Vintage Digital Photos Are Awesome, Even If They're Bad

After half a decade and three continents, I’ve decided to retire my trusty old DSLR body and pick up something new and fancy. As such, I’ve been spending a lot of time lurking around photo forums, first to gawk at specs and now to try to glean some info on when Nikon’s newest offerings might actually in stores. Waiting aside, it’s the former that’s really got me bewildered.

The tech industry has always mirrored its automotive counterpart in the fetishization of specs, but the digital photography world has gotten insane. First megapixels were the enemy, now they’re a godsend, except for when pixel peepers start freaking out over potential issues they found when looking at the corners of a 30+ megapixel image at 100% on a dirty laptop screen. Looking through the wealth of vintage digital at Pbase, I have to ask: can’t we all just stop whining and take photos?

It’s easy to forget how far we’ve come. The shot above was taken with a Kodak DC200 point and shoot, which shipped in 1998 with a whopping .9 megapixels and chewed through AA batteries like crazy. Yeah, the technical quality isn’t exactly great. But just look at how awesome that dump truck is! Never mind that it looks like a screen cap from an old TV (which, coincidentally, is basically how the first digital cameras worked).

But yeah, I get it, trying to compare a 14 year old P&S to the technical wizardry available today in current DSLRs is pretty silly. This shot is from the Nikon D1, a legendary camera released in 1999 that solidified digital as the photojournalist’s choice.

Being able to beam off digital images, rather than rolls of film, changed the speed of photojournalism forever. It’s especially brilliant for sports photogs, who could more easily cover matches. Excuse the border on this shot, I couldn’t resist sharing a D1 shot featuring Roberto Carlos (left).

Part of the reason the D1 was so well-received was that it was the first camera to feature the pro-level, integrated-grip form factor we expect today. Before that, pros tended to use digital backs mounted on film bodies.

Kodak dominated the digital back sector with its DCS line. The preceding two shots were both taken with a DCS 620, which also came out in 1999. Kodak continued making backs until 2005. That same year the original Canon 5D came out and the DSLR market was mostly solidified. Kodak, by never developing their own high-quality DSLRs, fell by the wayside, and then went bankrupt.

Of course, beefy DSLRs and lithe point-and-shoots were hardly the only form factors attempted in the early days of digital. In 2001, the perennially name-challenged Sony introduced the Mavica FD-97, a goofball of a camera that had a bazooka of a built-in lens sticking awkwardly out of its front. That lens was an obvious selling point, as all the photos I can find shot with one are of birds.

Point-and-shoots make up the bulk of the camera industry, and early on all kinds of companies were jumping in the “film is costly and a pain in the ass” game. HP’s line of PhotoSmart cameras are near ubiquitous in all their silver glory. This was shot on a PhotoSmart C500, released in 1999. Isn’t it great that digital makes storing images online forever great?

Even Sanyo has long been in the game, as evidenced by this shot from a 2002 DSC-MZ3 (ugh). It’s surprisingly sharp, assuming you don’t look at anything larger than small web sizes.

And that’s the end-point of the digital camera, isn’t it? When cameras are coming out with wi-fi and social media integration as key selling points and Instagram’s worth a billion bones, it’s obvious that people are far away less concerned about the technical quality of an image than they are how easily and quickly they can share it. For the vast majority of the camera-wielding population, capturing a moment is way more important than how it looks; it’s not like a newlywed couple is going to look at their wedding photos and say “What’s up with this noise? You shot with a 5D Mark II, not Mark III?”

Yes, I understand how wonderful it is to have the best and latest gear, that’s why I’m currently in purgatory waiting for inventory on exactly that to open up. But it’s nice to remember that, even for pros (I remember when skateboarding was still shot on film with motor drives), specs are useless if you’re not actually shooting. And plus, with a 3.2 billion pixel camera on the way, it’s not like any of us are going to win the spec war anyway.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @drderekmead.