Mitsubishi DJ-1000 (1997)

This peculiar camera was announced by Mitsubishi Electric USA on 1997-06-16 and demonstrated at PC Expo '97 in New York. A month later it was announced to be marketed in Japan too as the DJ-1 and shown there at Windows World Expo '97 in Tokyo. The camera was introduced by Mitsubishi Electronics America, Inc.'s Mobile Computing Division. Everything was simply odd about this model. First of all it was only sold in the US in limited quantities through T-Zone stores, in cooperation with Ado America Inc., secondly it was an extremely compact digital camera and although it was tiny, it still had space enough for a Compact Flash card slot. Thirdly it was marketed under two different model names in two different body colors. The DJ-1000 in titanium blue in the US and Europe and DJ-1 in silver in Japan. According to Mitsubishi Electric USA the DJ-1000 was to be the first one in a series of digital cameras for the consumer market, unfortunately it remained the only one.

The camera had no LCD screen whatsoever and an ambiguous optical viewfinder. It was powered up by two AAA-batteries and stored images in a proprietary file format on Compact Flash cards. A third model also appeared and was marketed by UMAX for PC's and notebooks. Although press articles say that these items were sold in limited quantities there are still plenty of them floating around. The japanese version DJ-1 and the UMAX camera are a little bit harder to find.

 

Now here is something you can't read on any other website and nobody mentioned until today. Contrary to popular belief Mitsubishi did not built this camera. Sanyo did. Mitsubishi only labeled the camera body...