In 2007 Steve Jobs stood on stage an introduced the first iPhone. “It’s an iPod, a phone, a mobile internet communicator,” he repeated, “are you getting it?! These are not three separate devices.”
This had been coming for quite some time – convergence happens like waves in technology. When something truly new or innovative comes out it tends to be as a standalone device. Over time, things get refined, miniaturised and eventually become drop in features for practically any device of your choice and inevitably what used to be separate devices eventually get combined into one do it all machine.
In the very early 2000’s digital cameras were the rapidly evolving hot new thing, especially compacts which could live in a pocket or at the bottom of a bag and be taken anywhere. It is easy to forget how novel, new and life changing this idea was. Then came the Mini-Disc killer in the form of MP3 players. The industry knew that every teenager in the world had smashed Napster for every track they could dream of and just needed something to play it on that wasn’t a PC. As soon as flash memory became cheap enough, the deal was on.
It wasn’t a surprise when Fuji decided they’d try their luck at breaking into the market as early as they could. In November 2000 they pushed out the FinePix 40i, a 2MP digital camera which happened to have a built in MP3 player, removable flash storage and a nifty plug in controller for your music and headphones. The logic being that these were two of the devices you’re most likely to walk around with all the time, why not smush them together and see what happens? Sounds like a great idea!
In this review:
- The way it used to be
- Buying a 40i
- It shouldn’t be this difficult…
- Rocking and Rolling with the 40i
- What about the photos then?
- Conclusions and Learning
- Links and Downloads
The way it used to be
It’s the Year 2000, you’ve woken up with the mother of all hangovers and despite all the hype you’re quite pleased to discover that the nukes didn’t get launched by accident, planes didn’t randomly fall out of the sky, the banks are still working and above all you’re not dead. Not bad. Admittedly, every house in the country now needs to be redecorated after the “party to end all parties” but that can wait. At least until your head stops banging.
What a time to be alive – trust me, it was a lot more fun then than it is now. The country was largely full of hope and excitement about the future, albeit we were all a bit annoyed that we’d reached the year 2000 and none of us owned a flying car like we’d been promised.
That year, the PC market continued to explode, driven on by the eye watering growth since Windows 95 launched. In no more than five years we’d gone from a society where almost no one owned a PC to a point where basically everyone had at least one in their house. I cannot describe how bonkers this transition was. The government at the time poured billions into technology in schools and colleges and computer rooms had sprung up out of nowhere. We were all used to owning a “multimedia” powerhouse that would play games, show terrible quality video and allow music playback – if you owned the CD of course.
Simultaneously the internet was worming its way into all of our lives. The sale of telephone extension reels went through the roof as everyone discovered their PC was nowhere near their phone socket and short of drilling holes through the house, this was probably the most sensible way to bridge the gap. Wireless? Didn’t exist. Before long, an entire generation of teenagers discovered something incredible – this internet thing was rammed full of free things. It was the digital equivalent of a free, all you can eat sweet shop.
MP3 sites popped up faster than any music company could have them taken down and once it seemed they got on top of that, some clever individual realised that direct, computer to computer sharing was a much better way of doing things and Napster was born. Our friends over the pond in America with their universities chock full of students attached to mind blowing amounts of bandwidth and quick internet made available vast, unimaginable amounts of music – and every track was free. The only issue was you needed to rack up a monumental phone bill to capture it all, but it was worth it and far, far cheaper than the £16 ish it cost for a new album in the shops. Bear in mind that with inflation that’s £30 in todays money. You wouldn’t pay that these days, would you?
So we filled our boots, or at least our hard drives. Soon, our pitiful 2GB hard drives were popping at the seams, unless you were rich and could afford a huge eight or even ten GB drives that were the largest available at the time. Winamp ruled the roost as the music player of choice and we’d connect the best speakers we could find up to our PC’s and use them as very expensive, power hungry juke boxes. Then you’d discover the “visualiser” which would show these full screen psychedelic kaleidoscopic colour shows that were meant to reflect the music being played. This was great if you were inside a house, but what we really needed was some kind of portable music player.
