This Fujifilm Rensha Cardia is basically an old-fashioned GIF machine
I recently picked up this weird little Fujifilm Rensha Cardia BYU-N 16 from Japan, and I honestly feel like I found one of the most fun film cameras I’ve ever used.
It has 16 tiny lenses and shoots a short sequence of 16 images onto two frames of 35mm film, so the results look almost like little old-school GIFs. Apparently it was originally made for analyzing golf swings, which also explains why the shutter button looks like a golf ball. Because of course it does.
I took it with me to Spain and shot it around Toledo and Madrid with a few different film stocks: expired CineStill 800T, Kodak Portra 400, and Ilford Pan 400. The first roll was a bit chaotic, some frames were almost black, some were weirdly exposed, and for a moment I thought the camera might be broken. But once it started working properly, I totally got the appeal.
The still frames are fun, but honestly these photos work so much better as looping animations. That is where the camera really makes sense. It feels like this strange little bridge between film photography and motion, almost like a mechanical GIF machine from the 90s.
I added some example images here, but I also made a video with a lot more of the animated results if anyone wants to see how they actually move:
Curious if anyone else here has used one of these, or any of the other multi-lens / sequence cameras. I kind of bought it as a ridiculous “I just need to have this” purchase, but now I’m thinking it might actually be one of the most fun cameras to carry around.