Somewhere I still have a digital camera so rubbish it was never available for purchase in the West at all. I can't imagine it cost more than a dollar including shipping, it was given away by not-quite-scams where they say you get a digital camera free when you sign up. I signed to get the camera because I was interested to see how many corners they could cut - a LOT it turns out.<p>Obvious things first, it's QVGA. Yes that's 320x240 and remember this is a stills camera, not video.<p>The sensor is just raw exposed through a pinhole, no actual lense.<p>There's no compensation layer to remove noise or compensate for defects in the sensor, so you get dead pixels and other noise in your shots. There's no JPEG, just raw data and the driver makes it into an image.<p>Ok bad but you've seen worse right? I'm just getting started. Flash is expensive so they didn't use it. The camera has DRAM in it. If the batteries die (which they will after maybe two hours of inactivity) every lousy picture is lost. It's not good DRAM either, no need. They used seconds so some extra pixels are dead or bright in particular shots every time, some fade before the batteries die.<p>There's a single button control, and the "LCD display" is literally a counter that tells you rough battery remaining and shots taken, no images.<p>It is amazing. They tell you the best camera is the one you have with you. But if you have this, the best camera is probably to describe the scene in a tweet. Higher fidelity.<p>AFAIR it's so cheap it has no model number, describing itself only as "Camera" or something.
It took me a little time to grasp the fact that this is a list of cameras that the website author OWNS rather than a list of all cameras that existed in 'antiquity'.<p>Once that sunk in, I was considering offering to send him my old Canon Digital IXUS II and my wife's old Fuji digital camera which we have the orginal packaing and manuals for, but it seems the owner is planning to sell up so I decided against making the offer.
My parents had a Sony Mavica FD-91 for a conservation project in Panama in 1999 or 2000... the great joke was that there was an image quality setting where a <i>single picture</i> took more space than was currently available on the storage medium — floppy drives. At normal image quality, a single floppy held eight photos.<p>The amount of technological improvement and decrease in cost between that camera and a 2003 Olympus point-and-shoot was stunning. I don't think I've seen hardware advance that quickly at any other point, except maybe PDAs around 2003 or smartphones around the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.
The first affordable one (Kodak DC20 of 1996) was actually <i>very good</i>. At least colorwise. Most people just did not know how to use it. You could make panoramas and use supersampling ie blend several static pictures:<p><a href="https://photos.app.goo.gl/sbG9uneEHakBMMSu5" rel="nofollow">https://photos.app.goo.gl/sbG9uneEHakBMMSu5</a>
Realtors were huge early adopters of digital cameras. Made getting photos into online web listings much faster, and quality didn't really matter because the early web was quite limited in bandwidth for most people so images had to be small and fairly low quality. Also the highest common screen resolution was 1024x768 and most sites were designed for 640x480 pixels.
Great list.<p>Reminded of my first digital camera I used - the Apple QuickTake camera appearing in 94.<p>While they were built by Fuji and Kodak, I believe the Apple Cameras predated Fuji and Kodak releasing their own.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake</a><p>Edit: I hope the author can add this camera to his collection, it's so comprehensive it didn't register when reading on a mobile device that it was more than a list.
Years ago, I sent someone cash payment and my picture to have them scan it so I could have it on my AOL signature.<p>I remember the alternative was contacting someone that had one of these new fangled digital cameras.<p>I'm old.
This is amazing! This free "cardboard" digital camera from IKEA is particularly cool: <a href="http://old-digitalcameras.com/MorePicts/MP656.htm" rel="nofollow">http://old-digitalcameras.com/MorePicts/MP656.htm</a>
My first digital camera was the Olympus C-420L (<a href="http://old-digitalcameras.com/MorePicts/MP169.htm" rel="nofollow">http://old-digitalcameras.com/MorePicts/MP169.htm</a>) way back in 2001. I was 13 years old and had been fascinated by digital imagery. I started with an HP flatbed scanner scanning film photos but knew that digital cameras were the future.<p>The camera took better pictures than many of the entry-level offerings from Kodak and Canon that came even YEARS later.<p>I remember buying it at Staples and having them price match from the internet (saving me something like $150) before internet price-matching stopped being a thing (until it started being a thing again in the past couple years).
