The late 1990's brought us such bits of pop culture and technology such as the Furby, Pokemon, and the Sony Playstation. This period also represented the final era of innovation in film cameras across the entire breadth of the field, with a digital revolution set to take hold in the new millennium. The result is an interesting, but now often forgotten period which saw camera makers cram as much technology as possible into the range of their offerings, some of which were great, and some of which were gimmick. Still, shooting with a camera of this era that benefits from affordable advances in technology provides an interesting look into what could have been, had the progression of film camera development not been all but derailed by the advent of consumer digital imaging.
I'm the kind of "Photo Geek" who admits to often liking a camera with little to no extra features, and have enjoyed shooting many rolls of film on cameras that lacked control of focus, and had no variability of aperture or shutter speed. On the other side of the coin, I've also found any number of situations where I savored a shooting experience rich in control or extra features. These have most typically been found on midrange or higher 35mm SLR cameras. But not always. Meet the Samsung Maxima Zoom 105.
Introduced in the mid-1990's, the Maxima Zoom is, at least on paper, a photo-geek's compact dream. In fact, I can clearly recall browsing issues of Popular Photography, and seeing the feature set of this camera and being astonished at all (including some features that I didn't even understand) that it was packing in the rather compact form factor of a zoom point and shoot. This degree of functionality really only put a blip on the radar of the industry at the time, perhaps largely since this was a camera made by what was then a manufacturer on the periphery of the market, and looked rather pedestrian.