Unbelievably, in 2000 the Sony Walkman was still going strong after 20 years and was a viable and popular method of playing music on the go. You could of course buy yourself a CD Walkman but manufacturers were constrained by the physical size of a CD which meant it was impossible to ever design one which could be stuffed into your pocket – even the pockets on the huge jeans we all used to wear that acted like sails round your legs when the wind picked up. Worse still, CD’s require a stable and shock free environment to enable the laser to accurately read the data. Although later players included a memory buffer to overcome this, you wouldn’t want to go running with one. That left one viable alternative – MiniDisc.
For a few years, MiniDisc absolutely ruled the roost. It was the perfect size, wonderfully portable, pretty robust and could fit at least an album of music on each disc. Plus, the discs themselves were all kinds of cool colours that just made your collection look rather happy. For a while MiniDisc seemed like the future and could do no wrong. The me in 2000 wanted one desperately, I cannot express how cool these things were at the time.
Then, seemingly overnight, flash storage came out of nowhere and wiped the floor with the portable music player market. The writing was on the wall as early as late 2000 and you could be an early adopter if you were utterly crazy and wanted to part with the best part of £200 for something that looked brilliant, had none of the flaws of disc players, could withstand any amount of bumping around, but could only store about 20 seconds of music at anything like a decent quality. But the seeds were well and truly sewn and anyone into tech could see that it was a matter of months before memory card capacities would start to do the doubling trick every six months and before long, you’d be able to store not just an album but your whole music collection on one of these things.
As for photography, film was still undisputed king of the castle but in an almost exact carbon copy of the music industry the change was there already and the writing well and truly on the wall. We’ve looked into early digital cameras when I bought and reviewed the Casio QV10 last year and that’s well worth a read to see how things developed back then.
What’s incredible is that in January 2000 you’d have struggled to buy a 1MP digital camera and certainly for less than £500 in old money. By the end of the year, you could buy the FinePix 40i which had a 2MP sensor and an MP3 player built in – but boy would you pay for it. I know I keep saying it but that pace of development was just incredible – and we haven’t seen it again since the blast off of touch screen smartphones in 2007.
Buying a 40i
Before we begin, I need to get something off my chest. AI descriptions on eBay auctions are an abomination. They are the worst thing that has ever happened to the site in its entire history. You can instantly tell if a seller has used the AI function to write their description because it’s complete and utter bollocks. It doesn’t tell you anything you need to know at all and so, by being monumentally lazy, sellers must surely be missing out on sales because their listing is garbage. AI is not what the marketing hype would have you believe and it certainly isn’t up to the job when it’ll joyfully write you a description which says a 25 year old digital camera is “the perfect introduction to photography.” This is the perfect example of using tech for the sake of using tech, for jumping on the bandwagon regardless of whether it is actually any good or not. We’ve done this lots before – do you remember when 3D TV’s were going to take over the world? Give me strength.
The Finepix 40i sells for approximately £25 these days in working condition and, as usual, around double that if you want a boxed version – which you might well do for reasons we’ll come on to later. There are lots and lots for sale broken and all of them have the same “lens cover won’t open” fault.
Before buying this one, which apparently had the same problem, I did what I always do and spent a few seconds on Google looking to see if this was an easy fix or a misunderstanding of some sort. The very quick search I did suggested that the problem could be caused by dust and dirt ingress which sounded plausible and at any rate, for £5 it was worth a try.
The camera arrived in the ultimate camera postage carrier – a cat food box. These just so happen to be super strong and just the right size for most camera bodies. Good choice. I opened it up, stuffed some batteries inside and… turned it straight on. So, not broken then? Well, almost. I think I’ve found the cause of the problem, in some cases at least.
On my camera, one of the small latches for the battery door has snapped off, as is so common on cameras of this age. The pressure applied by batteries and their spring terminals is quite considerable when closed and so many manufacturers fitted woefully inadequate, tiny and thin plastic tabs and clips which cannot withstand the regular stress of opening and closing the battery cover. And open and close it you will, because this like so many other cameras of this age, are absolute battery monsters that will suck the life out of a set in next to no time (although not as bad as the worst I’ve ever used which was the Finepix A201) It is no surprise that they snap off as the plastic ages and becomes more brittle. Fixing these is an impossibility as far as I’m aware, although there are definitely some bodges you could apply such as flattening the terminals out to reduce the pressure.
