“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
Random story: I went to the first ever digital imaging and technology film program to run in Canada, first cohort, 20+ years ago. There was one dude in our class that, in spite of the fact that our program didn't allow analog submissions, shot super16 all the time for his "personal projects and art", fine. So he kinda bothered me a bit, but did inspire me to, for the first, time grade my film to look like analog. I sucked all the contrast out, flattened it down and split toned it heavily. Submitted it to class and got the top grade for it. The guy was furious and went to the teacher to complain I shouldn't have submitted film, teacher came back to me to confirm I'd just graded it to look like film, and then told the dude my submission was accepted and my grade stood, but didn't tell him I shot it digital, so the guy goes and submits a 16mm short for his final because he thought I got away with it, ha.
After I graduated, I stuck to the all digital stuff and a couple of folks from my program and I went on to start a film company, and win 3 Emmy awards, over the years I was still in film I saw people bring various analog film things to set to try and see if they could somehow include it, be it some film type, some vintage light panel or whatever, but it was always just fad, there was a period of time everyone brought 35 to set just to "see if we could fit it in later" - it never got cut in, it was too difficult to match it to the digital.
It was always a fad bringing film to set, but those that did, I always admired they wanted to make that statement, no matter how foolish they seemed to many on set, I always appreciated the art they brought to the table.
I recently bought a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P5 with a broken back screen, honestly I've had so much fun with it, I went out with my wife this last weekend, left the phone at home and brought the Sony, had a blast looking at the frames when I got home, do recommend it.
Sorry for this random ass post, just this is my fav kinda HN content :D
20 years ago HBO made the tv show Rome. They filmed it on analog film. I’ve recently been watching it for the first time and it’s absolutely amazing how well it looks compared to shows shot on digital from the same time. It looks good even compared to modern cinema and because it’s film they could do 4k captures.
For a recent movie, Strange Darling was filmed in analog. Great movie and looks unparalleled.
Dune was filmed on digital, transferred to analog, and the scanned back to digital for distribution.
I guess my point is, that there is some magic in analog. Whether the inherent limitations of the form, or by introduced randomness of the chemical process, or by placebo assumption of “realness”.
We live in an age of Netflix enforcing all shows to look exactly the same and even adding de-aging filters to actors. The gulf between the perceived reality of analog film and digital has never been larger. So yeah, analog excites me.
Random idea about “the look”. Doing an analog transfer might kill the gradation banding that digital images suffer from, especially those that have gone through lossy or low bit depth edits to brightness values in large flat color areas like sky. Analog transfer may add dithering to the bands to make them look more natural.
I think about this Brain Eno quote often. It’s always surprising when old worse formats resurface, yet it happens everytime.
> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
This is a big thing for early synthesizers. Many of them tried quite hard to accurate emulate real instruments - pianos, horns, strings - but inevitably failed due to limitations of their time. But many of them became classics in their own rights, to the point that later synths emulated them. And now, of course, you can get software versions of the same synths which do an incredible job of reproducing every last detail of a hardware instrument that did a bad job of emulating an analog one!
An account called Natspone plays with this idea in shortform vertical videos, I find it incredibly bizarre and unsettling. I should forewarn - you're probably not going to enjoy the style at all.
Good questions. CD distortion include hard clipping from amplifying too much, whereas vacuum tubes and magnetic tape have soft saturation (still a distortion, just a different kind). Another distortion is that dynamic range compression is used, bringing up the volume of quiet parts of a song.
As for digital video jitter, I can think of MPEG compression artifacts, both spatial (e.g. DCT mosquito noise) and temporal (e.g. motion compensation errors, periodic keyframe refreshes).
Absolutely. Like those terrible filters that are supposed to make video look like it was recorded on VHS. They always make the results far worse than VHS actually was in practice.
VHS didn't always look noisy and distorted, but it always looked blurry and had horrible color bleeding. I disliked it even though it was the "only" technology at the time and we didn't have it at home.
People are now corrupting mpeg video intentionally. They call it "datamoshing". And of course there is glitch art, and the "vhs look" filter being (over) used everywhere.
I hit up a 100gecs concert awhile ago and there were a non trivial amount of people snapping photos with a nintendo 3DS. These pics are stereoscopic 3d so they can only really be viewed on a 3ds unless you want to cross your eyes or have access to one of those vintage picture holder thingies. The sensor in them is also not very great but it is what it is.
The gecs as a music act is a weird cross between extremely scuffed and extremely glossy, so the 3DS is somehow the perfect way to capture it imo.
My kids started asking for vintage digicams about five years ago. At first I wrote it off as a fad. And it is definitely partially that.
But when my kids started taking pictures with these cameras, I realized that the pictures were, subjectively at least, better.
We were in the Rockies and the pictures taken on their iPhones are sharper, more vibrant, but those photos lack perspective. It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.
Something else happens with digital cameras. My kids think more intentionally about the framing of the shot. They move into better positions. They think about light and shadows. With the iPhone it’s click and forget. So that contributes to better photos too.
Even with the point and click models that my kids bring to social gatherings, there’s clearly a sense of posture and special-ness about the photos that changes the dynamic more than everyone posing for a phone selfie or photo.
There are obvious limitations. My kids didn’t fully understand why older cameras perform so poorly in darker light without the flash.
But otherwise they really love their digital cameras. My eldest is studying abroad in France and it’s a real treat to get a batch of digital camera shots of life in Paris.
I now buy digital cameras in bulk and repair them slowly as a hobby and then resell them on eBay. It gives me a little spending money. I avoid the TikTok trend cameras - they’re too expensive to buy - but I make some nice pocket money on selling the in between models that perform really well.
And my kids get to pick their favorite models now and then.
Assuming you're not talking about lens effects (which definitely has a huge effect), you might be reacting to the use of tone mapping in iPhone photos, which tends to make things look "flat". There's a slider called "Brilliance" in the iPhone photos app that you can play around with to get a sense of how this type of processing tends to flatten images. I'm not sure how or whether it's possible to disable this in the default camera app.
Every digital camera I've ever owned takes "better" pictures than my iPhone 15 Pro. The iPhone is fantastic for taking a few snaps to remember a trip or event, or recording an ephemeral "story", but when I am actually trying to take photos there's no comparison to my ~10 year old digital camera.
It's partly about sensor size and tech., partly down the the limitations of tiny smartphone lenses, and partly down to what's added (or should that be taken away) by the "computational photography" software in modern smartphones.
I get that you're saying this as if to point out the hipster-ness of vinyl. I work in the music industry and have personally overseen the manufacturing of 100's of thousands of records, so I'm as much an expert as anyone on this topic.
Yes, vinyl is technically an inferior sound quality to FLACs. I'm happy to rant all day about the flaws of vinyl. I personally prefer high quality digital.
However on a good pressing there is an undeniable difference to a good vinyl pressing. It's not dissimilar from why I said that my kids frame the shots on digital cameras in ways that are different using an iphone. The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital. While there's a lot of shitty USB turntables, even those are often far better than how most people listen to music digitally which is often on iphones and shitty laptop speakers. The physicality of vinyl manufacturing incurs requisite different attention and processes that sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) results in a "better" listening experience.
Could you get the same "better" listening experience with lossless digital? Yes. but most don't. So vinyl is "better."
> The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital.
I call BS. I know people who work in music mastering, and I've asked about this. They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl.
They know people will buy vinyls if they want to no matter what if they want to, so it doesn't matter if the digital master isn't perfectly attuned to the vinyl medium
> I call BS. I know people who work in music mastering, and I've asked about this. They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl.
Nah, they don't. There is always a vinyl master. I have several here from records I have released. It may well be made from the digital master, but vinyl needs low and high end roll off and mono low end bass to stop the needle jumping out of the grooves.
