The manual zoom may have been a technical necessity due to the extension cord. If you had to power a DC motor, almost certainly a brushed hobby motor, over 40 inches of vaguely flexible cable, and that cable also had to stream raw video from an image sensor, in 1998, I don't think you could have done it without inducing pretty severe noise on the video feed. If that video uplink is digital, it would probably cut out completely while zooming, and if it's analog you'd have lots of noise. In either case you would need extra circuitry to protect both ends from dangerous crosstalk voltages. With the permanent pivoting camera designs, you can put even so little as millimeters between the signal and power lines, but you can also make the length where they're close very short, and you can keep the signal lines very short. With them all together in one cable over 40 inches, preventing cross talk isn't impossible, but given that many contacts and the physics that cable is displaying, I don't expect it to be carrying twisted pair, and I don't expect it to have particularly much shielding between pairs. There's plenty of ways to improve this noise that I don't think they would pay for, they might not think of because they're audio (balanced line), or I'm not sure had been developed yet then.
Actually, there is a possibility that Sony Venice cinema cameras with extension system can be traced back to this exact Minolta camera. Sony bought Minolta camera division and the current Alpha line is a direct descendant of Minolta cameras. I like to think that there is an engineer who started their career in Minolta with this great idea of a separate sensor element and eventually rose up in the corporate hierarchy high enough to bring it to the cinema world.
That's one hell of a blast from the past! I remember reading about the dimage V in a computer magazine at the time and drooling about the idea of that detachable lens and extension cord! It was so cool! I'm happy to finally see someone cover that camera :)
About the screwed up Minolta: did it by any chance make some weird pink pictures that... melted downwards??? My old Canon Powershot A75 died that way. It suddenly one day started to show pink molten pictures, it was incredible, the picture itself, like even if you held it steady, started to melt downwards. It was a natural creepypasta machine by that point, and it had a CCD sensor like some of the older cameras (now they're mostly CMOS ones), I wonder if this is one weird failure mode of CCDs.
It was a common failure in ccds produced for a while in the late nineties and early 2000s. My recollection is that it was caused in the canon models by a manufacturing defect that allows moisture ingress to the CCD, more or less shorting the columns together and allowing charge bleed, but don't quote me. It's deeply unsettling; when I first saw it happen it scared the hell out of me. These ones don't do it, but I think I have a Sony somewhere that does.
My family's A80 developed the same problem. Canon actually had a free replacement program for a few years but it naturally ended right before the problem occurred on mine. At first it would usually be OK but then it started happening more and more often, eventually happening all the time. Finally it stopped producing a picture at all.
@@aidanjarosgrilli Sorry for not replying, couldn't find the image I had here, probably on some backup external drive or such, it's hella funny but the most demonic, non-edited picture I've ever taken, all by accident. Here's a similar example: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/F717_CCD_fault.jpg (if RU-vid allows the link...)
I know this is probably a wild outlier, but there are cars in Japan from the early 2000s (and maybe later and earlier?) that use PCMCIA as a way to plug in your music library. I know because my 2005 import has a "PC card" slot in between the CD slot and a hard-disk drive slot, that came with a smart media/SD/MMC to PCMCIA adapter in it Xd
@@belstar1128 Not for a car manufacturer, where the time between the original concept to being rolled out on the production line is up to 10 years, so a lot of things are a generation or five behind the current state, plus add to that the likely original use was in the Japanese luxury market segment, and after 5 years in there the new hot idea came out, the old one was stopped, but the parts are still being made, so put them in the lower end vehicles as a mid range vehicle. Just like ABS was originally an option on luxury vehicles, then it became standard on them, then an option on mid range, then standard, and now it is standard on pretty much every vehicle, except the bottom of the range. After all you still got vehicles with a cassette player in the 2010's, brand new stock, while the top end had early versions of BT and plug in audio.
What car(s?) Did you see this in? I'm familiar with in-dash electronic toll collection systems in Japan but the only PCMCIA I've seen was for really old navigation systems. And they would have a card reader in them sometimes to update the maps...