It will occasionally come on but refuse to play and I think this is a combination of two things. First is that the terminals on my camera were oxidised and not making a good connection, the second is due to the snapped off clip. There are three clips for the battery cover and under the central one is a tiny micro switch which tells the camera when the door is fully closed or open. If this doesn’t engage properly, or partially engage, then the camera either refuses to operate or operates only partially. In every case where this happened to me, opening and then securely closing the cover again fixed it.
It shouldn’t be this difficult…
The purchasing didn’t stop there, however. Whilst the photography side of things was up and running, the music player was a different matter entirely. I’d made some seriously naive assumptions when I bought this camera and, as someone who grew up with this era of technology, I should have known better. Whenever we bemoan technology today we really are forgetting just how stupid things used to be just over 20 years ago.
You see, the music industry hadn’t met Steve Jobs yet, who famously called a meeting of record company executives before the release of the iPod and called them a bunch of morons. He was right. Remember earlier when I said a CD album cost the equivalent of £30? Record companies couldn’t understand why people would risk courts, fines and so forth to illegally download their music. They just couldn’t get it.
Steve, who wasn’t an idiot, pointed out that if you price almost your entire audience out of the market, they might just vote with their feet. His answer was to sell songs for 79 cents and albums for $7.99. They all thought this was ridiculous until Jobs pointed out the kids would all buy his iPod and just carry on stealing their music, or perhaps they could profit from the greatest revolution in music since the Walkman. Strangely, he was right and it just goes to show that you might be in a position of power, you may be highly paid, but it doesn’t mean you own a brain and some common sense.
Prior to this, music players were crippled by absurd “digital rights management” schemes or DRM as it was known. The logic went like this – if you can copy music to an MP3 player, you could take it round a friends house and… and… SHARE IT!! I’m sure you and I can all see the flaw in this logic, in that the MP3’s in question were probably already stolen in the first place or said friends could download them themselves. Failing that, you could go down the local library, take out every CD you ever fancied listening to and rip them to MP3 on your own computer. This kind of logic looks more like a colander by the second.
Still, this didn’t stop forward thinking companies like Sony releasing MP3 players which were both exquisitely expensive and equally crippled by the fact you had no choice but to use awful proprietary software which would take your MP3 file and add encryption to it. Sony weren’t happy with that approach, though, they also decided to install root kits on your PC when you ripped one of their CD’s and insist you used ATRAC format which was truly pointless. The software used to transfer songs to Sony players was called “SonicStage” and it was a notoriously awful and frustrating experience to use it.
Can you sense déjà vu coming on here? All of this pointless and needless hoop jumping introduced by these companies led to consumers flocking instantly to the first company sane enough to remove the misery from the process. That company was of course Apple when they introduced the iPod – an MP3 player that “got it” and once again… the rest is history. Tech companies will never, ever learn.
What does this have to do with a camera? You’ve guessed by now, the Finepix 40i came with its own proprietary MP3 “music downloader” which must be used in order to get music on to the memory card. Did I mention that the memory card also has to be a special type of “ID” memory card which will add yet more DRM to your files? You cannot just whip the memory card out, stick it in a card reader and drag and drop some music onto it. That would be far, far too simple, customers might like it!
Do you remember I said earlier you might want a boxed version of the camera? That’s because the boxed version is likely to come complete with the software CD and you really need that for both the camera USB driver and this fabled music downloader. I, of course, didn’t have this CD and that led to some digging.
I started by looking at auctions to find pictures of the exact CD I needed (there are countless versions of the Fuji software disc) before going to the internet archive to download the closest match I could find. This at least should have a matching or working USB driver which would tick one box on the list. The music downloader software wasn’t quite so simple. I spent a decent amount of time plumbing the depths of many websites and lengthy search results before stumbling across it on a driver site. At just under 2mb in size I had my doubts as to whether this really was the program I needed.
