[piano-laden jazz music]
Greetings and welcome to an LGR camera thing!
And this time around we’ve got a delightful little oddity from Sega.
Yes, that ♪ Sega! ♫
Back in the mid-90s, they were experimenting with all kinds of hardware beyond games, and
1996 saw the release of the Digio SJ-1, Sega’s first and only entry
into the personal digital camera space.
The SJ-1 sold for 29,800 yen, or roughly 300 US dollars, when it was first announced in
the fall of 1996.
A full two years before the Nintendo GameBoy camera came out, by the way, another example
of Sega doing what Nintendon’t.
And the Digio wasn’t just a toy camera or a game console add-on either, nope, this was
a point and shoot digital camera with a better set of specs and features than you might expect.
Things like a 320x240 resolution image sensor, manual focusing for both landscape and macro
photography, and even a color LCD screen acting as both a viewfinder and a playback device.
And images were stored on state of the art “Digital Film,” as Sega called it.
Which in reality was a version of Toshiba’s recently-released SmartMedia format.
Yeah, I was honestly shocked when I first found out about this thing!
Not only was it an official Sega product from the mid-90s that I’d never heard of, but
it was a digital camera with some seriously impressive specifications at a price that
was entirely reasonable from the get-go.
However, Sega never marketed the original Digio SJ-1 for sale outside of Japan, and
even there it seems it was largely advertised to their existing customer base in periodicals
like Sega Saturn Magazine.
Which, on further inspection makes sense seeing as the Digio was advertised to work in conjunction
with the Sega Picture Magic and the Sega PriFun.
The former of which was a graphics tablet with a combination of Sega 32x and Mega Drive
hardware inside, allowing for drawing on top of and editing digital photos taken on the SJ-1.
And the latter being a video printer designed to work with the Sega Saturn and the Pico,
letting users print 4x6 photos and sticker sheets captured using
the printer’s composite video input port.
[Japanese PriFun advertisement plays]
And yep, the Digio SJ-1 outputs using composite video as well using a 2.5mm adapter cable,
same kinda thing you saw on consumer camcorders back then.
So if you didn’t feel like squinting at that tiny LCD screen, you could view saved
photos or even a live feed from the camera right on your TV.
Dude, seriously, this is awesome for a three hundred dollar camera from ‘96!
Why weren't these more popular?
Sega did at least update the SJ-1 slightly in 1997, bundling in a clip-on magnifier for
the LCD screen and a larger memory card, along with a couple of fresh new paint jobs like
metallic pink and silver.
1997 is also when the Digio went on sale outside of Japan, but from what I gather this was
limited to Australia and was only marketed there for less than a year.
Yeah, this really is the perfect storm of impressive
yet obscure tech from a well-known company, I live for this stuff.
So let’s take a look at the original HDC-0100 model from 1996, which I imported from Japan
about a year ago now.
It’s been a journey to get everything I needed for this video, cuz yeah.
Even though it came in the original packaging, all that was in the box was the camera itself
and the video cable for connecting it to a TV.
Oh, and the memory card, thank goodness, since the Digio will only accept a particular type
of early model SmartMedia card.
This one for the Digio uses 5-volt power instead of 3.3 volts that soon became the norm.
Not only that, but this only has 5 megabits of storage, equating to just 625 kilobytes.
So not only is it bizarrely-specced, but I had no way of getting the photos off the camera
beyond hooking it up through fuzzy composite video.
Turns out that’s because, originally, Sega only intended the Digio for use with their
graphics tablet and printer, not a computer.
It wasn’t until January of 1997 that they started selling separate kits for connecting
the Digio to a PC, for an additional cost of 7,800 yen, nearly 80 dollars.
That’s a lot for a floppy disk and a serial cable.
Anyway, we’ll sort out the computer stuff later on, but for now let’s take a gander
at the SJ-1 itself!
It’s a solidly-built binoculars-style design, a popular form factor on early to mid-90s
digital cameras, weighing in at 11 ounces with batteries installed.
Which, by the way, are an absolute pain to get in there.
It takes four AA batteries and you have to jam the bottom pair in past the top two spring
contacts to get them to fit.
[batteries shuffling]
Seriously, who signed off on this design?
Another quirk of the Digio is that even with the batteries installed, the camera will not
power on at all without the memory card latch in the upright locked position.
I thought I’d received a dead camera when I first got it, but nope, you just have to
lock that tiny switch on front or nothing happens.
Also on front is a red LED indicator for the self-timer feature, just above the opening
for the lens, which is a 10 millimeter design with an aperture of 1.9.
And right above that on top is the aforementioned manual focusing ring, something rather unusual
for a compact digital camera in ‘96.
It does a pretty darn good job too, especially on the macro side of things, I’m impressed
with the range of focus options.
Along the bottom you’ve got a standard tripod mount, on the left you’ve got nothing at
all, and on the right is a little rubber door covering the ports for video output, serial
connectivity, and a place to plug in a 10-volt DC power supply.
Finally, there’s the standout feature of the Sega Digio: the color LCD panel.
Which, again, was an impressive feature in 1996, especially at its $300 price point.
The LCD-equipped Casio QV-10A cost fifty percent more by comparison,
though it also had a screen twice the size.
Anyway powering on the Digio boots up this nifty splash screen, followed by a live feed
acting as a viewfinder.
Yep, there’s no optical viewfinder at all on here, only an LCD.
And a tiny one at that, the panel is only about 0.7 inches, or 18 millimeters across.
