Misunderstanding Trends Again
I read an article somewhere about point-and-shoot digital cameras making a come back in popularity. I don’t know which article it was, but my take away was that having the whole device dedicated to a single function made “cheap” digital cameras almost always better than a smartphone camera. Despite having personally yeeted my own personal digital camera archive merely 3 or so years ago (now I’m sorely missing that pink Sony Cybershot with the skull emblem) the article’s assertment makes sense to me. With owning an aging smartphone, the prospect of a camera upgrade is always exciting. But all the newer digital cameras I see online seem to be a reasonable $200 for the budget versions. That’s how much my phone cost at this point. I don’t have to invest much more to get a better camera AND phone. So I went to the local thrift store to see if I could get lucky.
I feel very lucky. After some digging in a bin and detangling several piles of knotted cables, I found 3 old digital cameras. A very old Canon PowerShot at 3.2 MP, a Pentax Optio at 5 MP, and Samsung ES25 at a familiar 12.2 MP. I was not expecting the hit of nostalgia I would get from finding these cameras. The silver aluminium casing of the two oldest cameras rang deep, and all the single function buttons on the back was very exciting. It was a journey wondering if these would even power on when I bought them, being impressed that they all took AA batteries and excited when I finally found some with a high enough MaH to get the device to read its memory card, and the sense of victory when I used copper tape to fix the broken contacts of the ES25, and pushed passed the “memory error” message to find that I needed an old card that was under 4gb to get the Canon and Pentax to function.
As for the photos… yeah, no contest. My smartphone, an old LG G8X Thinq, is better. I tried to take some consistent shots with each device to find strengths and weaknesses beyond pixel resolution, but I have many cameras and little patience. Luckly it was irrelevant once I took a picture of the backyard and only my phone camera could detect the distant part of the sky that was blue and not cloudy. It’s a detail too big for my rose-colored glasses to gloss over. This was likely never the comparison the article wanted to make, but I had fun while my hopes were up. And it is interesting that, IMO, the oldest Canon was taking the best shots of the 3 cameras. Here’s a small gallery of comparisons.
I don’t think I’ll go the route of purchasing a proper dedicated camera. I’m not sure I’d recognize the advantages over new phone camera technologies as I haven’t had proper exposure to either. I like the idea of maybe downgrading back to my old pixel 2 for its size convenience and pulling out a dedicated camera for pictures, but I’m certain that if I were in that position I’d be excited by the idea of a device that somehow combined both my old phone and my new camera and any quality sacrifices would totally be worth it.
Post by: saturdayxiii