I pulled out a suitably retro PC (an Athlon XP if you’re asking) with Windows 2000 and plugged it in. The music downloader software installed and did look like the one in the manual, so that was a great start. I plugged my memory card in to the card reader, fired up the software to be greeted with “No Smart Media with ID found in any drive.” As far as I could tell from reading the manual, this is because it expects the memory card to be in the camera, which is then plugged in via its USB cable to the computer. No problem, I’ll just dig through my box of USB cables and plug it in…
Nope. You see, although USB was a standard, with standard connectors, manufacturers in the 1990’s and 2000’s still decided that it would be a good idea to create proprietary versions of these ports just to annoy you. FujiFilm were no exception and instead of the standard mini USB-B port which is practically identical in every way other than plug shape, they decided they wanted a square port. There is no justifiable reason to do this, but if you think this is an old problem, it isn’t and thanks to the sheer sanity of the EU, we can thank them for finally pushing even Apple to fit standard USB C connectors to everything so we can avoid this absurd incompatibility in future. If only they’d done this in 2000.
Off I went once more to the more obscure parts of the internet trying to identify this port type. The best I could find was “mini 4 pin USB” and after coming up against search engine hell where it thinks it knows better than you do what you’re looking for and helpfully “corrects” the results, I finally found a couple of options. One was £9 which is steep for a cable that costs more than the camera itself, so I opted for one that said it was compatible but cost only £4. I crossed my fingers and waited for it to turn up.
In the meantime, I wasn’t finished with proprietary connectors because to get any music out of the camera you must have the FujiFilm remote control. Fortunately, this was not a case of endless searching and several were available on eBay and they were brand new to boot. Another £5 later and I’d got a remote control ready to go. Having said all this and added up the cost of each individual component, I really would’ve been better off just buying a boxed example to begin with but, as the cliche goes, hindsight is 20/20.
I’d also ordered a larger Smart Media card as the only ones I had were 8 or 16mb which is fine for testing out old 1 and 2MP cameras as you can fit around 12-20 images on a card depending on settings, but for music playback this isn’t going to cut it. I looked in the manual and it hinted that 64mb was the largest the camera supported and I didn’t want to rock the boat by buying a 128mb card (which I think is about as large as Smart Media goes) and it didn’t work.
Rocking and Rolling with the 40i
Whilst I waited for cables to turn up I set about ripping a CD like it was 1999 all over again. I chose a period correct album and ripped it at various quality levels. MP3 maxes out at 320kbits and gives you the highest quality but with the trade off of higher file sizes coming in at around 10mb or more per track. The other options are 256 or at a push 128kbit for music that you can listen to without noticing really nasty compression artefacts. There is a 64kbit option but that really should be reserved for voice only, music at this level of compression starts to sound like the drummer is playing their cymbals under water.
At 128kbits, Urban Hymns is just over 64mb in size and therefore would not fit on the 64mb memory card I had without missing off the last track. However, stop and think about this for a moment. 64mb is as large a card as it was possible to buy when this camera was on sale and would’ve set you back at least £100. That’s a hell of a commitment when you then have a choice of either listening to a maximum of ten songs on your camera and not being able to take a single photograph or having potentially five or so tracks and space for a few snaps. That’s not a great choice to make, is it? All in, you’d be looking at £600 to buy a camera and memory card, which is well over £1100 in 2024. Eye watering. You can see why MiniDisc, CD’s and even tapes survived for a couple more years yet.
I thought it would then be a straight forward matter of plugging my shiny new USB cable in to the camera, opening the music transfer software and dragging it across. Of course, it didn’t work. The same “No Smart Media with ID found in any drive” message popped up and there are zero options for configuration to allow an attempt to get it to see the card in the camera. This was odd because the camera appeared as a drive without issue and you could copy pictures normally.