I seem to remember most cars from the late '90s having a range of digital slots for different devices, mostly as chargers unless you had flatscreen displays, which were usually only an option or upgrade on most vehicles at the time
I had SCSI on my PC back in the mid to late 90s. I even had a SCSI PCMCIA card reader. The used/returns sections of MicroCenter and CompUSA were a great place to get items at a discount. Or if you were more adventurous, you could buy the item, then return it, then buy it off the discount rack. I can neither confirm nor deny doing this. I also got lucky with some companies selling off "broken" equpment. I got a few multi-bay external drive enclosures and various drives for $1 each, when all they needed was a new fuse.
Yea, I got a very good flatbed scanner -- with PhotoShop included -- on the discount parade at MicroCenter. The salesguy said that it's probably just the included SCSI card, which many people can't get to work. I had a good SCSI card in the computer so didn't need their cheap card, anyway.
You're treating us (and me) far too well with all of this grade A content. If I got paid more I'd give to you on Patreon but right now I'm too busy giving my money to Adobe... I love classic cameras, digital or non so this is a great treat for me. Do keep it up please!
I got the Minolta Dimage V for my 17th birthday, I think. Took it to an air show with my SLR. I did use the extension on a tripod to shoot over the crowd… for four photos until the batteries died. I shot the rest on the SLR
A very basic demosaicing algorithm may explain a part of the strong artifacts from the Minolta camera. The strong zippering artifacts at 13:14 made me think about that. The way the camera handles noisy images may also be linked... Maybe they pick a basic algorithm to save computation time while saving the image. The Toshiba camera seems to do much better in that regard. Thanks for this video!
A lot of serial-to-2.5mm cables for cameras use the same pinout (tip:host RX, ring: GND, sleeve: host TX), and a lot of them work with the same protocol, via what has become known as Sierra protocol, named so after Sierra Imaging who sold a turnkey camera platform consisting of i think one of their chips and two Fujitsu chips, one of them being the SPARClite CPU and another a DSP, if i'm not horribly mistaken. Today it's supported by gPhoto library and back in the day you could use software called Came from TsuruZoh Tachibanaya. My favourite weird camera is the Sanyo VPC Z-400. At first it looks strikingly normal until you have had a "pleasure" of using some other cameras of the time. One problem common to cameras of the era before Li-Ion is that if you were using them with NiMH cells and they run flat or if it got rapidly colder, the camera is likely to unable to shutdown properly and retract the lens. Sanyo's solution: spring mount the lens, so you can just force it into the camera without harming the mechanism, you just put a cap on it. Another problem: CCFL backlight is weak and takes up a lot of power, and transflective LCDs weren't a thing yet, so in sunlight, the display is completely useless. Sanyo's solution: a window at the top of the camera leading into the backlight prism, so to review your picture you shot in the sunlight, you open the window and aim the top of the camera at the sun, it's not perfect, but you can see things. I just love these seemingly low-tech solutions to high-tech problems. The camera actually took entirely adequate 1.3MP pictures. It wasn't as good as cameras that came a few years later, but also not as bad as cameras that you're reviewing here. That dithering pattern reminds me of weird debayering on some Olympus cameras of the era, but here on this Minolta it's WAY worse. But i'm still fairly confident it's got capacitor plague, because of what flash is doing.
I've never heard of PCMCIA being used from a digital camera directly to a laptop, that's quite cool! (And am old enough to have lived in the days before USB by a fairly big margin 🤣)
When I started out as a mechanic back in the early 2000's I bought a cheap digital camera to help with complicated teardowns and reassembly. I would take a picture after every step so when it came time to put it back together I could just scroll backwards through the pictures. It really helped when I was doing drum brakes and transmission rebuilds and whatever else. I never printed any of them, I just deleted them after every job was done.
I do the same thing but for vintage computer stuff. When I get a new thing to take apart, I take several pictures from many angles of each step, even if it's something that isn't that complicated. It sure saves time vs. making hand-drawn sketches and notes.
12:30 - More than half of my zoom-capable '90s digicams have failed zoom motors, multiple of my late '00s/early '10s have also failed. That Minolta's manual zoom would be great, no power zoom to fail!