Back in 1996, I was doing an undergraduate honors independent study project on integrating computer technology into elementary-school classrooms. As part of that, my university and I had worked out an arrangement with a local public elementary school to let me teach a class on computer skills to a class of 5th-graders (ages 10 to 11, for those of you not in the US) a couple of days a week for a year.<p>I had some friends in the campus bookstore, which had a very close relationship with Apple (as was common in those days), and through them was able to get my hands on a QuickTake 100 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake</a>), one of the earliest consumer-level digital cameras. As soon as I started working that camera into my curriculum it became obvious to me that digital cameras were going to be a Very Big Thing. The kids took to it like fish to water, they <i>loved</i> taking pictures with it, and then when I showed them how to transfer those pictures to one of the Macs in the school computer lab and then publish them in a simple static-HTML Web page for their friends and family to see they were practically over the moon.<p>As with many Apple innovations of that era, the QuickTake was doomed by being just a little too far ahead of its time -- too expensive for average people to afford, too low-res due to the primitive sensors, and too clunky to use from the lack of simple ways to interface with a PC (USB 1.0 had only just been standardized and wouldn't start showing up in PCs for another year or two). It died at Steve Jobs' hands in the great massacre of Apple products followed his return in 1997, so that part of the future was left for others to make fortunes off of, at least until the iPhone came along a decade later. But even now, more than 20 years later, I still remember that camera.
Polaroid made a beautiful professional digital camera, with their own CCD design early on, which even had its own compressed RAW format...then they gave up :-(<p><a href="http://www.digicammuseum.com/en/cameras/item/pdc-2000" rel="nofollow">http://www.digicammuseum.com/en/cameras/item/pdc-2000</a><p><a href="https://www.digicammuseum.de/kameras/detailansicht/kamera/Kamera/show/pdc-2000/" rel="nofollow">https://www.digicammuseum.de/kameras/detailansicht/kamera/Ka...</a><p><a href="http://www.digicammuseum.com/en/cameras/item/pdc-3000" rel="nofollow">http://www.digicammuseum.com/en/cameras/item/pdc-3000</a>
Very cool, I love that weird, hobbyist sites like this still exist. Nice walk down memory lane for those familiar with this tech.<p>Sometimes I look at pictures taken with my 2006-era 3MP Nikon Coolpix and marvel at how bad they look compared to anything I was using from 2013 onwards.
I inherited a Canon PowerShot 350 from a dead relative back in the late 90s. I was still blown away that I could take pictures that went straight to the computer with reasonable quality.<p>By today's standards it's garbage of course, but it was a cool camera at the time. The thing I find most disappointing is how useless they are -- there's no real value in them; they're not like old film cameras where you can still take good, interesting photos.<p>It's fun to see the evolution of technology, as now my iPhone XS is vastly superior to most things on this list, and of course my big Nikon DSLR blows them all away.
My first digital camera was Kyocera Samurai 2100DG from 1999. It was actually pretty good, 2.1 MPx, great optics, 4x zoom, CF card. I've used it until 2005 or so. Only for sale in Japan<p><a href="https://www.cnet.com/products/kyocera-samurai-2100dg-digital-camera/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/products/kyocera-samurai-2100dg-digital...</a><p><a href="http://www.digicammuseum.com/en/cameras/item/kyocera-samurai-2100dg" rel="nofollow">http://www.digicammuseum.com/en/cameras/item/kyocera-samurai...</a>
Looking at the huge collection of odd camera brands starting around 2001 reminded me of an earlier article linked on HN about Fuji/Kodak transitioning from film.<p>You can see the point where cheap cameras became increasingly easy for anyone to assemble from commoditized parts in China, which was apparently one of the reasons it became infeasible for Kodak/Fuji to transition their entire film business to digital cameras (it was much easier to produce a decent digital camera than film)
I had a Agfa CL18 in 2000. The quality of the pics were awful but it really got me turned onto digital photograph in a way film photograph never did.<p>I graduated to a HP 618 a year later and the picture quality was excellent. I still have the camera and I could probably get by with it today if I needed to.<p>I remember my boss showing me a really early Casio camera in the 90's. That was the first digital camera I ever got to play with.<p>Great site, love it.