I began to think that the music copying software wasn’t the right one or perhaps there was an obscure USB driver that the camera needed for music transfer. I looked on the various software CD’s that I could find on Archive.org and they all came with specific mass storage drivers, but no matter what I did both Windows 98 and 2000 both point blank refused to let me change the driver from the default that had been installed to the one that came on the disc. It was then that I spotted the manual for the later Finepix 50i.
The Finepix 50i had apparently dropped the stand alone music downloader program and instead bundled Real Jukebox with a custom plugin to make it talk to the camera and perform the nonsense encryption. Incidentally, I want to take a moment to appreciate one of the best bonkers features I’ve ever seen on a camera. The 50i came with a special “party mode” which would take a picture automatically when it hears a noise. I have so many questions – parties are noisy, would it not just constantly fire pictures to the beat of music? I’d buy one but they’re much rarer and I’m not spending £50 to stand there clapping my hands at a camera.
Anyway, I pulled down the nearest CD to the date of the camera that I could find and, although it wasn’t specifically for a 40 or 50i, it did come with Real Jukebox. Fuji didn’t like you having choice when it comes to installing software so when the CD runs you have two options – install everything or nothing. If you dive into the folders yourself and install Real Jukebox, it doesn’t install the plugin for some reason. Finally, after digging a serial number for Real Jukebox out of the depths of the internet, I finally had it up and running.
Real Jukebox is like a time capsule of old user interface design and of software in general from the year 2000. It comes from a time when developers were trying to smash the web into their applications no matter what it looked like or how it affected usability and this comes with an added dose of advertising built right in to the interface. It also looks almost uncannily like Netscape Navigator which, for those of you under the age of 40, was once the worlds most popular web browser.
I tried it on Windows 98 first and after a reboot I loaded Real Jukebox and got overly excited when it detected the camera as a device that I could transfer music to. Then, in a moment of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, you guessed it – “No smart media…” Sigh.
Over to Windows 2000 for one final try and this time, as if by magic, it detected not only the camera but also that it had the correct memory card installed. We were in business! I dragged over the Verve album, deleted the last track because it wouldn’t fit on the card and watched as it slowly, and I do mean slowly, copied the files across to the camera one at a time.
Whilst you’re waiting for your music to transfer, you’re treated to some excellent built in adverts for MP3 players that you might want to try out. Check out this selection of early 2000’s hardware:
There’s more than a gentle amount of stretching the truth here. The Philips Rush will allow you to copy “hours” of music onto a Smart Media card! Probably not, perhaps minutes would’ve been more appropriate? I do also love the Diamond Rio which, for the small price of $200, will let you listen to a whole sixty minutes! This, I think, explains why MP3 CD players had their day for a year or two whilst flash storage caught up with customers budgets. Although, I must admit, I do love the design of the Philips Rush – you can buy these today but seemingly only from America and they want £70ish for what is a very, very limited MP3 player.
Eventually, the file copy finished and I had space left over for a whole seven photos on the memory card. The compromise is real. It was time to plug in some headphones, the proprietary remote control and experience early MP3 player quality.
The remote is reasonably well designed and is essential to the music function – without it you cannot control anything to do with the MP3 playing capabilities of the camera, however it does mean that you can store the camera in the soft carrying case and turn music on and off without having to get it out again. The remote also doubles up as a remote shutter should you need it for some reason, although I can’t think of many considering there are zero manual controls and you can’t use it as a long shutter release.
On the back of the remote is a “bass” button which you’ll be shocked to hear increases the bass to one of three different levels. This was almost ubiquitous on music players in the late 90’s and early 00’s – it seems that bass was the number one feature people wanted from their music players and if the playback wasn’t vibrating you down the bus as you listened it clearly wasn’t good enough.
What’s the quality of music playback like, then? Erm. It’s… Disappointing. I’m not an “audiophile” and I don’t have pitch perfect hearing, but I can tell the difference between decent kit and something cheap and cheerful. The encoding at 128kbps didn’t help, but listening through some good headphones playback was muddy and lifeless in Bittersweet Symphony. Turning the bass modes on was comedy, it quite thoroughly ruined the sound of the music to the point where it was like listening to music under water. Songs with less going on were better, Sonnet sounded quite nice in fairness.
