The march of the plastic, retro-tastic crappy-cams continues with the frankly pretty cool-looking NeinGrenze. In keeping with the genre, this camera will add a novelty tweak to any image you take, moving away from the perfect sharpness of the digital SLR and closer to the analog surprises of film.
In this case, the gimmick is tilt-shift, the effect that makes full-sized scenes seem miniature. The proper way to do this is to use the "tilt" part of a shifting architectural lens to change the plane of focus. This keeps a very narrow strip of the picture sharp. And because our brains are uses to seeing such shallow sharpness only when our eyes get very close to something, they interpret these photos as pictures of tiny people, cars and buildings.
You can also get the effect in software, but it never really works.
The NeinGrenze ("No Limit") 5000T is a digicam with a tilting lens built-in. With it, you can take 5MP snaps or 640 x 480 AVI video through a real, albeit cheap, tilting lens. Not only is the effect far more likely to look real, you get the grungy look you'd expect from such a plasticky marvel. You can also add in-camera filters: vivid, sepia and monochrome join the normal mode.
Power comes from a li-ion battery, focus is fixed and if you want to zoom, you'll need to do some walking.
For $150, you could just buy a "proper" digicam and gussy up those pictures later, but where's the fun in that? Available in Japan and Taiwan.
NeinGrenze product page [(Warning: Flash) NeinGrenze via Oh Gizmo!]
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