Cool cameras, great video, I enjoy these shorter episodes just as much as the longer ones. Thanks for the "two of them" at the end, you never disappoint
Wow! That Toshiba really gives everything the "90s digital photo" look that I love so much. Is it a VGA camera, too? Funny, that looks like the same serial cable that came with TI-83 calculators. I wonder, will you ever get a hold of one of those cameras that goes on a Palm IIIc, like a Kodak PalmPix or something? I think that would be interesting to see on your channel and would fit your collection beautifully.
I've had the same serial cord for one of my Casio pocket computers (not the Pocket PC ones, the ones that are a weird mishmash of a calculator, a QWERTY-keyboard and a fake C and fake assembler language in it alongside basic), as well as one of the Casio pocket memo thingies - I wonder if the pinouts are the same
In the 90s I worked for a media lab, and we had a Quicktake 100. It saved to floppy, and we had an indexing tripod head to take panoramas with QTVR. It was the future!
SmartMedia was anything but. It is just raw NAND flash. No controller or anything - it was raw NAND. Now, the SmartMedia specification did specify how you used that NAND flash (which was incompatible with most NAND formats around at the time) because obviously if you didn't specify how you used the pages and blocks and spare area, you'd easily end up with devices that couldn't share the memory card (without a controller, the physical layout of the memory needed to be specified). In fact, the Rio PMP300, one of the early MP3 players, used SmartMedia cards in a proprietary way which meant you had to "reformat" them for use in the Rio (the software it came with did this for you). Unfortunately, once you did this, you couldn't use it in any other device as you'd lose the control information you needed to format it. There were third party software that could reformat them back to normal use though. Finally, because it was raw NAND, there were ATA controllers for it - basically any CompactFlash card had a CompactFlash (a pin-reduced form of PCMCIA) to NAND controller on it, and SmartMedia was raw NAND. So with a little firmware you could easily create a SmartMedia to PCMCIA adapter using nothing more than what already existed at the time.
In Germany, the magazine ads for the Dimage V had a clever pun: "Die Minolta Linsen-Diät: einfach abnehmen!" - "The Minolta lentils diet: lose weight easily" or "The Minolta lens diet: simply take it off". I've been wondering ever since whether it was worth collecting. Good to know it isn't.
Early digital camera sensors and compression algorithms were atrocious. My dad worked for the Chicago area power company from 1980-2004 and was ended up being one of the company's thermography experts in the 90s. Modern FLIR cameras can take both a visible and thermal image from roughly the same perspective to help identify hot spots. 25 years ago your need a purse-sized Kodak with the first generation CF cards, and if I remember right they only had a few cards readers that had to be shared between power stations. The thermal camera was something else entirely. I first used it in probably 96 or 97 (10-ish at the time) and it looked like the future and had a built in air conditioning system to keep the sensor cool.
Have you tried plugging that PCMCIA camera into a Linux box? I've found several times that Linux keeps drivers for things that stopped being relevant years ago, so it's my go to for any weird old hardware that Windows "can't use the original drivers" (planned obsolescence anyone?). It's worth a try anyway, and not hard at all to install anymore.
It's not "planned obsolescence", it's simply a waste of time and money getting developers to update specialist drivers for long-obsolete hardware that barely anybody will ever want to use on a modern OS.
