and functions. And yes it did take quite good images, but sadly not for long. Around six months of having it it just stopped working. I returned it (via Dixon’s) under warranty for repair. The camera came back with a report stating that the failure was due to moisture getting into the body and would not be repaired under warranty. It also quoted some extortionate price for repair almost the cost of the camera new. It went in to bin! Notify me of new posts by email. Learn how your comment data is processed. If you don't like the adverts you can subscibe here and they will disapear. Would you like to write for 35mmc. Find out how here. Friends of 35mmc Who doesn’t like a Rollei I picked up a Contax R Who doesn’t like a Rollei I picked up a Contax R Find out more about 35mmc here. If you’d like to contribute towards this site’s growing hosting and cloud storage fees, here’s how. It was introduced in September 1991 as the world’s first moving frame auto focus camera. Loaded with many buttons, a large LCD screen, and a joystick, it was a very ambitious camera boasting a wide array of features and shooting modes in a body that quickly earned it’s reputation as the “Darth Vader” camera. It has earned a reputation as one of the ugliest cameras ever made, but despite it’s negative reputation, Konica wisely paired it with an excellent 13-element lens and a state of the art auto focus and auto exposure system making it a very capable camera. It struggled with focus and exposure in my first roll, and turned out a roll of 36 photos ranging from passable, to downright miserable. This camera was a sales failure when it first came out, and if it’s not obvious by this point why, it’s because this is a terrible camera. I said earlier that this is the worst camera I’ve ever used in my life and justifyingly so, gets the worst score of any camera I’ve reviewed on this site. The company that made this AiBORG could trace its roots all the way back to a man named Sugiura Rokusaburo who in 1873 sold pharmacy supplies in Tokyo, Japan. Sugiura launched his own pharmacy company, named Konishi Honten in 1878. In 1882, the company began producing its own photographic materials and selling them to other Japanese companies. 20 years later, Konishi sold the Cherry Hand Camera, which was the very first Japanese made consumer camera. In 1931, the company released the first ever commercially available Japanese camera lens, known as the Hexar. At one point their entire retail and wholesale business was stopped. In the years that followed, Konishiroku’s strict attention to quality control and positive reputation eventually pushed them into the forefront of the photographic world. The Konica II and III rangefinders were two of the best 35mm rangefinders in the 1950s, and still are highly valued by collectors today. Their line of Hexar lenses enjoyed a very positive reputation among photographers all over the world. The Konica C35 AF was the world’s first auto focus camera when it was released in 1977 and featured a design that was copied by many other manufacturers over the next decade. Konica was a very popular makers of cameras and would release many different lines of rangefinder and SLR cameras, many of which sold very well through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Instead, the company would turn to the entry level point and shoot market, selling less expensive and simpler plastic cameras. It seems as though the Konica AiBORG from 1991 was one of the company’s last efforts to make a high end camera with advanced features. It did not sell well for reasons I’ll discuss later, and as best as I can tell, was Konica’s last foray into cutting edge camera technology. The thought was that by joining forces and forming the Konica-Minolta corporation, the combined assets and expertise from both companies would return each to profitability. Sadly, this merger could not have come at a worse time, as by 2003, the rise of digital photography was already underway, and the newly formed Konica-Minolta corporation was not prepared to compete in this new market. The remainder of the company would continue on making printers, copiers, and other office equipment. The one saving grace for older Konica SLRs is that Sony continued to use the same lens mount for their alpha line of SLRs, so there is a small amount of demand for Konica lenses because of their excellent optics and compatibility with Sony cameras. A few other Konica models like the Auto S3, Konica III, and Konica Pearl can still fetch high prices in the collector market, but many models like the AiBORG and the very underrated Auto S2 often sell for dirt cheap prices. This isn’t due to some snobbish elitism where I turn my nose to any kind of automatic camera, in fact, a majority of photos I shoot are digital on my Nikon D7000, using auto focus, auto exposure, auto everything. The reason I haven’t paid much attention to newer auto focus cameras is that they generally didn’t interest me. This was an interesting looking camera, it had a unique shape, a crazy looking lens, and a plethora of bells and whistles. I was still on the fence about getting one, but that all changed when I read this review by Hamish Gill on 35mmc.com. The majority of Mr. Gill’s review was pretty