I know that part. I was imprecise in the words I used. There is a different vinyl master of course, but its almost always based off the digital master that is than modified to not fuck up on vinyl medium. The vinyl master has more "attention" because the vinyl is more limited, it has nothing to do with being "better"
> The vinyl master has more "attention" because the vinyl is more limited.
This isn't really true from my perspective. There are a lot of factors as to why vinyl mastering gets more attention. It's harder to do right, so there's that. Artists will often pay far more attention to the vinyl master, so it's a crucial A&R issue. But there's an issue on digital master, we can easily (more or less) change the material on DSPs. It's not fun but it's possible. On vinyl, mistakes made on the mastering side may not even reveal themselves until past the test pressing stage and can be very costly.
> its almost always based off the digital master that is than modified to not fuck up on vinyl medium
This might be true at some levels of skillsets, I guess. But in my circles for at least the last ten years, the vinyl master is sourced from the original mix, not a digital master. In fact, on larger projects more independent labels and artists are hiring vinyl-specific engineers who can oversee what is a very physical process from mastering to lacquer cutting in one sitting. Having sat in an a number of sessions, there's a lot of attention to the ways in which the master is effecting the physical nature of the cut. This is actually how it used to be when vinyl was the imminent format, for reasons I've already stated (cost). In fact some vinyl plants had apartments for record label people to stay on site and oversee the vinyl mastering process.
I'm not a mastering engineer and I always send my pre-masters off and get a digital and vinyl master back. So, whether they prefer to create the vinyl master from the digital I wouldn't know for sure, but that would be my assumption, yes.
I would also agree that the vinyl master wouldn't have more attention outside of dealing with the limitations of the format. Most mastering engineers are working on pretty tight schedules, for not much money, so it wouldn't make sense for them to take longer on the vinyl master (outside of the known limitations). There isn't any aspect of vinyl which is (technically) better. So, it's not like they can improve on the digital master.
> They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl.
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. If the engineers you know do that, you don't know good engineers.
edit: I can't reply to tekla's comment, so I'm editing here. It's frustrating on Hacker News for an expert - like myself, who has sat in on dozens of mastering sessions - to be disputed by someone who "knows some people." I'll clarify further. Do some engineers use the same mixes for vinyl as they do for digital? Sure. They're not good engineers. Or the customer hasn't paid enough (it's usually about $60-$100 per song to master per format). Vinyl is a drastically different medium than digital - of course - and any decent engineer will 100% mix differently and accordingly. If there are artists reading this and your engineer is using the same mix, fire them. You're paying a lot to press to vinyl so do the followthrough and get vinyl-specific mastering.
Here's a good article from an engineer I have worked with many times on why mastering for vinyl is different:
I'm a good engineer. I've done tons of mixes for records released both digitally and on vinyl or even tape. I never create different mixes for the formats - but I work with great mastering engineers and cutters who will create different masters for each format.
Thanks for commenting. I'm curious why you wouldn't master specifically to the format. There are so many nuances to vinyl with mistakes that can deeply impact sales when the job isn't done right.
For my own part, we had to recut the lacquers on a vinyl release five times to get it right, because the nature of the mix created a middling sound that bounced the needle around and caused intense surface sound. Once we solved that problem, the pressings sounded great.
Obviously with cassettes the profit margin isn't there to justify the additional expense of mastering, and to my ears cassette mastering rarely sounds different than the digital master (maybe some slightly different leveling). I believe NAC actually has a mastering guide to master to cassettes kicking around. But...not sure anyone follows it.
Just to be honest, I don't doubt you're a great engineer. But if you weren't mastering specific to format...I wouldn't hire you. Increasingly we've gone to vinyl-exclusive engineers on bigger projects, because it's so crucial to get the sound right at the start and poor vinyl mastering can cause problems months down the manufacturing line that are costly.
Are you confusing mixing and mastering, maybe? I just said that I don't MIX to different targets. I create the best mix I can, checking phase to mono every step of the way, then I deliver my mix to a mastering engineer who will create a master for digital as well as a master for vinyl. The vinyl master will sometimes be more agressively summed to mono in the bass if we're dealing with too much information in that registry. My point is you don't have to mix to different formats if your mix is good. Good mastering engineers and lacquer cutters will sort the rest for you! Maybe we just misunderstood eachother?
/shrug. He said/she said standoff is always fun, with a mix of insults.
People who are the type to buy vinyls will buy them no matter what, as long as its not obviously a bad press. Why would any sound engineer bother to do extra work for such a low volume, high chance of losing money, PITA to work with medium, unless they were some sort of super artist.
Vinyl is technically worse in that the low-end and high-end frequencies need to be rolled off to cut. It's also technically worse in that it can't do low-end stereo without the needle jumping out of the groove.
The reasons that people might prefer it (subjectively) are:
* The notion that it's 'warmer' - all this means is the high-end frequencies have been rolled off
* The subtle distortion effect you get from feedback through the needle. The needle, as well as picking up the groove, acts like a microphone for any sound nearby (i.e. the speakers playing the record). This then feeds back through the same loop, creating a subtle chorus effect (very subtle).
I've played in enough large nightclubs with massive sound-systems to know that my records sound completely different in them. The feedback is more extreme, so the chorus effect is more pronounced. This often turns into bigger low end at higher volumes. It can also be problematic if you have a record that's been cut too quietly. You need to turn the gain up on the mixer, picking up more of the club speakers, eventually creating audible feedback hum.
But, by having the same 'effect' on every record played, there then seems to be a consistency of sound from one record to the next. Creating something that's more 'glued' together.
It absolutely comes across. If you know what you're listening for then you understand, but most people just feel it. It's technically distortion, but humans like distortion. Anything too clean is boring to the human ear.
So, vinyl, is not technically better. But, it has some artefacts that are pleasing to the human ear. And, I suspect, that's what people pick up on subliminally (if they're not just trying to be boring hipsters).
If the general consensus is that vinyl sounds better, and the improvement is largely from rolling off highs and mono-ing lows - why don't the digital masters use the same technique? ie, why isn't there only a vinyl-ready master?
I'm not disagreeing - just interested. I actually roll off the highs via EQ for almost all my headphones and speakers.
> It's probably along the same line as how vinyl records supposedly sound better.
I'm not an audiophile, but that's actually probably objectively true, but for non-obvious reasons that are not clear if you're just looking at technical specs. Digital music can sound better, but opens up the technical possibility of prioritizing other things, which are in fact prioritized.
IIRC, it was the "loudness war." Digital audio capable of a much wider dynamic range than vinyl, but the record companies choose to throw most of that away in order to make the music sound "louder." Technical limitations of vinyl prevent those shenanigans (I believe the grooves would be too wide or something), which forces the music to be mastered in a better way than sounds better.
Vinyl is technically lower-performance than well-designed digital but albums that came out in the heyday of the LP sound better on that medium because they were generally mastered with more range. Vinyl has less practical dynamic range than 16-bit PCM but in that era they only had hardware limiters which meant that your mastering engineer couldn't just slap Ozone or L3 on the two-track and brickwall it to within an inch of its life via transient shaping and other DSP tricks. This is also why early CD releases of these albums often sound quieter (and better with a slight turn of the volume knob) than the remasters. Don't get me wrong... some older releases were mastered hot (presumably to stand out on a jukebox in a crowded bar) but even Motown's best attempts can't hold a candle to the nihilistic tidal wave of digital crunch that is possible with modern pop and rock mastering.
For this reason buying modern albums on vinyl doesn't make much sense to me besides for collectibility and sentimentality. I have a few hundred LPs sitting in my closet behind me but it's for those reasons, not because I have any delusions about a non-existent inherent sonic advantage of the medium.
In the mountain photos, IMG_1187 and IMAGE 2024-12-03 08:31:09 are the iphone photos. I think they're fine. But the alternate images (which are by a Canon PowerShot S50) convey better the lighting of how the scene actually looked IRL.
