Trevin Chow

Microsoft Group Program Manager and Seattle Photographer

Turning on the Zumi Black & White Mode

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Over the past year, I’ve fallen in love with photos out of toy / Lo-Fi cameras so I was absolutely thrilled when I got a Zumi Digital camera 2.0 as gift this past Christams.  I have been shooting like a fiend with it for the past week.  Here are some sample shots:

Yaletown BuildingSeattle Building

One of the hidden surprises of this camera was that there is an undocumented black & white mode!  I stumbled across it by accident going through the menus one day, and the great part is that it also works for videos!

Here is a shot I took of downtown Seattle:

Black and White 2

Here’s how you turn the B&W mode on:

  1. Start with the camera off
  2. Press the “On” button and wait for the screen to say “Ready”
  3. Press “Menu” button 5 times so you cycle through all the menus and end up back at the screen that says “Ready”.
  4. Press “OK” button 3 times – first time to toggle into Video mode, second time to toggle back to camera, then the third time to go back to video mode. 

Tada! You’ll now see video mode in B&W, and if you press the “OK” button one more time, you’ll go back to photo mode which will now also be B&W. 

You automatically go back to color mode when you turn the camera off and back on, which means that you unfortunately can’t stay in B&W mode by default.

Note: I have the Zumi 2.0 camera, so this may not work for the first generation that was originally sold by Photojojo.

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Written by Trevin

January 2nd, 2010 at 1:50 pm

Posted in Photography, Technology

Tagged with , , ,

  • Jared
    Thanks for the info! Guess I'll have to check what my timestamp is when I get home.
  • Love this little guy too. Thanks so much for shedding light on the undocumented feature. If you figured that out, maybe you can help with this. When I download, my files have a date stamp of 1928. Any ideas on that one. How do I set the date?
  • I actually was in contact with the manufacturer about this recently :)

    To save power and not maintain a clock in the camera, it has a fixed timestamp. My Zumi 2.0 has a fixed datestamp of Jan 2009.
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