@@dunebasher1971 you're right, it's not "planned obsolescence" more like "changing the design too often, no backwards compatibility and a hidden agenda". Drivers subsystem in Windows got drastically changed several times (remember non-WDM drivers, anyone? then XP/Vista/Win8-10 incompatibilities?), and building them was not easy to learn, unless you probably partnered with M$ to babysit you through shitty documentation and SDKs - which explains why only expensive products had good drivers or still have up-to-date drivers. As for "planned obsolescence" - I have a network HP office printer/scanner/copier which was acquired as e-waste because it doesn't work with any newer Windows and the website claims "it should work with any Windows later than Vista", but it doesn't. What do you say about it, isn't it HP pushing new printers? Guess what, it still does the job - prints papers, and even graphics like charts and logos; that's the only things I need it for anyway, like once or twice a year. Linux distros also have drivers disabled for really obsolete hardware, but take any kernel version old or new - and all of them can be built (enabled in configuration) and would work like charm. And not because driver coding model hasn't evolved, but because it was built right from the start and then only improved through mostly non-breaking changes. And it wasn't hard to learn, because it's open-source. Imagine, you have a super-rare PC or a fancy Mac G5 or even something like DEC Alpha or POWER or Sun Sparc (those are beefy even by today's standards - I mean 32GB RAM server for $100? and later, Sun/Oracle they had 512GB and 1/2/4TB RAM models too, but those aren't dirt-cheap yet, but they will be). Imagine, you want to run it with newest software and to its power limit - you can do all that with Linux! Btw, I did see something about "old Minolta cameras" in the kernel config, so it might actually work. To be completely honest, there's also quirks to it; for example, while you can get e.g. an old Creative Labs shitty 640x480 webcam to work, you'll need more than just drivers to use it, because introduction of UVC changed a lot in software too. That probably applies to this weird PCMCIA camera, you might need to find some odd software which could be incompatible with your current desktop environment (or would take some work to integrate) and would not show up as a normal camera.
@@artempylypchuk4140so, in other words, they're there in the Linux kernel because there was never a reason to remove them, because drivers on Linux have been the same since basically forever.
I honestly think It's a miracle digital camera's caught on with the general consumer as quickly as they did. Especially since digital point and shoot camera's only really surpassed film point and shoots in overall image quality in the early to mid 2010's imo.
barely related, but at 5:20, you mentioned PCMCIA being exclusive to laptops, but I believe there were actually a few desktops in the late 90s to 2000s that included them. Notably, the eMachines eOne all-in-one Mac clone that got them sued had them believe it or not.
Yeah I mean you could also add it to your PC for $40 but nobody was going to design anything with those add-ons or rare standouts in mind, so functionally it was exclusive
The first digital camera I remember seeing was Xapshot back in the mid '80s...I think it took six monochrome photos, stored on a disk. ...it was demonstrated at a local mall, and I didn't get a very good look at it.
This feels like a fever dream, because I felt sure that I had seen you do a video on a camera with a similar concept before. Edit: XD I'm remembering when you showed off the Minolta in the video about the Coolpix, which is just a brilliant video ouroboros.
That cat picture on the Minolta's storage reminds me of a picture I made with my webcam of a cat around 2005. (back then webcams were limited to 240p/288p/480p and could only take photos in at most 1024x768)
It's been a while since my recommended page has shown me your channel but the increase in quality and production value is INSANE keep it up! Been a long time supporter and glad to see you are doing well!!
Almost skipped this one. Had no idea what was going on in the thumbnail. Glad I decided to watch it anyway. My father had one of those Sony Coolpix with the rotating lens/sensor/flash modules. It brought back some fun memories of taking photos on vacations when I was younger. He was exceptionally tall (nearly 7 ft) with long arms to match, so he could pull off some unbelievable shots holding the camera above his head.
See, I had a late 90s digicam (gotten 2nd hand in 2001) that used compact flash and because my dad built PCs as a hobby, I had a card reader as part of my PC tower. The thought that most prebuilts just... didn't have those things never occurred to me...
Later pre-builts definitely did, though. My 2007 and 2012 PC towers both had memory card readers for SD/MMC, Sony Memory Stick, Compact Flash, and xD/Smart Media.
@@AaronOfMpls I think by the time SD and microSD were becoming standard, so too were built in readers. It's that liminal space between early adopters and mass usage that I think most of these early digicams fell into.
Fun fact: Minolta's digital camera division was sold to Sony, and is where the Sony Alpha line of cameras came from. Now, Sony is the leading manufacturer of image sensors, bypassing pretty much everybody including Nikon and Canon. Their image sensors are used in everything from high end digital cameras (like those in the Sony Alpha, iPhone, and many other smartphones) to dash-cams and automotive cameras like those used in self-driving systems like Tesla Autopilot.
