Camera of Week 41- Konica AiBORG
Konica AiBORG 35-105mm super zoom is a very eccentric camera and you are guaranteed to stand out in crowd with this piece of equipment.
AiBORG is 35mm P&S viewfinder camera which looks like Darth Vader (from Star Wars in case you didn’t know) helmet. It was made by Konica and introduced in 1991, Konica itself described it as – “futuristic, black, ellipsoidal”. As name suggest it had 3x zoom very advanced feature for that time, camera also featured high level of automation, i’ll get more to that later.
Camera is made from plastic, with rubberized grips and glittery front, really glam. AiBorg has 19 available scene modes as name is made from Cyborg and AI (artificial intelligence). Here are some of them:
“-infinity mode; for distant scenery or shooting through a glass window.
-night mode; night scenes with a shutter speed of maximum 6.4 sec. use a tripod. night mode with flash on or auto flash permits foreground and background exposed at night.
-potrait mode; figures at different distances can be photographed at about the same size 4.9ft.-11.5ft.
-tv mode; for taking pictures of tv images, use tripod.
-white background mode ‘snowflake’; for pictures against a white background, compensates exposure to prevent whites produced as gray.
-multi exposure mode ‘bouncy ball’;for 6 sequential exposures of moving objects on one frame. Flash is fired only on last shot.
-spot measuring mode; for setting exposure conditions to match a portion of the picture area.
-+1.5 exposure compensation mode; correction for shadows by over exposing by +1.5 ev.
-(-1.5) exposure compensation mode; for a darker image, used to compensate for haze or bring out sky color in scenery.
-me mode; multi exposure function releases the shutter for a frequency set on a single frame.
-te mode; time exposure as long as 1 sec. to approx. 100 hrs., use tripod, self timer, or cable switch.
-int mode; intervel time exposure shutter is released for the set number of frames at an interval from 10 sec. to approx. 100 hrs.”
Top LCD display shows exposure and focus settings while smaller one on back shows date settings. Lens cover is made from transparent plastic, camera has motor drive, in-built flash (with slow sync and fill-flash modes), but doesn’t have any option for external flashes. On top right corner of back is so called joystick, which zooms in and out when moved vertically, but when moved horizontally chooses between 5 focus points and MF mode. On back there also many tiny switches which control things like – flash settings, self timer, single/continuous shooting, date settings and few other settings. Interesting feature for P&S is that camera shows focusing distance is viewfinder. Viewfinder also has dioptric adjustment, useful feature for people with glasses.
Lens is Konica 35-105mm f3.5-f8.5, available shutter speeds range from 6.4 seconds to 1/500th of second in normal modes. Weight is about 650 grams and camera takes 2CR5 6V battery.
It is also voted by many users as ugliest camera of all time.
Benjiboy from APUG – ” used to have to try sell them for a living, but never sold even one, if Moses had seen the Aiborg there would have been an eleventh commandment”
dnjl says – “That is one offensively ugly plastic blob of a camera.”
Benjiboy replies – “When it was born the midwife slapped it in the mouth”
Info from – http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Konica_AiBORG and http://blog.dcview.com/article.php?a=U20IaFMw
Price – Currently there is one at eBay for about $20, but they usually doesn’t sell even for 10. Only when interested preson wants to pick it up. So don’t pay more than few coins for it.
Konica AiBORG from http://www.kameramuseum.de/
AirBORG from Caparobertsan Flickr stream
Konica AiBORG from Caparobertsan Flickr stream
Konica AiBORG from Caparobertsan Flickr stream
Nameisis Film Paradise 
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