Revolutionary?: Watching 1950s Hollywood movies while wearing funny glasses was once the high tide of 3-D imagery. But in recent years, the cyclical fascination with 3-D has surged again, but the problem of needing those glasses has dogged the idea. Fujifilm claims to have freed 3-D imagery from spectacles with its new FinePix Real 3D W1 camera. Rather than a movie maker, the new gadget is a compact digital camera. It is operated in the usual fashion, but after the shutter is clicked, things get interesting. The camera uses two separate lenses to take photos, with each one recording to a separate sensor. The camera's innovative new processor, dubbed the "RP (Real Photo) Processor 3D," then takes the two images and joins them to create a purportedly 3-D image.

Using two lenses in this manner is nothing new, but traditionally this approach has produced images of limited quality. Fujifilm claims its new processor captures an image "exactly as your eye sees it." Perhaps more importantly, Fujifilm claims that no special glasses are needed to view the images from the camera. But the 3-D marvel comes with a major catch. The 3-D images can be viewed on the camera's own 2.8-inch, 230,000 pixel LCD screen without any special aids. But printing 3-D photos is no simple task, as special plastic paper has to be used to preserve the 3-D effect, with the resulting photos expected to cost hundreds of yen each. Perhaps aware of the deal-breaking nature of these limitations, Fujifilm is also offering a separate photo frame, the FinePix REAL 3D V1, with a 7-inch screen that displays 3-D images. The device can display both 3-D still images and 3-D video. However, while it has a resolution of 800×600 pixels when displaying standard two- dimensional pictures, the quality drops to 400×600 pixels for 3-D images.

The camera can also take video, with a shooting rate of 30 frames per second at a resolution of 640×480. As a camera, the W1 is nothing outstanding, with a pedestrian 3× zoom lens that goes from 35 mm to 105 mm. The camera comes with 42 megabytes of internal memory. Considering a maximum quality 3-D still image will eat up 14 megabytes of memory, it is fortuitous that the camera also takes SD and SDHC memory cards.