The blue rendering of the uranium glass reminds me of how bad UV and Hot Mirrors were on early cameras. I remember photos that included items which were red hot and IR sensitivity caused it to render as green. I'll give the Toshiba engineers respect for that compact engineering. The corded extension use case reminds me of being in San Francisco years ago, walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, and getting a shot that involved holding my D800 facing upwards and at arms length between a cluster of suspender cables.
I had my first digital Camera back in 1998, Canon PowerShot A5. It had also no USB, but a seriell cable was equipped. Later on i bought a Sony DSC-F505. Memory Stick with 32MB was very expensive at this time, i paid 200 German Marks for it. The main issue was the limited storage space. For longer trips i take my notebook with me (Toshiba Libretto 50Ct) which i used for storage and exchanged the pictures via PCMCIA with a PCMCIA-Card Reader. I have still the pictures from those times.
LOVE these videos. Takes me back to the (not so great) dinosaur age of digital photography. When I was in school for graphic design (95-97) we had an Apple Quicktake camera, which I believe did 0.3Mp images. Yep. 0.3. But it's all there was at the time, we thought it was amazing. I love how everything back then was so proprietary and just... odd.
I'm not sure how bad that manual zoom is, but I generally don't care about powered zoom at all. I recall older cameras like that not giving you the feeling like you're that much in control, and yes, it saves cost and there's less that can break. Seems generally a net positive for me. On the remote control/detachable lens thingamajig, my Olympus E-PL9 (and I know it isn't unique) can use wifi with my phone, which is handy for remote control. Especially because the screen turns down for "selfie mode" which is a problem when you're on a bipod. I am actually considering getting a second (used) phone just so I can use it as a controller with all the touch options. It's pretty handy to have an external monitor/controller for these types of things.
I recently found a new old stock of a camera I had in 2000 made by Polaroid. It was a digital camera and MP3 player in one device. It is transparent so you can see the PCB inside but it's a transparent green color. It uses compact flash cards. Man I absolutely loved that camera and finding a new old stock one on eBay was such an exciting find. I paid _way_ too much for it but it was totally worth it. I loaned it to my 7 year old niece who has only ever known iPhones and tablets so she can experience the pain of having to take out a memory card and transfer the crappy pictures onto the computer that way. And the MP3 player on it is just absolutely awful to the point of being almost unusable. The headphone jack is in an awkward place. And imagine having to cary a camera around with you to listen to music while everyone else has their little iPod Minis and Shuffles. It's an absurd idea. Folks can keep their old Cannon and Nikon film cameras. I'll take a late 90s, early aughts digital camera over those any day.
Great video. Photo and video cameras are probably my favorite technologies as far as their history goes, maybe besides TVs. It’s just astounding how many different features and designs were tried. Anything was on the table it seems! It helps that they often had a flood of tantalizing buttons across their surface.
I noticed what looks like a tripod mount on the lens end of the extension cable and got a hilarious mental image of the tiny thing alone on a full size tripod.
I have a Toshiba PDR-2 kicking around with my collection of cameras. Has a whopping 2MB SmartMedia card and the cool PCMCIA insertable part. No flash, small screen just for image count, one single CR123 battery, 640x480 images with either (fine)8:1 or (standard)16:1 compression. The person I got the PDR-2 and ThinkPad 380XD had said he originally bought them together as a bundle at the time in 97-98
The Casio QV-10 from 1996 or so had a pivoting image sensor, so it was like a tiny version of the Sharp Handycam. No flash, not even removable storage.
Happy new year! I wanted to submit a small correction on the Venice. Typically the Rialto with a lens and matte box aren't really heavy enough to counter balance the "sled" on a steadicam. Most operators prefer more weight on the camera vs lighter builds. When shooting with the Red Raptor or Komodo we usually slap a shark fin to add another battery for more weight/hot swapping capabilities. You usually use the Rialto system for head mounted pov style shots, talent mounted shots, out anything where you need to whip the camera around quickly for handheld style shots.
Oh, huh! I swear steadicam usage came up as a bullet point when I was investigating the system but I can't find it now. I must have been looking at the specs for the Venice itself?
