I had originally intended to review my very first digital camera with removable memory (an Olympus D-390) but since the only memory card it could read was corrupted and was beyond repair with formatting that digicam will have to wait another week till I get another small XD card that it will read.
So after wasting the first two days last week trying to get usable photos out of the Olympus D-390 I switched over to the Fujifilm A345 pocket camera. This was the camera that went to a lot of different travel locations from 2005-2007 including Hawaii, Seattle and San Fransisco and my frustrations about its limitations as a travel camera is what led me to save up for my first DSLR and really get serious about Photography.
The Fuji A345 is one of the few early cameras in my collection that is the original camera and wasn't re-bought later. This is the very same camera that I wanted to chuck into the ocean in Hawaii because I was so frustrated with it. This blog post is a reflection from 17 years after the last time I really used it other then checking to make sure it turned on in 2018.
The Fujifilm A345 was a very minimalistic entry level pocket camera from 2005 with a 4.1 mp 1/2.5" CCD sensor. I got mine in 2005 as an Open Box display model at one of the local electronics big box stores.
It has a fairly compact albeit thick footprint for digicams of the era especially those which took AA batteries. The Fuji A345 shoots on the proprietary to Olympus and Fuji XD memory which I don't have a reader for but thankfully the camera still has USB drivers for Windows 10. It's comfortable to hold and shoot but that was perhaps the only thing I liked about this camera.
After shooting this camera for a few days I remember why this camera brought me to rage in my early days of Digital Photography. It's limited 3x optical zoom is extremely janky and not at all smooth, it pauses at three different "zoom levels" and you can't stop in-between.
If you want to zoom in past the first stop you often have to tap the zoom lever more then once (you can't just hold it). The zoom lever itself is also something I hate- the rocker is stiff and not very responsive and it was this way in 2005 so I can't blame the camera sitting on a shelf for 15 years for this.
It also lacks a 4 way navigation control. To navigate the UI menus you have to use the zoom rocker to go up and down and the two left and right buttons to go left and right. Once you've used any digicam with the standard 4 way d-pad this feels extremely poorly designed and not very well thought out.
The camera does have exposure compensation but when I tried using it the output really didn't seem to change much. It didn't significantly affect the output of the photo even when set to 1.5 above or below even exposure. While the camera has a fairly solid light meter and doesn't over or under expose that often its very frustrating not to have that control. The exposure comp is also buried in the menu system; there is no quick button or quick menu available to adjust exposure on the fly.
Output wise the photos are very often very cold for a CCD sensor, especially for a Fuji who was otherwise known to have incredible colors in their CCDs (like with the Fujifilm S2 Pro DSLR). Without that bump in saturation the photos looked pretty meh and being locked into JPEG shooting there was only so much I could do to change it.
The sensor also isn't the sharpest and has a lot of JPEG artifacting but that is to be expected with a 4mp digicam. This said the CCD in the Fuji A345 is still far better then the "newer" one on the GE RS1400 but that one is a very low bar to clear.
I was hoping that after my new found interest in Digicams I now have which I didn't have in 2005 would have made the Fuji A345 a much more enjoyable experience 17 years later, but honestly it wasn't that much better. At the end of the day its a camera that can get the digicam "look" and runs off AA batteries but it is very frustrating to shoot.
For me, how enjoyable and fun the camera is to shoot is often the most important thing when I do these reviews more so then even the results. Is the Fuji A345 the worst camera in my collection? No. But its a camera that frustrated me once back in 2005 and still frustrates me to shoot in 2023.
Here are some of the photos I was able to manage to take with the camera for the few days I took it back out. I'm glad I had nothing really exciting going on this week as this camera certainly would have missed a lot of shots with its laggy un-responsive zoom lever and slight shutter lag.
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