The Canon shots are also more zoomed in, shot with a longer focal length on the lens. The obvious effect of focal length is zoom, but it’s the change in foreground-background distortion that makes the photos look weird or good. Flat, wide lenses like the one used for the iPhone photo exaggerate the foreground and shrink the background. As you lengthen the lens you shrink the distortion and pretty soon you hit a point where it matches the distortion of your eyes’ lenses. That’s when photos look most natural.
The iPhone photo of the mountain has a really nicely balanced dynamic range. The Canon one has blown out highlights where the clouds meet the peaks, and really dark shadows with almost no discernible detail. From a purely technical point of view, the iPhone picture is a "better" photo, but this serves as a perfect example of how "technically better" and "artistically better" are not the same thing.
Ultimately, photography is less about the quality of the equipment, and more about what you do with it (cliché, I know), and phone cameras are pretty high quality but clip your wings by taking all control away from you.
Your kids might benefit from an entry-level Sony a6000 or a6100 (the a6000 is ancient but shockingly capable) or equivalent, and some practice with raw processing software (Lightroom Classic is the default choice here, but Darktable is great if you don't want to give Adobe your money. Apple Photos is a pretty damn decent beginner option too).
Wow, I thought it was really obvious which was which, which I found surprising (and I guessed before I read this comment). The thing that gives it away is that the post processing means there's a uniform amount of illumination throughout the picture, which rally makes it look like an iPhone picture.
The poster said they "convey better the lighting of how the scene actually looked IRL."
I dunno... I've never seen anything like the photo of the mountain (IMG_6491) in real life. The reality is that our eyes have an extremely wide range of contrast. But in that photo, the clouds are blown out and all the immediate scenery is essentially black. In real life, clouds don't get blown out, and you can see everything around you just fine in every situation where there's a big blue sky above you. The iPhone photo is a much more accurate approximation of what our eyes perceive.
And the poster claims the mountains feel like more massive objects on the older camera. I'll respectfully disagree -- on the older camera, I can't judge their size because I can't see any of the landscape leading up to them for comparison. Whereas on the iPhone, I intuitively feel how massive they as my eye is drawn up the road, up the valley, up into the sky. I have full context for comparison.
Of course, there's no arguing with taste. :)
But maybe I can never unsee this either -- I appreciate the iPhone even more now...
You should teach them to also move into better positions and think about light and shadows when they take phone pictures.
A big difference between smartphones and cameras is the focal lengths. On an iphone, a 48mm focal length is considered tele, and the main cam is 24mm. That will surely take away the perspective from the Rocky mountains, if not your nose.
CCD or CMOS sensors count photons. They presumably have some natural frequency response curve, but the actual colour discrimination comes from the filters (usually some flavours of RGB, but has been other choices too).
It's those filters, and the colour reconstruction algorithms that change colour response, not the underlying sensor.
Welcome to modern "journalism" on the web. The medium (HTML) easily allows including as many high-quality images as you want in an article, but the writers are too damn lazy to bother including any.
It's similar to this whole discussion about CD vs. vinyl in one of the threads here: CD is technically a far superior medium, but the mastering engineers are too damn lazy to use it properly, and instead compress everything to hell ("brickwalling") and eliminate all dynamic range, whereas the vinyl mastering engineers apparently put a lot more effort into their work, so vinyl ends up sounding better.
The film secret sauce is usually varying temperature/hue in different regions/brightnesses of the image. The 2005 digital example exhibits this via red/magenta being excessive in the shadows, but falling off in brighter areas
Was "digicams" a word people regularly said in the 2000s and I just somehow didn't notice? I only remember these being called cameras or, when necessary, digital cameras.
Back when I was shooting on film, various "Toy Cameras" came in and out of vogue. I enjoyed the subtleties of the Lomos and Dianas, so when digital cameras became mainstream, I kept a lookout for similarly quirky DCs. My favorite was the JamCam (640x480) which was fun for awhile. But soon realized, the same quirkiness could easily be achieved with digital filters applied to photos from cameras that were more enjoyable to work with. That's about when my interest in toy digital cameras died. But I have to admit, do miss the 9v consumer battery of the JamCam :P
Back in the 90s some artists discovered the LOMO LC-A (Lomo Kompakt Automat), a soviet era cheap film camera which they used for self-expression. The distortions of the cheap camera were the preferred feature. And for a time a lomography movement started, with a focus on spontan snapshots.
The echoes of Lomography then found themselves in the very early German/Austrian blogosphere – Lomographic snapshots, then with digicams, were often seen in blogs of the early 2000s. There were even group weblogs, some of which are even going 20 years on:
In my opinion the very early artistic filters with whom Instagram started – long before Kardashian culture - must have been influenced by cheap film or digital cameras and tried to replicate those effects with smartphone cameras:
Not sure if this counts but my original Canon 5D is still my favorite camera. It came out in 2005 which is almost 20 years ago. I've tried many other cameras but always come back to my 5D. I don't think it's nostalgia though, it just works really well, I love using it and I love the results.
I still take photos on a 5D Mark II because I don’t see a big reason to upgrade. The photos look great and I’m familiar with the layout. I know there are plenty of improvements to be had in newer and better models, but I’ve managed to work around its flaws and still take good photos. It being old helps me feel comfortable taking riskier shots, too.
I asked my wife to buy me a new Polaroid for Christmas. And bought two 35mm film cameras in the last year.
I got "tired" of the perfect reproduction offered by my digital cameras. Along with the less-perfect reproduction, the delayed gratification and higher cost/shot has brought some pleasure back to taking photos. Even the shots that look straight out of a late-80s family photo album bring me more joy than pixel-perfect shots.
FWIW, I'm 48, so grew up using mostly 35mm disposables or cheap P&S. By the time I was post-college, it was early digital P&Ss and an early Canon Rebel.
I have a pile of Nikon CoolPix 950 (1999) mostly cheap from eBay, along with tele, wide, 183° fisheye lenses, and IR filters. It started with a pro photo friend who had upgraded and I went for the complete set.
1600x1200 pixels is plenty! The CMYG CCD matrix gives incredible fidelity of green. With the IR bandpass filters, I get saturated two-tone IR: Leaves reflect IR that passes the C+G filters and water transmits IR that passes the M+Y filters, so I get foliage in ice cyan and water in wine red colour.
It can see your eyes through your sunglasses, but not through your cornea.
They are a fad because in most cases their entire purpose is nostalgia, i.e. pointing at the screen and saying "OMG it's just like the 1990s!!!". In the recent Batman movie, soviet lenses from the 1950s were used. Did anyone feel a "soviet" look? A "1950s" look? No, they were chosen because they look unique
I still have a couple digicams, between the fact that they don't ping cell towers, and let me manually and quickly adjust exposures between shots, they still have a lot of value for me.
Phone cameras are great at what they do, but are absolutely neutered in terms of the degree of control they afford you. If you want to make an artistic statement in photography, your hands are tied. A standalone digital camera that gives you even basic exposure controls is miles ahead even if technically inferior (older crappier sensor, worse autofocus, etc).
Jumping from there straight to vintage equipment amounts to dumping the baby with the bathwater, but modern digital cameras can be quite pricey (starting at around the cost of a mobile phone), so vintage stuff can make sense as the budget option for dedicated hardware.
A friend brought out a "Camp Snap"[0] camera at an event the other day, and the thing everybody enjoyed about it was that it didn't immediately bring the whole internet into our event. It doesn't even have a screen.
I would pay good money for a digital camera that could take photos as well as the average flagship phone and fit as easily in a pocket (and I'm a woman, so I'm including sometimes pathetic little pockets), but they could only be tweaked and edited later, on a computer or companion device.
I think that desire for spaces occupied only by the people in them, not the whole rest of the world and its opinions, explains even more of this trend than the aesthetic of the photos.
