the 1.8-inch D-TFD panel — 114,000 pixels of glory
Keyboard: SPACE shutter · WASD/arrows aim · +/− zoom · F flash · M mute · Esc back.
Controls Reference
| Action | Keys / Input | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Power | P or POWER switch | any time |
| Mode | dial, or 1 REC / 2 PLAY / 3 MENU | any time |
| Shutter | SPACE, shutter button, tap LCD | REC |
| Pan / tilt | A / D and W / S, arrow keys, drag LCD | REC |
| Zoom wide / tele | − / = (+), mouse wheel, W/T rocker | REC |
| Flash mode | F or the bolt key | REC |
| Browse shots | ← → ( A/D too) | PLAY |
| Zoom stored shot | + / − or SET, drag when zoomed | PLAY |
| EXIF info | I or INFO | PLAY |
| Delete shot | Delete / Backspace, confirm → left/right + SET | PLAY |
| Navigate menu | ← ↑ ↓ →, SET confirms | MENU |
| Back / dismiss | Esc or MENU | MENU / dialogs |
| Mute | M | any time |
MERIDIAN PHOTOYAK DIVISION · PUBLICATION NO. 621-A · PRINTED IN SOUNDLY RECYCLED PIXELS
Operator's Field Manual
“Photography For The Impatient Decade” — fourth impression, amended for firmware 1.07
Taking Your First Picture
Rotate the MODE dial to REC. The top panel announces itself; the colour panel wakes after a brief mandolin of synthesized chimes. Frame your subject through the rear panel — drag or use the W/A/S/D cluster, remember the old rhyme: left is left. Depress the silver shutter collar firmly. You will hear a mechanical bleat, witness a brash white flash of investment, and observe PROCESSING… crawl along while the red diode beside the card door performs its duty. Only when the counter decrements is your negative truly abroad.
Scenes In The Machine
Three excursion cartridges ship affixed: a Sunlit Courtyard (brick, banners, an industrious windmill, clouds on rails), the Dusk Boulevard (gaslight streetlamps whose halation will bloom like gravy, window grids flickering), and the Lamplight Den (one bulb, many shadows — ideal for demonstrating why ISO existed). Select under MENU → SCENE. Aiming at light sources intentionally exceeds the sensor's loyal little headroom: streaks and halos are character, not defects.
White Balance & Exposure
The 340c judges brightness continuously and negotiates a plausible shutter, iris, and gain trio; these exact figures are engraved into each photograph's EXIF ledger. Four white balance presets bend the colour ledger: tungsten warms what fluorescent sicklies. Exposure compensation spans ±2 EV in half-stops for the wilful. Flash: AUTO fires in dim scenes with cruel falloff beyond a few metres, ON washes near faces bridal-white even at noon, OFF surrenders to the dark and trades shutter speed for grain. The charge whine preceding readiness is normal and, we find, musical.
Compression Economics
Each exposure is surrendered to the JPEG cruncher at your chosen dignity: FINE keeps some Self-Respect (approx. 190 KB per frame at HI 640), NORMAL pleads practicality, and BASIC mortises the image into 8×8 ceramic tiles with enthusiastic mosquito fringes. Dropping to LO 320 quarters the fee. The supplied 8 MB CompactFlash card is finite; exhausting it summons the era-authentic CARD FULL rebuke. Delete judiciously in PLAY mode; deletion cannot be undone, which built character then as now.
Dithering Connoisseurship
Within MENU → DITHER sleeps this publication's guilty pleasure. Ordered BAYER matrices at 2×2, 4×4 and 8×8 lattice the scene in crosshatch; HALFTONE screens it like a Sunday supplement; FLOYD–STEINBERG secretively shuffles error downhill through live pixel neighbourhoods and takes its sweet about it. Pair any of these with a palette collapse — Full, a demure 256 colours, a heroic 16, or stark monochrome — and photographs acquire the ancestry of 1991 shareware.
Glitches, Honest & Otherwise
DATA GLITCH intensity dresses frames in channel separation, sync slips, and block displacement. The CARD ERROR procedure corrupts sectors outright: smeared macroblocks, striped confetti, memory doing its best impression of weather. Both may intrude uninvited when RANDOM MALFUNCTION is armed. History records that owners mailed such images to friends precisely because of these wounds. We neither confirm nor deny sharing that instinct.
The EXIF Ledger & Exporting
Every photograph carries a clerk's ledger: exposure time, iris, gain, illumination, bias, focal length, clock stamp, and this firm's private marginalia on dither and palette. Consult it briefly via INFO; consult it exhaustively from the → PC bench, which presents the card's contents as a contact sheet. There, photographs may be downloaded as genuine JPEG files with the ledger sewn into the bytes — open one anywhere that reads metadata and confirm the paperwork survived. Nothing leaves your computer; the serial cable is metaphorical.
Care, Feeding & Trouble
Four AA cells motivate the enterprise; the gauge creeps downward across sessions and will nag you below fifteen percent until refreshed in SETUP → BATTERIES FRESH. Clock drift being unknown to mathematics, set the date and time honestly under SETUP → DATE/TIME — burned-in stamps obey whatever the camera believes. If the panel misbehaves, strike POWER twice. If the windmill stares back, take the picture anyway.
Spec Sheet, As Admitted By Engineering
- Sensor
- 1/3-inch interline CCD, 640×480, selective read noise rising with shadow, fixed-pattern lattice included free
- Lens
- 6.4–19.2mm f/2.8 zoom (34–102mm equiv.), autofocus performed by optimism
- Storage
- CompactFlash-class 8 MB, contents variable by dignity of compression
- Panel
- 1.8-inch colour D-TFD, glorious 320×240 internal, modest 114 k-pixel claim
- Flash
- Auto / On / Off, reciprocal-quadratic falloff, frontal overexposure complimentary
- Processing
- Real-time WebGL stage-chain: sensor matrix → Bayer tease → halation → JPEG blockery → dither/concision → mischief
- Dither modes
- Bayer 2/4/8, halftone screen, Floyd–Steinberg wavefront diffusion; palettes Full / 256 / 16 / mono
- Metadata
- JFIF + EXIF APP1 authored per-frame, maker-note marginalia, honest clock stamp
- Sound
- Synthesized shutter, beeps, servo whirr, flash whine; muting civilized
- Power
- 4×AA, gauge fiction maintained for realism
Colophon
This exhibit is a single-page machine assembled of hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Every scene is procedural geometry dressed in textures painted at boot; every effect lives in WebGL fragment programs; every sound is coaxed out of oscillators and filtered noise at the moment you provoke it. There are no network calls, no external typefaces, no trackers, no cloud. Photographs you download contain precisely the pixels the camera mocked up for you, EXIF appendix and all.
MERIDIAN, the PhotoPak 340c, PIXEL PRESS and their vignettes are affectionate fictions. Any resemblance to cameras living or dead is a compliment paid forward. Set your clock, mind your batteries, and please do try the 16-colour monochrome halftone — the management assumes no responsibility for the resulting obsession.