Kyocera Samurai 1300DG (1998)

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The Kyocera Samurai 1300DG was announced 1998-06-23 and it's design was based on the highly popular Samurai film cameras of the 1980's. It was not Kyocera's first digital camera but the first digital Samurai. As with it's successor, the 2100DG, the model name was based on the resolution of the CCD, a common process in early digital imaging. If you were unfamiliar with the Samurai series the camera design might look unusual as it looked more like a video camera. This was not the only thing that made the camera unique, the other thing was the body color. Most digital cameras were either silver, white-ish or black but this one had a pearl style color and it looked like a purplish color depending on the viewing angle. It was a mixture of pearl powder and paint and for the first time it was applied to a digital camera, the official color name was 'purple pearl'.

 

The camera featured an optical viewfinder, an LCD display viewfinder, a status display, 3x optical zoom, built-in flash, automatic exposure and white balance. The startup time was about 4 seconds, the recording time about 5 seconds in fine mode. To achieve a good image and color reproduction the Samurai 1300DG had a function to correct distortion by software processing. According to some tests the image reproduction with this camera was very good and there is no bad word about the picture quality. Seems that Kyocera did a good job on this camera.