What you are looking for is a Ricoh GR III or IIIx [0] (same camera, different fixed lens focal length). It's super pocketable, and you can turn the screen off completely, although it doesn't have a viewfinder, so with the screen off you can't really know what you are framing - it could be fun to try and guess after getting the hang of it.
Image quality would be much better even than the latest flagship phones.
Finally, you can browse the images on the camera afterwards and wirelessly transmit the ones you want to edit/post to your phone/tablet/computer. You can also have presets for color filters and highlight/shadow tones, so you don't really need to edit in post if you prefer.
It's truly a great little camera, and the price is not that bad (usually around $1000, but can be found for less, or you could go with the previous model, GR II).
There's not a chance in the world that thing fits in women's pants pockets!
What I'm looking for has the form factor of a phone (potentially even much smaller) and a camera like a phone, but all it does is take pictures. I'm fine with seeing the pictures on a screen, just not editing them.
I recently had burst of vintage digicam nostalgia.
For her birthday, my daughter received a toy digital camera that instanly printed photos on thermal receipt paper. It's great fun, and the print quality has lovely B&W dithering.
Her gift reminded me of my Gameboy Camera and printer. The printer worked by printing on thermal stickers. I bought several Gameboy Cameras back when they could be found in discount bins for 10 USD.
I bought a Gameboy printer off ebay and it came with several rolls of tape. Still have it all in my basement.
> For her birthday, my daughter received a toy digital camera that instanly printed photos on thermal receipt paper.
I got one of those recently. Immensely gratifying to have the photo printed immediately (even if all the tourists in London look at you funny.) Wish the camera was a little better but then again it's probably not worth it given you're printing relatively lo-res B&W dithered output...
This article existing strikes me as a sign its at least in some context a fad. If someone uses a tool, in this case vintage digicams i guess, to make a piece of art and the use of the tool comes through as part of the statement it was in that context an artistic statement. If they're using it to make nothing and just bought it because they saw someone else using it and found it novel, seems like they got caught in the fad.
Stomping your feet and telling me why it's not a fad is very fad behavior.
I saw a few of these posts and dug up my 5MP Sony digicam from ~2006. The LCD had a few artifacts, but it still worked. Unfortunately, the memory card was in bad shape, and it took a really long time to boot, making it useless as a "point-and-shoot". Without the card, it had enough onboard storage for 15-20 pics.
Took a few pics, couldn't see myself using it regularly with the terrible quality and the horrible sync story, so it was a pretty short experiment.
Tangentially related, I've been doing video art, both analog and digital, and there is a quality in analog video that cannot be replicated by digital processing (at least not yet). In addition, every camera and device has it's own "look", like a personality. In the end it is more about the artistic result that one wants to achieve rather than pure technical specs.
The title isn't mutually exclusive at all. I'd wager the vast majority of artistic movements are fads, let alone statements. That doesn't mean it says anything deep about reality
Ask anybody why they are doing it any you won't get an answer any deeper than "I like the way it looks", "It's nostalgic", "I saw other people doing it", or even "It's trendy" and it doesn't take much digging to see that.
Digicams are a fad and a shallow artistic statement. That's not to say you can't make great art with a digicam nor that switching to one won't make you a more mindful artist. Switching from a modern graphical shell to a bourne-like shell will make a non-programming computer user (if there is such a thing) a more careful programmer, but in doing so you are cutting out an entire space of tasks that you could be doing.
I saw a Youtube video recently that looked like it was filmed using a late 90's webcam. The presenter looked too young to have owned it from new so I assumed it was a lo-fi aesthetic choice but having suffered those cameras at the time the appeal of them eludes me.
Photography is among the lower forms (if not the lowest) of artistic expression on account of how it captures the "exactitude" of a subject's matter. It's no surprise to me that people are shunning high quality images and embracing the imperfections of older devices to capture a semblance of the quirks and personalities that make humans who they are and consequently what makes "Art" art.
I really like my old 2010 pictures on my Canon PowerShot, I wish I had shot in RAW mode. I even miss my iPhone X, the AI upscaling has gotten out of hand.
I honestly like my photos more from my iPhone 3 than my current iPhone SE. The photos were blurry, noisy, and crunchy while my current photos are just flat and without character. It's not nostalgia for me, it's the photos looking too good and a bit plastic.
So fad and "artistic statement" may be quite closely related. Quite possibly every popular artistic statement is a fad. The opposite is clearly not true (some fads are silly plastic toys).
Umm...I've got an old HP 1.3? MPix digital camera that I hang on to because, yeah, I like how it paints. The sensor acts as if it has a slow focal plane shutter and that combines really nicely with some specifics of how I take pictures to give some really amazing effects.
Original iPhones shot in a very similar way, but over the years, newer versions have lost those 'faults' I like as the sensor got faster and 'better'.
Yeah I don't buy it. Juicy Couture tracksuits are also trending right now, but I haven't seen any thinkpieces about how they're not a fad, but really a bold artistic statement about modernity and AI...
There's a bizarre "Old stuff is better" tendency which sees vintage tech as somehow more credible, ethical, characterful, expressive, and individual than modern tech.
It's quite strange. It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use - but trying to pretend it isn't.
But smartphone cameras are not progress on all fronts.
They are small and seem to be optimized to take pictures that look impressive.
I sometimes have a slideshow with family pictures running on a large monitor.
Sometimes I stop and look at a picture that somehow just look much nicer that the rest when you spend some time looking at it. If I then check the metadata, it almost always turns out to be one of few pictures I took with my old DSLR camera or a newer compact camera.
Of course those cameras are much bigger and has bigger lenses and should be able to make better pictures. But the best camera is the one you brought with you. Which is why so few of the pictures are made with a smartphone.
But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular.
Smartphone cameras will never compete with full size optics.
They can only simulate the physical properties of optics. Eventually we’ll get to the point where they’re far from “photos” and more AI generations that look like photos.
The newest iPhone and Pixels have much larger sensors than older phones. That is the reason for the hump on the back. The sensors are bigger, and better, than digital compacts. They are half the size of the 1” fancy compacts and with newer sensors might be better.
The only difference with compact cameras is not having zoom lenses. But the telephoto and wide cameras on some models help make up for it.
There is a big jump to interchangeable lens cameras. But those aren’t what is popular as vintage.
>But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular.
It seems like if you have the latest top tier phone: iphone, pixel, samsung s, etc., you get decent photos, if you have any of the 2nd tier phones, they all continue to suck no matter how many mp they claim to have or whatever optics they claim to have.
My girl has an S24U and outside it is badass. Indoors, low light, it's really weak. We just bought a 13 year old Canon EOS (Rebel) and it takes much better photos inside. You can get some amazing bargains on old DSLRs.
* until you zoom in or look at it on a screen larger than you'd hold in your hand.
Seriously, even on a modern Pixel (mine) and iPhone (gf's), I'm often disappointed in the level of detail you find once you want to crop an image or zoom in on something distant/small.
The software has come a long way and does incredible things within the limitations of such tiny lenses and sensors. But I've got much lower resolution images from point and shoot cameras in the mid/late 2000's that show more detail and none of the weird software sharpening artifacts of a 20-40+ megapixel phone pic.
I was at an event recently, with a bunch of teenagers (one of which was mine) and I passed around a couple of those Fuji Instax cameras.
They loved them. They liked writing notes on the border. The photos aren't nearly as good as even the most basic smartphone camera, but there was something genuine about them.
For all the advances we've made in technology over the years, people are still thoroughly analog. And while digicams are not analog in any way, there is something about them that scratches that itch. Maybe it's as simple as hitting an actual button to make it go.
For all the amazing high-tech in today's smartphones, you still feel like a monkey at the monolith as you paw at it.
I've got to admit, digging through a shoebox of fifty blurry lightly-water-damaged family or childhood photos is kinda better than finding a directory of 10,000 perfect digital photos of the same stuff.