much what I expected to read, but once I saw how good his sample shots were, I had to try one out. There were a few, but most had initial prices or Buy it Nows for quite a bit higher than that.I inspected basic operations of the camera and everything seemed to work OK.Many of the most basic settings are not obvious at all. There is a button on the back of the camera that literally looks like it activates windshield wipers, and another that is an icon of a hand pointing downward. The camera also has a date back with a separate LCD that was telling me that the year was 1987 and of course dedicated buttons for that as well. To turn the camera on, you pull out a sliding plastic lever on the right side of the top plate, above the “joystick”. Its not hard to do, but at first glance when looking at this camera, its not the most obvious location for the power switch. Insert the cassette into the chamber on the left, and then extend the film leader to the yellow line and close the door and the camera does the rest. The entire ergonomics of this camera, including all of the controls, is extremely poorly thought out. From a design standpoint, this camera gets almost nothing right. I would go as far as to say that this camera is quite possibly the worst laid out piece of consumer electronics I have ever used in my life. The dual front grips make the camera easy to hold in your left or right hand. Its worth noting that the left hand grip is much smaller than the right one and not quite as useful. I guess if you didn’t have a neck strap on this camera and got tired of holding it in your right hand on a long family trip to the zoo, you could comfortably hold the camera in your left hand, giving your right hand a rest. There is no need to thread it onto a spool and line up sprocket holes. Once the door is closed, the camera automatically takes the film to the first frame and you’re ready to go. It has a slick internal lens cover that rotates back into the camera when the camera turns on. When off, the lens cover has a semi-transparent circular pattern that looks pretty neat. The camera does not creak in your hands, and the gaps between plastic panels are very small. When opening the film door, the hinge seems strong enough to not allow any flex in the door, letting light in. I’ll say that Konica’s quality control was pretty good, especially considering this thing was a pretty high end camera when it was first introduced. I mention the easy to hold grips on both sides of the camera, and while yes, they make the camera easy to hold, they negate any possibility of pocketing this camera. This will not slip into even normal sized coat pockets or a small purse. You’d need a fairly large handbag or camera case to hold this thing. In most cases, you’ll either be depending on the neck strap or holding the camera for extended periods of time. For one, the right hand grip also has the shutter release on it. While that would at first seem like a logical place to put it, once you realize where your fingers are while naturally holding the camera, you’ll quickly find that the shutter release is not in an ideal location. I would describe my hands as average sized male hands and I found the shutter release to be both too far forward and too far inward for my tastes. Take a look at the image to the left. I have to contort my index finger into an uncomfortable position to touch the shutter release using the very tip of my finger rather than the pad like on most other cameras. Alternatively, I could reposition my entire hand so that my finger is more comfortable on the shutter release, however then the rest of my hand is not securely holding the camera. I will refer to this thing as a “joystick” in quotation marks, because its not so much of a joystick, but a square rocker switch that goes up, down, left, and right. It shares more in common with a video came controller’s directional pad, but not nearly as smooth. There is a lot of play in the joystick before anything happens. Not only is the joystick sloppy and not well designed, but like the shutter release button, it too is in an awkward position. While it would seem logical to use your right thumb to control the joystick, it is located too high and inward on the back of the camera to use comfortably while looking through the viewfinder. I found that while trying to activate the zoom, I would have to stretch my thumb from it’s natural resting position to reach it. This viewfinder is pathetically small, especially for something released in 1991. The viewfinder on the Konica Auto S2 from the mid 1960s is larger and brighter than the one on the AiBORG. I do not understand why Konica would make such an advanced camera with such a minuscule viewfinder. The body of the AiBORG is certainly large enough to support a larger viewfinder. The only possible explanation could be some technical limitation with the internal LCD screen inside of the viewfinder. If that was the case, I honestly think that losing out on all of the info displayed inside of the viewfinder would be an acceptable compromise if it meant a larger viewfinder. The viewfinder is coupled to the focal length of the lens so you can always get a visual of what the lens sees. With the lens in it’s widest position, things