Early digital cameras

[havana_joe]

This is just a general thread about reflecting on some of the cool and quirky digital cameras that have been around. The great thing about digital photography is that it’s relatively new, as far as a technology goes. It’s only been about 20 years since digital cameras started coming on the scene, and less than 5 years since the average consumer could get a really good digital camera without spending thousands of dollars.

What early digital cameras did you have? The good, the bad, the wacky & weird!

I had 2 that come to mind. The first was a Sony Mavica. Remember these? They used a floppy disk for the “film”. That’s right, a 1.44 MB 3 ½ inch floppy disk. It was basically a small portable floppy drive with a lens on the front. You could feel the disk spinning inside it! I remember how great it was that I had nearly unlimited media, since floppy disks were all over the place at that time. I would have my friends save the AOL dial up floppies for me and pay them a quarter a piece so I had stacks of “film” for my camera! Picture quality was 640x480, if I remember. Yes, that is 0.3 MP! I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. It still might be!

The second was a Fujifilm 4900. This was my first “real” camera. It was $999 when it first came out; I bought mine for $700 so it must have been out for 6 months or so before I got mine. It had a 2.4 MP sensor, but Fujifilm used a special “hexagonal pixel array” and secret interpolation algorithms to give you a 4.3 MP picture, which at the time was the most available to consumers. I think you could by a pro level 6 MP for $3,000 if I remember correctly. It had a 5X zoom, and the lens was built in, but you could screw an adaptor over the lens and add either a wide angle reducer or a telephoto magnifier. I had both of these. The moon picture that is my avatar (also on my Shutterbug site, link is in my signature) was taken with this camera. I think I somehow screwed more than one telephoto magnifier on it, I am pretty sure that I got up to a 20x zoom for the moon picture. I got my first paying gig with this camera, taking pictures of cars at a car show for the car clubs’ newsletter. It had a big ol’ grip and a .55 inch screen on the back. I sold it online for about $400 a few years after I bought it.

Well, those are my thoughts. I’d love to hear some memories of YOUR old school digital cameras!

[SmartWombat]

I had two Sony Mavicas, one went to a friend as their first digital camera.
I think the other one may still be upstairs somewhere.

But before that, a few cheap things.
No-name cameras, which took pictures (sort of) and one took a wafer thin memory card that was a weird non-standard.

From the Sony I went to a Casio 4MP twist body camera, great pictures but it eventually died from being dropped too many times.

Then the Minolta A1 (good) and the Konica-Minolta A2 (bad). The A2 was the first proof that more megapixels in the same body/lens was a bad idea. Nowhere near the quality or sensitivity of the A1.

Not sure what came after that, I think it was the Canon 20D.
But followed by quite a few P&S cameras.

[havana_joe]

You should break out the Mavica, SmartWombat. If only for old time's sake. Post some retro gear pictures!

[Flybye]

My first digital camera was some no name 640x480 camera I got back around 97. I tossed it after getting my 2nd camera.

My 2nd camera was a Ricoh RDC-4300. Had some great times with that model. Had her between 99-03. That is when things really started flying for me with digital cameras. Around that time, so many people I knew were getting digital cameras due to being able to instantly have your pictures. Ricoh gave me hundreds of awesome pictures till she finally died.

My 3rd digital camera is the Sony F717 and he still works beautifully. I got him in 03 just after the Ricoh died. Actually, the CCD in the F717 died a few years ago, but Sony replaced it for free. Nearly 7 years and the F717 is still taking beautiful pictures for a P&S camera. All the pics I've posted here have been with it.

I'm starting to look into digital SLR cameras, though. I know will be very sad to part with the F717.