It's not "old stuff is better" as much as "I'm better than you."
For a long time, that was by having sharper, higher-quality pictures. Your friend had some Kodak Instamatic and you had a Hasselblad and you could assert your dominance over them.
But nowadays, the phones in everyone's pocket take such outstandingly sharp pictures that there isn't really meaningful room for improvement. So, people now differentiate themselves by getting vintage digital cameras which are hard to find, cost extra money, break frequently, etc., so that they can demonstrate their uniqueness.
When I first had got my nexus 4, my first upgrade over another Android phone that I can't remember, I was astonished by the improved fidelity of the pictures.
Then after I got my next phone I looked back and saw that the pictures had terrible artifacts that weren't hard to find. Now I'm on a Pixel N after having a handful of earlier Pixels and I can see the shortcomings of the photos it takes (and all its predecessors have taken) without much difficulty. Just zoom into the picture a little.
Of course. People are never genuine in their interest or preference of things. It's always about status, wealth, and their standing among their peers. /s
It’s not about being ‘better’. Older tech is just more fun! There are more moving parts, more differences between models, more to enjoy repairing, maintaining, hacking, comprehending! Modern tech is now so mature that it’s obfuscated to the point of being magic.
I don’t think it has much to do with ‘ethics’ at all — at least not for me.
It is also reasonable for one human being to fully understand a piece of the "older tech". Modern stuff is often just a black box, even to the people designing parts of it because they only work on a single part.
Cameras imbue a grain onto what they shoot, both in the physical sense of grain in analogue cameras and the digital grain of the iPhone camera (The technical high quality but AI smearyness and color grade of modern iPhones is it's own grain) and that iPhone grain is now the aesthetic of almost all social media content so anything filmed in it has the same feeling as every janky social media video shot with it.
If you're creating art and easy route to differentiate and not feel like everything else in the timeline is to use an entirely different "grain" and you'll stand out from the mass.
It's not as simple as "old stuff better" it's more "other stuff feels different".
I try not to be this guy, but actually your terminology is a little off.
Film cameras have grain. Literally, there are tiny physical grains of photo-sensitive material on the film. Those grains, which are distributed semi-randomly in a film across the medium determine the limit of film's resolution and give it part of its organic, non-digital feel.
Digital cameras have noise. That's the term for randomness injected in a signal from the effect of physics: Brownian motion, heat, quantum effects on photons, etc. Noise means that while each pixel on the sensor is in principle quantizing a measurement of the real world, that measurement has some random error that can never be fully eliminated.
A digital image recorded from a digital sensor has no grain. There was no film, and no grains of photosensitive media involved. (It might have simulated grain from some "film effect" look applied to the image.)
The distinction matters because they look different. It's one of the key reasons film looks like film and digital looks digital.
On the other hand it helps preserve history so I'm not sure I care the intentions are not pure. I know I got on this bandwagon with a simple analog camera over ten years ago and now I'm drowning in 1800s and 1900s electrical engineering books and newspapers.
I don't know take valve amps for example, the subjective qualities the clearly imperfect technology produces can be quite pleasant. Yes you could just as well simulate such an amplifier in software because there's no 'magic' to why it sounds that way, but there's something aesthetically pleasing about warm glowing glass.
I'm no photographer but I feel there's something similar going on here.
UAD and WAVES, amongst several other companies, operate their business on the premise that there is some 'magic' as to why it sounds that way that is somewhere between difficult and impossible to manage (sufficient to enthuse a musician/producer).
As an owner of a UAD Octo and plenty of their plugins, but also lots of analogue hardware [1], including valve based compressors, EQs, and distortion units that are emulated by UAD. The plugins still aren’t there.
Especially for anything that needs harmonic distortion. I get the impression they use regular random number generators for some of the random variance, rather than trying to emulate the physicality of a valve. They just don’t quite have the mojo. For some things it doesn’t matter, but often music production is about a 1% improvement here, a 1% improvement there, which sums up to a lot. It’s still easier to get those wins with hardware. Like ‘mojo’ is the default setting.
A really good example is the Chandler Curve Bender [2]. I have the real hardware. A new one will cost you £6,700 - so it would be insane to buy one when UAD have a plugin version for £179. I have the plugin too. The plugin is my favourite digital EQ. It sounds great. But the hardware does things that the plugin just doesn't touch. The hardware is all discrete circuits (with massive transistors). I think the slight latency shift between the left and right channels gives a 3D-ness to the sound that the plugin doesn't even attempt. Anyway, this demo [3] really shows what it can do and why hardware is still in the game.
In many areas plugins are good enough, I tend to use the plugins for more precision and to have similar curves to the hardware, but there’s still a ways to go to until there’s parity with the hardware.
That doesn’t mean you need the hardware, plenty of successful artists use digital alone. Just it’s still easier to get ‘the good stuff’ with hardware.
I mean, audiophiles will gaslight themselves into believing and hearing what they want to hear. There are some areas where ok, maybe there is some difference to the sound, unlikely as it is, but once you start getting into "audio optimized SSDs" and "audio optimized ethernet switches" then it's all a 100% scam(and yet audiophile forums are full of people swearing that they can hear a difference in their audio tracks saved to an SSD that had a few extra capacitors added). So I'm not surprised that there are companies making money off that belief into what is effectively magic.
Audiophiles are ridiculous, frankly. I'm on the ATC group on Facebook. ATC make pro speakers used in many top studios, but they also make home 'audiophile' speakers. The speakers are amazing, but I often see them talking utter nonsense about how X sounds great or whatever, when they have pictures of their setup in an untreated room. Like they could even tell if the speakers are good in a room like that. They're hearing the room.
Audiophiles are like astrologers, it's all in the wind with them. But they shouldn't be confused with people into pro-audio for music or film production. The name of the game is to get the best sounding room you can, so that it's easier to make your art, there is a motivation to get it right and not be hoodwinked by the things you state.
Not that pro-studio people don't have their blind-spots too (especially around things like cabling), but they're not the same.
I suspect their failure mode, limitation and purpose are more characterized and less surprising ? Single purpose tech vs magical black mirror that does everything.
It’s super weird to find out that my old camera sitting in a drawer, the cheap one everybody had, is now an object of desire for people who weren’t even born yet when it was manufactured. However silly I think the motivations are though, I’ll get behind any trend that extends the useful life of our electronics.
Especially since so many of the cheap cameras made right before the smartphone era were essentially manufactured e-waste that barely worked. Same with things like portable tape and cd players, the Sony ones were good, but any of the other brands were just the same trash electronics repackaged in slightly different packages for each brand.
What is bizarre? Ethical, characterful and expressive they certainly can be, right? I also haven't seen anyone pretending it's not consumerism. People are just trying to have some fun.
Before 2008 or so a 35mm SLR has higher quality photos for the price if you weren’t taking that many photos and you could still process film all over, with good quality scans if you had the right place. When DSLRs hit 10+ MP and dropped to $700 or so that changed things a bit.
My X100 still has better photos than my iPhone 12. I have an iPhone 16 Pro and I think it’s better as a camera than the X100 but I still prefer the X100 when I want a shot and I will put the time into it. That is 13 years old. I also have a canon S95 and it was still more useful for photos than my iPhone 12 was.
That's probably some of it, but I recently took up film photography again.
A few aspects of shooting film appeal to me... the imperfection (memories aren't perfect, the photos shouldn't be either - but I'm also a huge Impressionism fan, so maybe that's it). The delayed gratification - in a world where most things are "instant", waiting a few weeks+ to get results changes the way I mentally process the images and associated memories. And the higher cost per shot forces me to be a bit more planful about shots.
Of course, that said, I get the photos scanned (not prints), and view them in the same apps as pure digitals. So maybe I'm just weird or a hipster.