If you're ever curious on how steadicam operators like their builds a buddy of mine, Myles Shank, did a video on how 1st assistant camera should design their builds. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--G6HtDNvYgM.html
The standard Venice is pretty common to see on set and often goes up on steadicam. Used it on a job a few weeks ago and it's for sure a chonker. You pair that up with a Cinema zoom and you can end up with over 40 lbs of camera. I've seen steadicam ops move with it like it was light as a feather, those people have some serious core strength.
@@CathodeRayDude Wanted to circle back again here. Frame Voyager just released a video on the Rialto that is a great watch. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--YacAKKqmCw.html
The first time I saw a digital camera was early December 1996. I was at a party, and someone had just gotten it. I went to the Future Shop in Yakima the next day, and plopped down a few hundred to pick up a brand new Casio QV-10A. WOW! Images without film or other superfluous video capture devices from an NTSC signal... It was a game changer. Then, in 2000, I shelled out for an Olympus Camedia E-10. wow...
On a tangent, were there ever any USB devices that let you daisy chain? I'd completely forgotten that it was a thing until I saw that little "looking for USB devices" clipping you popped up, but I don't recall ever seeing it as a feature in the wild.
This was initially one of the bigger supposed USPs of USB, and why you'd often find only a single USB on desktops and laptops for the first few years of its existance, because there was this assumption that daisy chaining would be ubiquitous. In practice, it was rare.
Transferring your photos via serial gave you some minutes of anticipation as the photos you took that day *slowly* appeared on your PC screen. Folks these days wouldn't understand that seeing photos you took that day was like magic.
My first digital point and shoot was a Cascio QV-10 purchased March 9, 1996 for $627. I believe it was the first consumer digital camera on the market. It produced a 240x360 pixel image, had no memory card so the only way to get the photos off it was a serial cable. If you removed the batteries, or they ran down, you would loose all your photos. I now use a Nikon D-800. Amazing advancements in the last 26 years.
19:49 An option this gives you is to light from your vantage point, and to shoot from another vantage point. This could be useful for really overexposed low-key lighting.
Lens extension cable... Look up the Elmo remote head camera CCU. I have a couple of these at work. The news department use to use them as hidden story cameras, with a big battery and a little composite VTR.
I think the dithering pattern at 13:13 is some kind of debayering algorithm - compensating for the fact that the actual sensor has a grid of red, green, and blue square subpixels by having each pixel just directly borrow the value of an adjacent pixel for the subchannels it doesn't have Modern cameras have bigger sensors and more sophisticated algorithms but ultimately have to do the same thing.
I have two Sony DSC-T1's, and a T5 on the way (there are various other models) with a sliding lens cover. I know it's not really unique, but it's still a very clever way to protect the lens. There's no worry about breaking the lens cap or barrel or anything like that. The things you do have to worry about though is the glue containing iodine in the CCD sensor package, basically evaporating and rendering the CCD unusable. This was the case with the T1, T3, T11 and T33 models which most of them suffer from this same issue. The other models I'd avoid are the newer T7, T2, T50, T500 and other various T-series models from 2007 and newer, as they have a steady shot EV stabilizer that tends to fail with time, making the image blurry, and it's a PITA to repair (you have to remove the CCD and poke your tweezers into the lens assembly trying not to scratch any of the lenses). The only models that don't seem to have any technical issues suggesting a recall would be the T5 and T7 as they don't have steadyshot, and they were made after the CCD recall. I just ordered a T5 untested, it's quite scratched up but should work no problem considering it's one of Sony's most reliable subcompact cameras. By this point I've got nothing to lose. The TX models should be fine as they feature optical steadyshot, to some extent. I haven't heard of any people have issues with theirs. I just got a TX100V and it's working great, just some nitpicks here and there that dither from me liking it more.
Wow! I still have my Toshiba PDR-5. I got it in 1998 and took the very first images of my first child in 1998. Still have those pics on CD-ROM. Cracking cam for the time and this has been a fantastic trip back into my past. Thanks man. The only thing was the lithium battery lasted no time at all. Power hungry unit and those battteries were damn expensive at the time.
