An old camera doesn’t just capture light. It exhales the ghosts of moments past, each click a heartbeat echoing through time.
The Fujifilm FinePix Z35 is a slim 10-megapixel point-and-shoot first announced in July 2009. It has a 3x optical zoom, a 2.5-inch screen, and a sliding front cover that turns it on. It was sold in colours and aimed squarely at people who wanted a camera in a handbag rather than a camera bag. This is a winter day in London on one.
Like the Z70 that followed it a year later, the Z35 has a small sensor and a lens that is slow at the long end, so it wants daylight. Give it a bright, cold London afternoon and it rewards you with colours that are a little too rich and edges that are a little too soft, which is the whole point of shooting one now. Every frame here is as the camera saved it.
City of London
The benches in the Square Mile say where you are.
Trafalgar Square
A cyclist in front of the National Gallery. The Z35 is quick enough to catch this at the wide end if you have already half-pressed the shutter.
A bench at Bank
The same bench design at the Bank junction, with the traffic lights of six roads meeting behind it.
St Paul’s, reflected
From the glass passage at One New Change, which was built to frame the cathedral exactly like this.
A cobbled street
Shade on a cobbled street. The camera’s noise reduction smears the cobbles a little, which reads as film grain if you are generous.
Red buses
Red buses against a faceted new facade. The Z35 saturates the red before anything else in the frame.
Bank Station
The old stone entrance to Bank station, with the equestrian statue of Wellington above.
Chinatown
The gate at the top of Wardour Street, in low winter sun.
A cake shop window
Shop windows at dusk are where a camera like this struggles and where it is most interesting: the reflections, the warm interior light and the cold street all in one frame.
Donutelier, Great Newport Street
A striped awning, a neon heart, and a pigeon.
Is the FinePix Z35 worth buying?
As a first old digicam, yes. It is cheaper and more common than the Z70, it uses the same NP-45 battery, and it has the same look. The 3x zoom is enough for a city. It struggles indoors and after dark, and the screen is small by any modern standard, but on a bright day it is a camera you can carry everywhere and forget about until the moment you need it.