I had a tiny Sony NW-E95 MP3 player in about 2005 which had 512mb of storage and whilst the design was amazing, I distinctly remember being really disappointed by how little music you could fit on it and, as usual with Sony, the annoying DRM it applied meant you had to use their awful Sonic Stage software to get anything on and off. The Finepix 40i is like an even more depressing version of that with much poorer sound quality.
This idea of mashing together a camera and an MP3 player was only useful for those with very deep pockets, who could afford multiple memory cards or those who would accept extremely compromised sound quality with really low encoding rates. The size of memory cards available when this camera launched, and in the years which followed, simply were not up to the job. By the time SmartMedia died, you still couldn’t buy a card with the capacity to store more than a couple of albums on.
If I’d had £500 to spend in the year 2000 on music playback I’d have hands down bought a MiniDisc player for around £200 rather than something like this. I’m genuinely stunned that this camera went through multiple iterations which must surely mean that it sold well, but… why? Who bought this for the music feature and was genuinely happy with their purchase?
What about the photos then?
After using the Finepix A201 I had relatively low expectations considering this was a year younger at the same resolution. The A201, however, was a true budget model in every respect whereas this camera should’ve been a much better effort considering the high price point.
Fuji quickly settled on a design language for its compact cameras and it doesn’t seem like they deviated from it much from model to model. This, the A201 and S3500 I bought recently for £1 all share a common design language with virtually the same buttons and control dials. They’re not difficult cameras to use by any means, but they’re not particularly well designed either. One thing you won’t find on these cameras are any real controls.
The 40i comes with a rather ironically named Manual mode. Manual this is not and you cannot change the ISO, shutter speed nor aperture. What you can change is exposure compensation and white balance. That’s your lot, although there is a macro mode on this camera that functions as such and does give fairly reasonable close up focus ability. Other options include the standard file size and compression choices and a range of flash modes, but that really is the limit of your choices.
Auto focus is fairly reliable and makes that familiar “purring cat” noise that so many compacts of this era make when focussing. It is not fast by any means and just like a ZX81, it freezes the screen whilst it thinks about it until focus is locked. There is no point trying to photograph anything which moves because by the time focus is achieved, the subject has disappeared and you won’t have noticed because the screen was frozen. What you see isn’t what you actually get if there’s motion involved.
Framing is best carried out using the built in screen. There is a viewfinder which will definitely save you a few visits to the battery charger, but it is placed on the very top left of the camera in quite an unnatural position and is so small as to be almost useless. There’s no zoom other than your legs, unless you use lower resolutions and then you’re offered a completely pointless digital zoom option which just takes a 2MP shot anyway and then crops it for you. I guess “digital zoom” looks better on the box and marketing material than “fixed focal length.”
The 2MP sensor produces images that are 2400 x 1800 pixels which in 2000 would’ve been too big to display at full size on practically any CRT monitor you could purchase without the deepest of deep pockets. Displays of that era were 1280 x 1024 at the very most and even then you needed a decent graphics card to drive that kind of resolution. Users of the 40i must’ve been fairly impressed with the size and quality of these images.
At 100% there are definite and obvious signs of compression. In some scenes there’s quite obvious checkerboard patterns at full size and you can see a fair amount of colour noise too. Corners are soft but nothing like the softness I experienced with the A201, indeed I think the 40i is let down by the resolving capability of the sensor rather than the lens itself. The final images are firmly in the “not bad” category and would’ve been reasonably impressive when this camera was new.
Unfortunately the internal battery or super capacitor is dead on my camera and I haven’t taken it to pieces to investigate or replace. This means that the camera resets itself every time you turn it off regardless of whether batteries are still present or not. The problem with this is that the 40i defaults to “normal” image quality and turns on the incredibly annoying and loud beep that sounds on every button press. The normal level of compression isn’t too bad actually and side by side with a “fine” quality image there really isn’t much in it, but it does mean that nearly all pictures I took for this test were taken on the normal setting rather than fine.
