Technology: Zoom! Click! (Compute) Shoot!

Photographers used to fall into two clearly focused categories: professionals who lugged around bags overstuffed with expensive lenses, meters and flash attachments and amateurs who made do with Instamatics and flashcubes. That distinction gradually blurred as advanced features drifted down to the low- priced cameras and automatic functions moved up to make the high-priced models increasingly easy to use. But in recent years the pace of change in camera technology has accelerated to the point where the old categories no longer apply. Today even the most casual shutterbugs can have at their fingertips all the photographic tools the pros use — as well as a few gimmicks that have yet to appear on professional units.

No cameras embody this trend more completely than three new 35-mm models from Olympus, Chinon and Yashica that are making their debuts in U.S. camera stores this month. Not only are they packed with computer chips and high-tech features, but each also sports a new, high-tech look, one that owes more to the smooth curves of the video camcorder than to the basic rectangular design that has dominated 35-mm cameras since the 1924 Leica Model “A.” Says Yasuhiko Nakayama, the veteran video-camera designer who created the Chinon Genesis: “We wanted a unique design concept to match the new type of camera.”

The new cameras are full of advanced engineering. Like many popular “point- and-click” models, each boasts functions that used to require manual operation but are now automatic: exposure control, focus, flash, loading, winding and film-speed setting. To these have been added some new twists, including infrared beams for focusing in the dark, automatic exposure compensation for subjects that are lit from behind, and a built-in zoom lens for wide-angle and telephoto shots with a flash unit smart enough to narrow or widen its beams accordingly. The zoom lens of the Chinon Genesis is hand operated; in the Yashica Samurai and Olympus Infinity SuperZoom 300 it is powered by push-button controls.

Of the three models, the Olympus SuperZoom makes what are perhaps the most impressive technological leaps. To keep its weight and cost down, the camera uses a separate viewing window rather than the so-called single-lens reflex design adopted by Yashica and Chinon. To ensure that what the photographer sees matches what is captured on film, Olympus engineers had to link the viewing window to the main lens in such a way that the viewfinder zooms as the lens does. Yashica and Chinon avoided this complication by using the standard SLR prism-and-mirror arrangement that lets one view and shoot through the same lens; to stay trim, Yashica uses a vertical format that makes negatives half the size of a standard 35-mm picture.

An even more striking feature of the Olympus is its “auto zooming portrait mode.” The user simply selects the proper setting on the camera’s control panel, points and clicks. The lens will zoom in or out to ensure that the subject’s head and shoulders are well framed in the viewfinder. “If you want to take portraits of people at a party,” says David Willard, a senior vice president at Olympus, “the camera will automatically zoom to give you same- size shots of everyone.”

How does the camera do it? First it uses its autofocus system to measure the distance to the subject. Since the camera is programmed to know how wide an angle is necessary to accommodate the average person’s head and shoulders at any given distance, it can adjust the zoom lens accordingly.

The new models are trying to wrest sales from Minolta, whose best-selling Maxxum model was the first to bring automatic-focusing technology to single- lens reflex cameras. Now that the competition is coming up fast, Minolta is not standing still. Last week it introduced two new models in the Maxxum series, as well as an array of lenses and high-tech accessories. These include several plug-in cards that reprogram the Maxxum’s computerized focus, exposure and film-advance systems for such special assignments as high-speed sports photography, formal portraiture and tight-focused close-ups.

None of this technology comes cheap. The suggested retail prices of these “amateur” cameras — more than $500 for the Olympus, Chinon and Yashica models, and nearly $840 for the Minolta Maxxum 7000i — exceed those of many cameras designed for professionals. Moreover, their user-friendly controls add several layers of technology that some pros may find irritating. In the auto- zoom mode on the Olympus, for example, everything may look fine in the viewfinder, but the camera will refuse to take the picture if the subject is too far away to be adequately lit or properly zoomed into portrait size. Says Barry Tanenbaum, editor of Modern Photography magazine: “There is such a thing as a camera being too smart.”

And for all their technical sophistication, none of these cameras can offer the kind of artistic instinct and guidance that are necessary to guarantee pictures that actually look good.