It is magnified a bit to try and make up for that, but this also means that you have to
move it away from your eyes in order to actually focus on the image and see it clearly.
And taking a picture is simple and silent, everything but the focusing happens automatically.
[photographic silence]
It does take about five seconds to save an image, but once you
have some you can switch over into playback mode and manage pictures directly on the camera.
It’s limited to simple stuff like locking photos, deleting groups of them, and formatting
the memory card, but this was still pretty fresh stuff in ‘96!
Many digital cameras up to that point didn’t allow you to access pictures at all unless
it was through a computer.
Speaking of which, I tried several methods of getting files off of here without the serial
adapter, including putting the card in another camera that uses similar SmartMedia cards,
and trying multiple PCMCIA adapters that were supposedly compatible with 5-volt memory cards.
But man, no matter what I just couldn’t get anything to recognize it.
So I turned to Amazon Japan, as ya do, and imported an HDC-3002 kit for 2,000 yen.
And uh, welp!
All it came with was the software, which I’d already found an archive for online.
What I really needed was the serial adapter, so I put in a saved search on Yahoo Auctions
Japan until I found a listing for both the HDC-3002 and 3000 kits complete in box for
a total of 3,100 yen. Excellent.
I didn’t need both of them but whatever, I’ll take what I can get.
The only real difference is that the 3000 is only for IBM PC-compatibles running Windows
95, and the 3002 also comes with software for the NEC PC-9821.
While I don’t have a PC-98, I do have an NEC PC running the Japanese version of Windows
98 which really is the next best thing!
[Windows 98 startup sound plays]
Mm, my waves are now vapor.
Right, so the HDC-3002 software here is completely in Japanese, that’s a bit of a thing.
There is an English version of the software from its later Australian release, but ah
well, functionality is standard enough for mid-90s photo retrieval apps
that I didn’t have a problem with it.
With the Digio plugged in and powered on it’s able to download your photos
in Sega’s proprietary SJ1 file format.
From here you can select which images you want to delete or keep, transferring the ones
you like over into the editing window.
From here you can do things like flip and rotate images, adjust RGB color values, edit
hue, saturation, and lightness, change brightness and contrast, and both increase and decrease
sharpness and mosaic pixelization.
Once you’re happy with things, you can export images to something more standardized, like
Windows bitmap files, and there ya go.
As for the images themselves, well, as mentioned earlier they’re captured in 320x240 resolution,
though if I had to guess it looks like it’s automatically upscaled from 160x120.
I should’ve expected as much since it holds
around twenty pictures on that tiny memory card, so yeah.
The resulting images are maybe a tad more compressed and chunky
than they otherwise could be.
Not that I expected impeccable image quality, but still, everything just looked so cool
through that LCD screen!
Ah, I mean well, sometimes.
See, the digital viewfinder is useless during the middle of the day due to its inherently
reflective design and muted backlighting.
Imagine having a Sega Game Gear screen that’s less than an inch across and you're looking
at it through an oddly curved magnifying glass.
Yeah.
The screen is turned on here, I swear, but even in the shade
it’s hard to see anything if the sun is out.
Not only that, but the battery life?
Ha, what battery life!
I only get enough juice from four AA’s to fill the card once with pictures and just
get them loaded onto a PC before it dies.
I went back to count and it turns out I went through two dozen batteries
just to make this video.
[dead batteries crash to the floor]
Still, these kinds of quirks and caveats are precisely why I enjoy using older digital
cameras from time to time.
I don’t do it for the ease of use, I do it for the fun of it,
for the retro challenge of the ordeal.
I love taking pictures of things that wouldn’t be out of place when the camera was manufactured.
Old cars, buildings, trees and metalwork and stuff.
And I love seeing how devices like the Digio go about capturing various colors and light
ranges, because you never get precisely what you expect.
Like the Mitsubishi DJ-1000 I reviewed, this is another mid-90s digicam that produces these
downward streaks of light on any parts of the image that’s bright enough.
It’s not always a desired effect, but when you plan for it I think it’s pretty neat.
And of course, I always take pictures of several of the same scenes with each camera I cover
so you can compare them to one another.
Like this tiger and circus dude, which I always photograph around the same time of day and
compare it with a modern camera phone.
Yeah, that’s about what I expected really, the SJ-1 tends to go for over-exposure almost
every time, it really isn’t good with bright outdoor scenes under clear skies.
Or dim indoor scenes under no skies, hehe.
Yeah so I took this thing to E3 2019, because why not.
They have a Sega booth there and I thought it’d be fun to take the Digio on a pilgrimage
back to the homeland, so to speak.
And yeah its lack of flash makes it bad for bars,
but it did pretty decently out on the show floor!
Turns out it’s particularly well-equipped to capture hues of blue, which,
I mean it’s a Sega camera.
If it didn’t do a good job at the color blue then what would be the point?
And yeah, that is the Sega Digio SJ-1 from 1996!
A fun little camera that still amuses me for the very fact that it exists.
There’s something about consumer electronics made by game companies that always fascinates
me, but especially when it’s from a company like Sega that by and large really isn’t
associated with this kinda stuff.
Sure it murders batteries, you can’t see crap using it outside, and it was almost exclusively
sold in Japan so good luck finding one. But whatever!
The fact that it’s so limited in availability and usability is why I find it enjoyable at all.
[retro synthwave beats]
So concludes another LGR thing.
If you enjoyed this thing then great!
Old digital cameras, game-related stuff, and retro tech in general is what I do, so maybe
check out some of my other videos.
And as always, thank you for watching!