2:54 fun fact: the U92 glass converts UV radiation into a visible wavelength. The camera seems to lack an UV filter, picks up the UV wavelength and represents it as blue. That also means there's lots of UV in the display. (display as in showing stuff behind glass (physically showing real items))
What bugs me though is, sure, maybe it's picking up the UV, but that doesn't explain where the green went. The green in reality is so intense, I can't figure out why I'm not seeing a mix of green and blue.
@@CathodeRayDude The camera adjusted it's exposure for the high amount of UV light. Since the green light is just a small fraction it gets overshadowed by the UV and lacks from the image. That must also mean the green you can see was pretty intense. There's nothing weird going on because fluorescence of the uranium glass is at around 530nm, it should be very similar in every piece but the amount can vary. the way i know this stuff is: I'm a photographer and educated in chemistry and physics (and other scientific topics that don't apply here). Meaning, I understand the underlying physics and how the camera picks up the varying amounts of light. Although I cannot 100% exclude the possibility of the camera's software being weird, I'm highly certain this result is because the camera is picking up way more UV light than the fluorescence is providing. if you are still not sure, think about it in this way: You point your camera to the sun and expose for it, the surrounding sky doesn't just disappear, it is just very underrepresented in the final picture.
Thank you for your interesting content. You've re-awoken my interest in photography and videos again, so much that I decided to tackle a thing I've been putting off for years. I have a bunch of 35mm film from pictures I took in my youth, and I've wanted to digitize the collection, especially since the 6x4 prints aren't looking too good... and the "professional" or "pro-sumer" scanners like the Epson V850 wouldn't give much change from a thousand dollars... so taking inspiration from you I went to eBay and took a punt on an old Medion flatbed scanner with a negative box for about $40, that can scan at 4800dpi (but it is painfully slow!) but the results are more than good enough for me. I'll also be able to see some black and white film that I took and developed in the photo lab myself, but I never exposed the whole film since i just did the ones I thought looked best (so only like 2 or 3 of a 25 shot film) so I'll actually see some photos I took but never developed, which will be really fun! Thank you for the content and the inspiration. I hope you had a great new year! x
I love these cameras. A school friend’s dad was very techie, had early wifi, a PDA with a stylus and a wifi card, and an expensive digital point and shoot. He was talking in 2002 or 2003 about how they finally rival film in picture quality now that they’re over a million pixels, instead of VGA or perhaps 800x600. He also talked at length about how he would’ve spent more on film than he did on the cameras with the number of pictures he’d taken, probably to convince himself he liked it better than film!
Love these videos , I’m not sure why I watch them but for some reason It’s actually all really interesting , my girlfriend would walk in the room and ask me “why are u watching a video on 1998 cameras ?? “ and then I have to scream at her “ I don’t know ok I think some sort of witchcraft is being used on me here I’m being sucked in , call mum ! “…… anyway great host definitely a natural behind the camera even out side , good humour also , seems like he could present anything so fair play to him and obv knows what he’s talking about so yea love it all thanks for making them , keep on truckin 👍
I have never heard about any of these cameras. The first digital camera i came across is a 2003 Kodak easyshare with their multi national "Kodak Moments" TV advertisement.
When I was in college in 2003, I took a "digital photography" course as one of my electives, which, unsurprisingly, required me to buy a digital camera. I ended up getting a cheap Minolta Dimage (something) because it was the cheapest half-decent thing I could find. I remember referring to it as the "Dim Image" because of the poor quality of pictures I got out of it. The thing was still more useful than a $120 textbook.
I worked in a computer store and I started seeing USB ports on computers something like 2-3 years before I even knew what USB was. Early roll out and adoption was slow and quiet. I don't remember what the first device I had was, but it was probably something like a mouse. Maybe an optical one?
Damn that Minolta setup looks like the beginning of a gopro before go pro. Stick the body to your belt like a walkman and the sensor to your head and get to doing cool stuff.
These are some interesting cameras. But what’s really interesting is those sold cat pictures. Someone took those photos over 20 years ago of their cat and now it’s been seen by over 50k people.