I did ask for a Polaroid for Christmas - full analog baby! The Go model is dirt cheap (for a camera), maybe it'll be great, maybe I'll use it a few times and stick it in a drawer.
just go find a used Polaroid and shove some film in it. no need to spend money on a camera someone will probably give you for nearly free. That said, the instax wide is a better value. unless you really want the brand and square photos.
I'm looking a the Polaroid Go 2, primarily because it's the smallest of the bunch. And on sale for $60.
I'd love an Instax wide or square, but the camera bodies are just too bulky (at least as big as my rangefinders or micro-4/3+prime). Same for vintage Polaroids, plus the need to use the older battery-included (and more expensive) film packs.
And I'm aware of the limitations inherent in the current Polaroid chemistry and small size. It's a toy and I'm ok with that.
> It's quite strange. It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use - but trying to pretend it isn't.
Reality is strange. Like how Apple owners somehow think they own a product that expresses individualism and artistic freedom where it really is a mass-produced product that looks the same as everybody else's, and more so than any other brand with less choice, while almost every aspect of customization is heavily controlled by the company ...
As someone with more-or-less the full Apple ecosystem in my home: I don't think it expresses any sort of individualism or artistic freedom. It just all works together really well without any nonsense.
I understand that was Apple's marketing a decade ago, but it doesn't really seem to be their pitch anymore.
Yep, don't give a shit about making a statement, just finally gave them a try and realized I'd been wasting my time with half-broken computers my whole life until then, rather than the 75% broken computers I could have been using.
If someone eventually makes a non-broken computer that's in no way cool, I'll switch to that.
[EDIT] Though nb a mostly-just-works ecosystem of devices and integrations is basically table stakes for a competitor now. Just a better computer is almost useless to me, it needs to take just a couple clicks or taps (if any at all) to have it integrated with the rest of my shit. That's where the time savings and utility comes in, and fiddling-with-electronic-crap becomes computers actually doing things useful for me in my life, making paying any money at all for the damn things worth it.
While I gladly embrace the shift to solid state, I find the mechanical engineering in old electronic devices, cameras in particular, quite fascinating.
Old stuff is harder to use and you have to put in more effort to get good results out of it, so the act of creation using old tech feels more meaningful
Hardly. People are talking about point and shoots here. On button, flash button, click, shoot. The phone paradigm is way more awkward. Some buttons become shutter but one still locks the phone. Have to tap the screen for autofocus. Have to futz with touch screen menus to adjust settings. On an iphone you straight up fight with the exposure setting that is both stuck in molasses and wants to reset and ignore your instructions. Oh and someone could blow up your phone with notifications in the middle of this. And having that camera on and screen on tanks your battery.
My wife and I were just watching a YouTube video about the history of the Mattel Intellivision gaming console. If you've never seen one, the thing had wooden panels. It was definitely inspired by an era where your appliances were meant to match your furniture. I remember, as a child of the 80s, seeing televisions that were cased in wood as well.
I would argue that these types of designs made an anti-consumerist statement which is why you don't see them anymore. An appliance that tries to look like furniture doesn't need to do that, it is a non-essential feature of the appliance that the manufacturer chooses to include. And it makes a statement: "I'm part of your home. Care for me. Display me. Treasure me. Enjoy me ... and don't throw me out because I'm not disposable plastic."
The dedicated camera vs smartphone topic doesn't necessarily align with the concept of appliances as furniture, but it does strike me as being the difference between a specialized tool and a multi-tool.
Everyone owns a smartphone. There's nothing special about that. And while taking a good photo arguably requires some degree of skill regardless of your tool, smartphones represent the average consumer; the lowest common denominator. Anyone can, and does, snap pictures with a smartphone.
A dedicated camera, on the other hand, represents a conscious decision to take photography more seriously. To want to focus only on that, free of other distractions. To climb whatever learning curve stands in the way.
Then, consider, that there are people who appreciate history and have no illusions about whether or not a particular historical time period was "better" or not. I follow a historic costumer on YouTube, from whom I learned how to sew by hand and how many historic clothing was constructed. Do I think that living in the Victorian era would be better on the whole? No. I value modern medicine and social advancements that have been made since that time. But do I love the Victorian aesthetic and value the knowledge of how to do things without modern machinery? You betcha. I feel like a more rounded person and, despite coming from a hobby, I have life skills that I didn't have before, like being able to fit, hem, repair and even produce some of my own clothing.
Trends and fashion changes, and the phenomenon of "older is better" is human nature that has always existed. It is easy to find artefacts of the past that are less common, or gone entirely, that you consider to be better than the trends of the present.
This doesn't mean things are worse on the whole now, nor does it mean that those artefacts aren't valid examples of things of value that are no longer produced. I guess it's part and parcel of change.
> Treasure me. Enjoy me ... and don't throw me out because I'm not disposable plastic.
Plastic looking finish is the one that was luxurious at the time. And wood was just a way to get a good-looking finish for cheap... Like shiny black plastic is today.
Like walkmans! Beyond the portability - which on modern hardware is better in every way - the qualities were all worse than comparables at the time. Why anyone would want to relive cassettes and batteries is beyond me.
I actually got a refurbished tape deck the other day, and the sound is quite good. A CD would sound a little better but they seem to actually become unreadable faster in storage than tapes? very counter intuitive.
I'd love a nice mp3 player set up, but it's sometimes harder to get those legally for music compared to a CD or even an old tape now! streaming has a lot of downsides in comparison and I think that's fueling the desire to own a full album in some form.
yeah, and you can go the other way and fit most of an mp3 library on one DVD or something with later CD players. (my car has one that can do this for instance).
but ofc at that point you can use a flash drive and it's way easier
Old stuff is better understood. Parts and information are often more available, and the failure modes etc are well known. New stuff is more in the "unknown unknowns" territory.
There's a reason brand new tech isn't favoured for safety-critical systems.
>The friction that they have in their use, means you have to be more intentional when you use them - you put in more effort and it feels more special.
This, I knew a guy 20ish years ago that was super into vinyl right as the rest of us were getting into MP3, and it was a whole experience of dusting off the records and cleaning them with a soft brush and waiting for the electronics to warm up and such. It's like the modern equivalent of those Asian tea ceremonies.
Not really. Different cameras, both old and new, draw differently. It's not a question of "good" or "bad". Sometimes I want a nice, sharp image, sometimes I want the scratchy, somewhat random image I get from a Holga.
You pick the tool that gives the artistic effect you WANT.
There is something real to it. It's not just nostalgia or a fad. Go and look at product manuals from the 70s through 90s. They're awesome and detailed with diagrams and even exposition discussing the general genre of product. For example, synth manuals would actually teach you about synthesis while also covering the synthesizer in question in great detail. Nowadays, you are lucky to get a little placard of quick tips.
The fact that manuals were produced with such care when it was really hard to do so is insight into how much thought was given to the entire product. It's not necessarily that the products are technically superior. It's that honest hard work was put into the products. You walked into a store and purchased it from a person. It couldn't be easier to produce product manuals these days with modern software, and yet it's never done. Today's consumer landscape is about disposability and scale. You have companies like Apple that intentionally remove features so that they can sell you them separately, like the dongle mess. Apple lied to their customers for the reasons they were removed and now sell them parts that costs sub-cents for dozens and hundreds of dollars.
There is something real about all of this that modern people yearn for. I remember having to buy technology as a kid. You talked to people, asked them questions, and they new things about the product. It wasn't about just pushing a virtual button.
It focus on nostalgia and repairing of old things (because they don't make them anymore, so you have to), rather than buying the latest Apple shit, so there is a distinction from modern disposable consumption patterns.
It's not bizarre at all, if you assume a consumerist or marginal+consumer sovereign economy then after years of phone releases making cuts to whatever buzzword some group cares about eventually anything they buy will be worth less than whatever they already own, after that all it takes is someone pointing them to a old device.
