The Online Photographer

I had a Sony FD-5, their first digicam; it recorded 640x480 images onto a 3.5” floppy. The floppy was like a roll of film; I had a little belt pack that held ten floppies. Man, I had fun with that thing! It had one shooting control, for macro IIRC, that I never used, no zoom at all. My kids’ eldest’s toddler years were all documented at 640x480.

Start-up times were quite abysmal at first...

This discussion reminds me of the early days of home computing. We (i.e., I) were dazzled by what those machines could do and chafed at their limitations. We were unsettled by their cost, but agog that we could actually own all that power. We spent endless hours fiddling with minutiae of their operation, coaxing them to do what we wanted and tweaking their performance. We jumped at new software that let us do x better than we ever imagined, though we griped at what it still couldn't quite do. Today we (I) mostly ignore hardware, which has become sooo cheap and SOOO powerful. My current cameras and computers exceed my abilities to use them near their limits. That's great, of course, yet it was rather fun, sometimes, to do technical and artistic battle with the bad ol' tools in the good ol' days. (Or was it the good ol' tools in the bad ol' days...?)

The early digicams were also notable for self destructing if they turned on inside a pocket or case, as the lens tried to extend and self-destructed. Repair was never financially feasible. They could have been designed to notice this and not extend, but it wasn't done.

WOW — what a different outlook and remembrance!

I thought briefly about posting a couple of ancient examples. Then I started wandering through photos from my ancient Canon S110 — and got lost. What a lot of wonderful images I would not otherwise have.
I would need to do a big album to do them justice.

Sure, those early compacts had limitations, but as with film photography over the years, one learned to work around them. Aaaand . . . I could see how that worked in real time, and try again.

Film, processing and printing were expensive, extra digital shots were free. I could have someone take seven shots of me with 3 year old granddaughter on my lap, check the LCD and decide if we got the shot.

I could natter on, the point is that I liked my many compacts, some more than others. The FujiFilm F10, for example, was auto only, and had an LCD invisible in the sun — so I upgraded to the F30 when it came out. BUT, I have all those wonderful pix from the interim.

I found their size and ease of use valuable. I got shots I treasure that I would never have gotten with film only.

The other thing I didn't know then is how now contemporary software can make them even better! Denoise, sharpen, correct a bit of motion blur, uprezz, Yowsa!

Somewhere, in the very early 2000's, I read that 3 megapixels was the threshold, where digital was as good as film. I held off until a camera that I could afford, hence a digicam, met that mark. So, ...

2001 Kodak DC4800 3mp an "adequate" camera
2004 Canon A75 3mp - better than the Kodak
2006 Canon A530 5mp - better still
2011 Canon A590 8mp - now we're talking
... until ...
2012 Lumix GF1 12mp - bought used - and from here, most of my camera purchases have been Lumix micro four-thirds, except for a few old ones for my "collection"

Do the LX7, LX100, or ZS100 count as digicams?

My first ever digital camera was a tiny Pentax 430RS. It was very cute to look at but produced pretty dreadful files. It was seemingly identical to a Casio model, so presumably both versions were made by Sanyo or Casio. It was soon accompanied on my shelf by a Canon S45, which performed quite well for the time. But pretty soon I ditched both for the Pentax *istD DSLR. You can make surprisingly large prints with a decent 6MP file from an APS-C sensor.

Not everyone is interested in photography, but ‘most everyone wants pictures. George Eastman was perhaps the first to understand this, and built an empire around it with his first box camera pre-loaded with film for 100 pictures and sold with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest.”

Previously, photographs had been made on sensitized glass plates or single sheets of film in holders. The process was complex and required serious interest in photography to grapple with it. Film in rolls was invented by Peter Houston, a Wisconsin farmer, in 1881. Eastman bought Houston's patent for $5000, and in 1888 produced his first camera. The rest, as they say, is history.