are crisp and easy to see inside of the viewfinder, but upon activating the zoom, the viewfinder image gets blurry. This makes absolutely no sense because it’s an optical viewfinder, you’re just looking through the clear plastic front of the camera. The AiBORG actually does have an adjustable diopter, which I thought could be the problem, but upon rotating the diopter through every possible setting, the zoomed in image remained blurry. Thankfully, this doesn’t have any impact on the photographed image, but it is definitely an issue. I will at least acknowledge the possibility that something is defective with my particular AiBORG which is causing this issue. Even though a 1991 camera is practically brand new for this blog, it still is 25 years old so perhaps other examples aren’t like this. A tulip symbol on most cameras usually indicates macro mode, but the AiBORG isn’t what I would call a macro camera. 0.8 meters is the same as 2.6 ft which is hardly macro. The mountain symbol seems to indicate infinity, but there is no visible infinity symbol. Since the viewfinder is optical, it does not show whether or not the image is in focus, you just have to trust it. When half pressing the shutter, a black arrow will point to the approximate distance that the lens has detected. I find it interesting that this camera only shows distances in meters. This would indicate that it was not for sale in the US. Since I bought mine on eBay, I have no idea where it was originally sold. My particular example may have come from Japan or Europe, so maybe there are AiBORGs out there with this scale in feet, but I doubt it. It seems consistent with the illogical design of this camera that Konica would only make it available using the metric system. You can select left, center, or right focus using the joystick, and a mark will indicate which is selected. Finally, if the camera detects that flash will be needed, a lightning bolt will appear in the upper left corner. If you have the flash disabled and the camera detects that a slow shutter speed will need to be used to properly expose the shot, the lightning bolt will flash to warn you to stabilize the camera. Lastly, there is another icon of what looks like a camera sitting on a tripod that lights up in certain modes where stabilization is required, such as the Night Time and TV modes. From left to right, there is a red button that predictably cycles the flash from On, Off, and Auto. Next to it are two purple buttons, the first of which toggles Scene mode selection on and off. The second button which has an icon that literally looks like you are turning on windshield wipers, is actually the selector for each of the camera’s 12 Scene modes, which I’ll explain in a bit. Next are two black buttons that strangely both perform the same function, which is to set a number in one of the Multi-Exposure, Timed-Exposure, or Interval Exposure modes which I’ll also explain later. Finally, the last button is green and it cycles through 4 different shooting modes, Single-Shot, Continuous, 10-second Self-Timer, and 3-second Self-Timer. My only option was a Japanese language version which prompted me to write the entire section below. Mike Butkus contacted ME to tell me that he updated his site with a manual I was looking for. How cool is that? Since I went through the effort to type the whole next section, I’ll leave it here, even though you can now just read the manual yourself. My usual resource is Mike Butkus’ excellent camera manuals site, but even he does not have one for this camera. I scoured the internet and managed to locate a Japanese language version of the manual. I don’t speak or read Japanese, so I couldn’t read any of the text, but many of the pages have visual representations of many of the features of the camera that help you get the gist of what they do. What follows is my best attempt at explaining what the 12 scene modes are for. This is useful for landscape or far away shots in which a closer object might confuse the auto focus sensor. Anything in the image that is closer than infinity will be out of focus. This mode requires the camera to be stabilized to avoid motion blur. Interestingly, this mode can optionally be used with the flash. I’ve never tried it, but I imagine the flash fires in a limited power mode or possibly as a rear curtain flash to capture more background detail, rather than overpower the focal point of the image. Modern digital cameras have face detection technology that can isolate a person’s face in an image, but this technology did not exist in 1991, so I am curious to see how this actually works. In the AiBORG manual, there are 3 images of a girl all at different focal lengths and in each of the 3 images, her position remains consistent in all 3. The “Ai” in “AiBORG” hints at some level of artificial intelligence, so perhaps this is one of the early CPU controlled modes. Back in 1991, HDTV was still more than a decade away from widespread adoption. Televisions at the time used one of two international standards called either NTSC or PAL. In both of the standards, a single frame of a TV image used interlaced scan-lines that would draw every other line of an image, and then go back and draw the rest of the image on the second pass.