When photography started to make its transition towards digital, not much was standardised. Even though 35mm cameras had been around for years, digital didn’t adopt those familiar designs right away. Instead, we were taken on a weird and wonderful journey of product design.
In this video, Snappiness takes a look at five of the most iconic cameras of the 1990s. It’s a sort of retrospective review, mentioning some of the things that we’re glad digital photography left in the 20th century.
1990s cameras were challenging then and they are today
The first camera we see in the video is the first ever Ricoh digital camera. Priced at $1,700 when it was released, the Ricoh RDC-1offed a mere 0.4-megapixels. It uses proprietary batteries that aren’t being made anymore.
A desktop battery charger wasn’t really a thing then, so you have to charge those batteries up inside the camera itself. There was no built-in display to let you review the images you’d shot. Well, there was, but it was a separate device that bolted onto the side of it.
Polaroid’s an interesting name to pop up in the list, but it does, with the Polaroid PDC-2000. Yes, they did actually have a go at digital back in the ’90s. This brought with it a massive 1-megapixel resolution and looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
It ditches proprietary storage in favour of 40 megabytes (yes, MEGAbytes) of internal storage. It’s this proprietary, non-standard batteries storage that makes some of these cameras so difficult to use today. Even if you can figure out how to give it power, you still have to find a way to get the images off it.
Apple and Game Boy Cameras
A couple of years ago, I would’ve said this was an odd one to include. But we’ve seen so many projects with the Game Boy Camera over the last few years, that it’s gathered something of a cult following. We’ve featured it a bunch here on DIYP, too.
We’ve had everything from the basic operation to shooting sports. We’ve seen the Game Boy Camera modified to take DSLR lenses, seen it re-engineered into an even smaller form factor, stripped down to a bare board and even shoved into a more… “classy” looking camera enclosure.
So, I think at this point, it qualifies as iconic.
Also in the video, we see the Apple QuickTake 150, but the less said about Apple’s attempts at cameras before the iPhone the better.
The first time Sony made good cameras
Sony is one of the most highly regarded names in cameras these days, thanks to their Alpha series. Some of you might remember the older A mount Alpha series after Sony bought Minolta. Well, before that, we had the Sony Mavica line of compact cameras.
I say compact cameras, but they were anything but compact, for the most part. I mean, would you consider any device that has a built-in 3.5″ floppy drive to really be all that “compact”? Whatever you called them, they were very good compared to the competition of the day for your average consumer.
In the video, we see the Sony Mavica FD73. I had the Sony Mavica FD83 in the early 2000s and for its time, it was a fantastic piece of kit. It wasn’t cheap, but it produced some of the nicest results I’d seen at the time outside of a DSLR.
It’s great taking these trips down memory lane on YouTube. It’s fascinating to see technology we once had but is no longer around, too.
What’s your favourite digital camera of days past?