Are you just saying it's bizarre that we live in a consumerist economy? Or are you saying that you think we live in a capitalist economy with people brainwash by capitalists into a consumerist culture? Or are you just acting like a naive purist who thinks that art isn't economically motivated?
> "Old stuff is better" tendency which sees vintage tech as somehow more credible, ethical, characterful, expressive, and individual than modern tech
Well stuff produced at 1/10000th the number of units sold of, say, a modern iPhone or Android phone is obviously more "individual". I mean: I see a dude driving an AC Cobra vs one driving a mass produced chinese EV... They're both cars but that's about it. That'd be Hank Moody driving an old beaten up Porsche 911 Carrera in Californication. I mean: for one reason or another, Hank Moody is driving an old beaten up Porsche and not a Hyundai. And the series shows him as liking his car and liking to drive his car.
Where's the lack of use in someone daily driving an AC Cobra or an old Porsche? Where's the lack of use in someone using an old camera to take pictures?
> It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use
Someone takes his old camera, goes out at night, snaps a picture of the sunset, and goes back home. Where's the ownership of display?
I don't post picture or my cars online. I take one out at night and go for a drive on desert roads. Where's the ownership of display? On HN?
Sure, everything is still an object. But then everything is consumerism, unless you make your clothes yourself (funnily enough my mother-in-law knits clothes).
Regarding ethics: I think something can be said about older tech. For example an old "dumb" 1080p projector both gives that "movie theather" feeling (mine had a gigantic diagonal no TV could match) and it's neither listening to everything you say nor sending your data to the motherload nor constantly updating apps for seemingly no reason nor can it be bricked remotely. Nor can it be hacked.
I mean: there's at least something in vintage tech I think.
P.S: I'm currently in the process of buying a "vintage" HP Z series workstation that I'll use a small server but that's because I want shitload of cheap ECC and huge, big, cheap SAS drives... And it's going to get lots of love and use. I may blog about it if I want to display ownership though.
In a lot of cases, older stuff is actually better by many objective criteria.
I love old tools, both hand tools and power tools.
There are many criteria by which you could judge the older tools, made in the USA, Canada, or UK, and say they are objectively better than even the highest-end tools I could buy today at Home Depot.
Thicker metal, designs which are more repairable with swappable parts, they were obviously designed to be more durable. I have a roofing square I use on the job site which is over 100 years old, and it's better than one I could buy at the store. I use a chop saw which was made in Japan in the 80's and it is going to outlast any equivalent chop saw I could buy at the store today. You can tell immediately by just using the thing that it is more durable and higher quality.
Yes, older tools lack some modern improvements like lasers or safety stops, but when it comes to reliability and durability you can't buy a brand new tool with the same quality of old tools for any price.
I don't know if the same is actually true for digicams or whatever, but things like record players or typewriters have similar qualities to what I'm talking about with tools.
I've run into this with nostalgia-toys and board games. Modern "reprints" usually suck, even if they superficially look the same.
Loopin' Louie? The modern one's lighter and has a weaker motor, even if the original was never exactly greatest-games-of-all-time material, the modern one's just non-functional.
Rock 'em sock 'em robots? Weaker punches, plastic's lighter, new models are often smaller. They suck compared to vintage ones.
Hell even soda bottles are kinda like this. Those things used to be thick and you could re-use them for all kinds of stuff.
It seems like at some point around the late '90s and early '00s we got a ton better at precisely optimizing plastic use in mass manufacturing processes, and all plastic products got somewhere between a little, and a lot, worse, because manufacturers could make them just barely thick enough to not fall apart. Good for waste on the one hand, for disposable things, so that hits "reduce" at the expense of making "re-use" a lot worse. But also makes non-disposable things so shitty they become disposable (often because they suck so bad to begin with that you're gonna toss them out after one use)
I was very disappointed when I bought my kid a “vintage” Fischer Price record player. Turns out it’s made in 2023 by a company that licensed the look. [1]
Instead of winding a spring, the wind knob turns on an electric motor that takes batteries.
Instead of playing the music with an embedded set of metal tines in the play head, the disk just holds and RFID and the player loads the mp3 file of what the original 1980s toy sounded like.
> Today’s young adults grew up in a time when their childhoods were documented with smartphone cameras instead of dedicated digital or film cameras.
I get that this is a ridiculous nit-pick to kick off a comment, but how do they define "young adult?" Because I'm not sure that that statement is actually true just yet.
I have two Gen Z daughters, the youngest having been born in 2001. Smart phones didn't really start to land on the scene until 2008. It then took a few years until everyone had one and the cameras were good enough that people were getting rid of their digital cameras and switching to smart phones.
Granted, my daughters are several years older now than an 18 year-old, which I would consider to be the "youngest" possible "young adult."
Even then, an 18 year-old today was born in 2006. I suppose that part of their childhood was likely captured on smart phones rather than digital cameras. But being old enough that I remember the 00s like it was just yesterday, and having two "young adult" children whose childhoods' were almost entirely documented using digital cameras, even having packs of old printed photos that were printed at the same places you would get film developed ... I just can't help but question the statement that today's young adults had their childhoods documented on smartphones. Today's children and young teenagers, sure. But the modern smartphone, with camera, actually hasn't been with us for a full generation quite just yet... as much as it feels like it.
"Young Adult" is a weird term -- think of the book/movie genre called "young adult" or "YA" -- it isn't actually literally for people in their twenties but for children. It's like calling people like me in their 50s "middle aged" -- most of us aren't going to make it to 100.
I had considered the YA genre in fiction, which is marketed at teenagers. But I did a quick search for the general term "young adult" and Wikipedia seems to suggest that it is the period immediately following adolescence, which is generally considered to begin at 18.
Exactly. Kodak stopped selling film cameras in 2004.
Peak film sales was in 2001!
Film sales in 2006 was the same as in 1994 ...
After 2006, the decline was drastic¹.
But the long tail of childhood memories stored on film and cheap digicams stretches far into the smartphone era. Remember, not everyone had a smartphone or even a good way to transfer the images out of there. Also, smartphone cameras were really bad in the beginning.
Yeah, I wondered that, too. That line might be referring to the handful of people whose parents were tech enthusiasts who went to midnight launches of the first iPhones and were born at roughly the same time. A very small group.
> I get that this is a ridiculous nit-pick to kick off a comment, but how do they define "young adult?" Because I'm not sure that that statement is actually true just yet.
Additionally, before the explosion of digital camera sales in the early 00s, many childhood memories simply went unrecorded.
Growing up my family had a couple film cameras that rarely got used. They might come out for holidays and a handful of events but they spent a lot of time in the closet.
Even when they were used a roll of film only got two dozen photos that weren't cheap to develop. We'd get maybe one or two photos per roll that had decent focus and lighting.
There's a Cambrian explosion of photos I have from my first digital camera onwards. There's so many events and several people I'd love to have pictures of today that don't exist because no camera was handy at the time. Today I can capture pretty much anything I want to remember.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
– Brian Eno
Eno never misses does he?
Besides his solo album "The Drop" and perhaps his production of Coldplay, not really!
Except ADAT.
Nobody is nostalgic for ADAT.
Why not? Because it was little more than a shitty hard drive? Didn't have the noisy, analog charm of 4-track cassette recorders?
Random story: I went to the first ever digital imaging and technology film program to run in Canada, first cohort, 20+ years ago. There was one dude in our class that, in spite of the fact that our program didn't allow analog submissions, shot super16 all the time for his "personal projects and art", fine. So he kinda bothered me a bit, but did inspire me to, for the first, time grade my film to look like analog. I sucked all the contrast out, flattened it down and split toned it heavily. Submitted it to class and got the top grade for it. The guy was furious and went to the teacher to complain I shouldn't have submitted film, teacher came back to me to confirm I'd just graded it to look like film, and then told the dude my submission was accepted and my grade stood, but didn't tell him I shot it digital, so the guy goes and submits a 16mm short for his final because he thought I got away with it, ha.