Conclusions and Learning
Digital photography was still very much in its infancy in the year 2000. It would be all too easy to dismiss the image quality of the 40i and make comparisons to “your average smartphone” but to do so compares something brand new with another device that has 25 years of research and development behind it. Truth be told, back then 2MP was more than enough resolution for an image on a computer screen and would’ve been far too big to display on a website. Images then were recommended to be no larger than 640×480 or 800×600 and some people were definitely still using the latter as their monitor resolution at that time.
The images from this camera are not bad at all. When revisiting the 1.3MP Olympus Camedia 860L we covered the idea that megapixel cameras were a real watershed in digital photography as these were the fist cameras to not only produce something that looked like a photograph rather than a collection of mushy pixels, but they also made images large enough to be useful or indeed printable. The 2MP pictures out of the 40i would’ve been more than acceptable and I think most owners were probably quite happy with the pictures their little portable square produced for them. Interestingly, the Olympus was on sale at the exact same time as the 40i – their focus had been on lens and image quality whereas Fujifilm had put their money into developing an all in one media machine.
As with many failed technologies there are so many mistakes that can spell the end for a product before it even gets off the ground. Common things include being too soon to market, backing the wrong technology and over complex design. The FinePix 40i was struck by all of these things. Flash memory wasn’t a mature enough technology in early 2000 and as such prices were astronomical, capacities were too small to be useful and in the case of a combined music player and camera it was just never going to work. Worse, they backed the wrong memory format in Smart Media which went nowhere after 128mb cards came out. Compact Flash and latterly SD cards became the de facto standard and Smart Media became another Betamax.
Fuji must’ve known about these limitations during design and launch. The idea wasn’t a bad one – having a combined camera and music player did make sense as people were definitely walking around with separate devices in their pockets but the disappointment for early adopters must’ve been palpable. Realising that you can only fit half a dozen poorly encoded files on a memory card that cost north of £100 whilst simultaneously precluding you from taking any photos because your card was full must’ve really rained on several parades. Of course, Fuji would’ve argued you can just swap memory cards but we can all see the flaw in that plan and the need for almost limitless pockets to make it happen. Imagine the dilemma when owners of these things saw an opportunity for a picture and then had to decide whether to format their card and have a quiet journey home or miss the picture entirely. The shared memory card for both music and images must also have led to some frustration when formatting the card wiped both music and images at the same time.
Inevitably, I think most of these cameras ended up being primarily just that – a camera. With a decent memory card you could fit more than 70 images in before it was full and that would’ve been enticing at a time when 36 exposure films were still the norm. The final nail in the musical coffin was surely the needless DRM nonsense and being forced to use a proprietary cable, with proprietary software which then re-encoded your music before slowly, very slowly downloading them to your camera over a USB 1.0 connection. There’s definitely a reason Apple went with firewire for their first iPod and that was to prevent multiple deaths from sheer boredom whilst waiting for music to transfer to a device. After doing this once the novelty would’ve worn well and truly off for most users and within 12 months so many better music players would’ve been on the market that it was probably easier to just buy one of those.
I think this camera is very much a case of just because you can do something with technology, that doesn’t mean you necessarily should or that it’ll be a good idea. Credit to Fuji for trying something new and I’m sure that with better, more capacious memory cards it could have been more successful than it was. Inevitably, when you try to do two things and end up doing neither of them particularly well whilst charging the earth for it, you’re only going to see limited success.
I like the whole new millennium aesthetic and the nostalgia of it all, but these days you’re certainly not going to use it as a music player. If you want to be “retro cool” you’re going to buy a MiniDisc player or a Walkman. Once you discard that feature, the FinePix 40i becomes nothing more than a rather interesting square novelty camera that doesn’t do anything particularly spectacular on the imaging side of things.
I am left wondering who these people are who keep buying them on eBay as they sell rather regularly. They can’t all be going to Ravioli themed authors with an interest in niche cameras, surely?
Links and Downloads
Argos Catalogue Autumn / Winter 2000
For anyone who ever needs it, here’s the music downloading software.
The install discs can be found on archive.org
The USB cable is this one on eBay
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