DSLR older than Me

Another rainy day on TradeMe I happened upon another unlikely suspect, a very odd camera indeed. The Fujifilm S1 Pro.

The S1 Pro is a Frankenstein camera originally built in 1999, which makes it a twitch more ancient than me.  The S1 is actually a Nikon F80 film camera that Fujifilm stole off the production line. They surgically removed the film components and tacked a digital heart in its place. 

The S1 featured a unique Fujifilm invention, their Super CCD sensor technology. This mean instead of laying out colour pixels of the sensor in squares, instead they were laid out in hexagon shapes. This allowed the sensor which could only usually shoot at 3 megapixels to steal neighbouring pixels colour information to interpolate up to 6 megapixel images as well.

While personally I think the 6MP mode to be little more than a marketing ploy, the sensor does have remarkable dynamic range and high ISO performance where it actually beats out a much more modern Nikon D200 camera. Fuji continued developing their Super CCD technology throughout 3 more iterations of their Sx DSLR line, where the S5 was considered to be a class leader in dynamic range long past it release date.