When all the film had been exposed (100 photos) the user simply mailed the whole thing to Kodak, who processed and printed the pictures, reloaded the camera, and sent it back to the owner. Nothing could be simpler.

Eastman Kodak went on, over the years, to produce cameras of varying complexity, and of course, film for them. Lots and lots of film. In fact, they didn't particularly care who built the cameras as long as they could make the film. But the heart of their business was always the casual picture-taker who was happy with a simple box with few or no adjustments. The focus was fixed, as was the shutter speed, and exposure variations were mostly compensated for by the latitude of the film.

As time went on and cameras became both more capable and more complex, various kinds of automation were devised, such as auto exposure and autofocus, so that the only technical challenge the user continued to face was loading film. And even that was simplified with the 126 and 110 format cameras that featured film pre-loaded into cartridges that could be simply dropped into the camera.

As ways were devised to make it simpler to load 35mm film into a camera, the 35mm point-and-shoot camera, often, but not always, featuring mid-range zoom lenses, came to dominate the market among those who simply wanted reasonably good pictures with a minimum of complexity. One hour photo labs grew behind every bush to service this emerging market, and making and selling point-and-shoot cameras became the bread and butter of camera manufacturers.

(I still have a great little camera from that era -- a Canon AF35ML with a fine 40mm f1.9 lens, autofocus, and the most accurate exposure metering of any camera I ever owned until my Fuji X-H1. I could shoot slide film in it with no bracketing and no worries.)

My beloved late sister epitomized that army of point-and-shooters, as she documented every detail of the life of her family and her large coterie of relatives and friends. Her house was awash with 4x6 prints (doubles, of course), as she contributed heavily to Kodak’s bottom line. In fact her decline in picture-making activity due to age and infirmity paralleled Kodak’s decline so closely I can’t help wondering sometimes if there could have been a connection. . .

As we morphed into the digital age, camera manufacturers morphed right along with the times. Film point-and-shoot cameras morphed into digital point-and-shoots. I think the first digital camera in our family was a little 3-megapixel Fuji I got for my wife in 2003.

Meanwhile, in 2002, the first cellular phones with built-in cameras became available to the public. It took a while for them to catch on, but by 20114 or 15, sales of digital cameras had begun to drop. Which they continue to do. And much of that decline has been in sales of digital point-and-shoot cameras, which as a category, is nearly dead.

Why? Three things.

1. Digital point-and-shoots should be easy to use, but they're not. My wife got a very nice little Olympus point-and-shoot a few years ago, Does she use it? No, but she takes a lot of pictures with her cell phone. The Olympus menus are almost as complex as those on my professional cameras. Even I have difficulty with them, and I have mostly mastered the menus of an Olympus E-M5.

2. Cell phones make it quick and easy to share your photos. Even faster than getting double 4x6's at the one-hour lab. Cheaper, too.

3. Cell phone cameras do everything for you. Reasonably good exposure, reasonably good focus, both good enough for most people. and "you just push the button and (the camera) does the rest." George Eastman's idea lives on -- in modern garb.

It was exactly 20 years ago when I decided to set film aside & jump onboard with digital for personal use. Intrigued by its peculiar square shape, waterproof rating, and ability to save in RAW, my first was the Pentax Optio43WR (1). Looking back now it falls short on almost every merit, but when I first picked it up, I was gobsmacked; the photo studio I worked in at the time was still using view cameras with Dicomed Pro scanbacks, and this Pentax offered so much freedom in comparison with its light & compact design. And it was 4MP! Remember when 3 megapixels was more than enough (2)?

Sadly because of a catastrophic fall that was beyond what the Optio was intended to survive, my second, and last, digicam was a 7.1MP Canon A560. It was just OK.

Sure, those digicams of yore were kind of chintzy, but that Pentax is canonized in my mind as a great digicam.

1. https://www.dpreview.com/articles/3395632166/pentaxoptio43wr
2. https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4270680