This reminds me of a time when I had become jaded as a camera store employee. I got in the habit of telling people that the cameras they were hoping to buy were essentially landfill filler. This website would have been a useful resource for confirming that point.<p>Oddly, it was an effect tool for up-selling cameras. The higher end cameras tended to last slightly longer before getting binned.
I shot some of my favorite images with a digital I purchased for a few dollars. The poor camera quality, vigineting, and surprise due to not having an LCD combined to make some artistic images that I loved.<p>Unfortunately, the camera also used DRAM and would lose all your images if the batteries got bounced loose.
My first digital camera was the Nikon Coolpix 800, which came out in 1999 and came with a CF card that could hold 18 photos at the default resolution (less at high resolution). Also, it had a serial port connector instead of USB.
Nice collection, but he wants to sell it. We still have a Sony Mavic camera somewhere with a 3.5" floppy drive. I think it has XGA (1024x768) resolution. I wonder if the battery is still ok.
Hah! I don’t see the Canon G1. My first digital camera. Metal body. Carl Zeiss glass lens.<p>Every thing afterward came in fiberglass bodies.<p>Still have the G1!
I remember my first digital camera. I think it was a somewhat pricey ($200) point and shoot. It was around 2002 or 2003. It was so awesome to get "scans" off the camera with just an SD card... but, it had it's drawbacks. It was 3.1MP which was fine for most stuff at the time, but it had this awful way of rendering colors and a few months after I got it some kind of hardware broke in it making video and preview mode "broken" in some way. Basically what you saw was NOT what you got in preview mode, typically with way less exposure on preview.. and movie mode always looked weird, as if it had lost half of the bits of color info or something.<p>Anyway, I kept it and ended up digging it up in 2010 from a box of old stuff to crack it open and make it an IR camera. Something went wrong, so now it's fixed focus at ~3ft, and with a few bits of dust permanently on the sensor... but, it worked! The focus issue prevents it from being very useful, but it's really cool as it is VERY sensitive to both IR and UV light. Using a very deep 920nm IR filter with it, I have to decrease exposure on a bright day or it's blown out... and it can very easily see UV patterns on things inside when the sun is out. I have a faded shirt that looks just black, but with the camera it can see the original lettering etc as if it were new... but also it looks magenta rather than black. Even with tungsten lights, the IR sensitivity is stronger than normal light and can end up with some crazy pictures that have "color" but not true color.<p>Here's some example pictures:<p>* <a href="https://i.imgur.com/5ZKmgFm.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/5ZKmgFm.jpg</a> reading text on a letter through an opaque black shirt (UV/IR illuminated through windows)
* <a href="https://i.imgur.com/IYzdhXP.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/IYzdhXP.jpg</a> an out of focus look out of my house on a summer day (notice red leaves, brown grass)
* <a href="https://i.imgur.com/STSPbq5.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/STSPbq5.jpg</a> IR "enhanced" portrait in a car. Her hair is deep red and the coat she's wearing is black and white only.
* <a href="https://i.imgur.com/7gSzCTT.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/7gSzCTT.jpg</a> looking partially through a deep IR filter<p>The only good UV-only photos I have tend to be flash pictures. The built in xenon flash appears to output enough UV that it will burn through IR filters. It definitely appears to be UV though because of different colors used and the way certain things will fluoresce<p>I've done some film B/W IR photography but with film it's so temperamental and I've never gotten good IR-only (though a deep red filter can be nice) pictures. There is Aerochrome, which is getting harder and harder to find for color IR pictures on film, but even it is hard to predict (though requires less filtration) and very expensive these days.