After I graduated, I stuck to the all digital stuff and a couple of folks from my program and I went on to start a film company, and win 3 Emmy awards, over the years I was still in film I saw people bring various analog film things to set to try and see if they could somehow include it, be it some film type, some vintage light panel or whatever, but it was always just fad, there was a period of time everyone brought 35 to set just to "see if we could fit it in later" - it never got cut in, it was too difficult to match it to the digital.
It was always a fad bringing film to set, but those that did, I always admired they wanted to make that statement, no matter how foolish they seemed to many on set, I always appreciated the art they brought to the table.
I recently bought a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P5 with a broken back screen, honestly I've had so much fun with it, I went out with my wife this last weekend, left the phone at home and brought the Sony, had a blast looking at the frames when I got home, do recommend it.
Sorry for this random ass post, just this is my fav kinda HN content :D
20 years ago HBO made the tv show Rome. They filmed it on analog film. I’ve recently been watching it for the first time and it’s absolutely amazing how well it looks compared to shows shot on digital from the same time. It looks good even compared to modern cinema and because it’s film they could do 4k captures.
For a recent movie, Strange Darling was filmed in analog. Great movie and looks unparalleled.
Dune was filmed on digital, transferred to analog, and the scanned back to digital for distribution.
I guess my point is, that there is some magic in analog. Whether the inherent limitations of the form, or by introduced randomness of the chemical process, or by placebo assumption of “realness”.
We live in an age of Netflix enforcing all shows to look exactly the same and even adding de-aging filters to actors. The gulf between the perceived reality of analog film and digital has never been larger. So yeah, analog excites me.
Random idea about “the look”. Doing an analog transfer might kill the gradation banding that digital images suffer from, especially those that have gone through lossy or low bit depth edits to brightness values in large flat color areas like sky. Analog transfer may add dithering to the bands to make them look more natural.
I think about this Brain Eno quote often. It’s always surprising when old worse formats resurface, yet it happens everytime.
> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
This is a big thing for early synthesizers. Many of them tried quite hard to accurate emulate real instruments - pianos, horns, strings - but inevitably failed due to limitations of their time. But many of them became classics in their own rights, to the point that later synths emulated them. And now, of course, you can get software versions of the same synths which do an incredible job of reproducing every last detail of a hardware instrument that did a bad job of emulating an analog one!
An account called Natspone plays with this idea in shortform vertical videos, I find it incredibly bizarre and unsettling. I should forewarn - you're probably not going to enjoy the style at all.
https://www.instagram.com/p/C3HtsLXOgui/?hl=en
This is brilliant
Lynch shit, for sure.
What did he mean by CD distortion?
I'm also not super clear on how digital video would have jitter in a way that analog video wouldn't?
I totally agree with his overall sentiment, I'm just a bit confused on the specific examples.
Good questions. CD distortion include hard clipping from amplifying too much, whereas vacuum tubes and magnetic tape have soft saturation (still a distortion, just a different kind). Another distortion is that dynamic range compression is used, bringing up the volume of quiet parts of a song.
As for digital video jitter, I can think of MPEG compression artifacts, both spatial (e.g. DCT mosquito noise) and temporal (e.g. motion compensation errors, periodic keyframe refreshes).
That is bad mastering, not an inherent property of CDs.
It's not, but it's very, very common, basically the rule in fact, starting I think in the early 2000s.
I read that, at least early on, many CDs were mastered with inadequate dithering, resulting in audible quantization noise.
In 30 years, people will be nostalgic for TikTok.
Some people might even be nostalgic for Bing. (People are nostalgic for Clippy after all.)
In other words.... you are not nostalgic for the thing itself. (The thing kind of sucks.) You are nostalgic for your childhood.
Absolutely. Like those terrible filters that are supposed to make video look like it was recorded on VHS. They always make the results far worse than VHS actually was in practice.
VHS didn't always look noisy and distorted, but it always looked blurry and had horrible color bleeding. I disliked it even though it was the "only" technology at the time and we didn't have it at home.
People are now corrupting mpeg video intentionally. They call it "datamoshing". And of course there is glitch art, and the "vhs look" filter being (over) used everywhere.
I hit up a 100gecs concert awhile ago and there were a non trivial amount of people snapping photos with a nintendo 3DS. These pics are stereoscopic 3d so they can only really be viewed on a 3ds unless you want to cross your eyes or have access to one of those vintage picture holder thingies. The sensor in them is also not very great but it is what it is.
The gecs as a music act is a weird cross between extremely scuffed and extremely glossy, so the 3DS is somehow the perfect way to capture it imo.
My kids started asking for vintage digicams about five years ago. At first I wrote it off as a fad. And it is definitely partially that.
But when my kids started taking pictures with these cameras, I realized that the pictures were, subjectively at least, better.
We were in the Rockies and the pictures taken on their iPhones are sharper, more vibrant, but those photos lack perspective. It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.
Something else happens with digital cameras. My kids think more intentionally about the framing of the shot. They move into better positions. They think about light and shadows. With the iPhone it’s click and forget. So that contributes to better photos too.
Even with the point and click models that my kids bring to social gatherings, there’s clearly a sense of posture and special-ness about the photos that changes the dynamic more than everyone posing for a phone selfie or photo.
There are obvious limitations. My kids didn’t fully understand why older cameras perform so poorly in darker light without the flash.
But otherwise they really love their digital cameras. My eldest is studying abroad in France and it’s a real treat to get a batch of digital camera shots of life in Paris.
I now buy digital cameras in bulk and repair them slowly as a hobby and then resell them on eBay. It gives me a little spending money. I avoid the TikTok trend cameras - they’re too expensive to buy - but I make some nice pocket money on selling the in between models that perform really well.
And my kids get to pick their favorite models now and then.
Assuming you're not talking about lens effects (which definitely has a huge effect), you might be reacting to the use of tone mapping in iPhone photos, which tends to make things look "flat". There's a slider called "Brilliance" in the iPhone photos app that you can play around with to get a sense of how this type of processing tends to flatten images. I'm not sure how or whether it's possible to disable this in the default camera app.
Every digital camera I've ever owned takes "better" pictures than my iPhone 15 Pro. The iPhone is fantastic for taking a few snaps to remember a trip or event, or recording an ephemeral "story", but when I am actually trying to take photos there's no comparison to my ~10 year old digital camera.
It's partly about sensor size and tech., partly down the the limitations of tiny smartphone lenses, and partly down to what's added (or should that be taken away) by the "computational photography" software in modern smartphones.
> It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.
Can you post a representative mountain photo from each camera? I'm very curious what generates this feeling for you.
It's probably along the same line as how vinyl records supposedly sound better.
I get that you're saying this as if to point out the hipster-ness of vinyl. I work in the music industry and have personally overseen the manufacturing of 100's of thousands of records, so I'm as much an expert as anyone on this topic.
Yes, vinyl is technically an inferior sound quality to FLACs. I'm happy to rant all day about the flaws of vinyl. I personally prefer high quality digital.
However on a good pressing there is an undeniable difference to a good vinyl pressing. It's not dissimilar from why I said that my kids frame the shots on digital cameras in ways that are different using an iphone. The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital. While there's a lot of shitty USB turntables, even those are often far better than how most people listen to music digitally which is often on iphones and shitty laptop speakers. The physicality of vinyl manufacturing incurs requisite different attention and processes that sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) results in a "better" listening experience.
Could you get the same "better" listening experience with lossless digital? Yes. but most don't. So vinyl is "better."
> The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital.
I call BS. I know people who work in music mastering, and I've asked about this. They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl.
They know people will buy vinyls if they want to no matter what if they want to, so it doesn't matter if the digital master isn't perfectly attuned to the vinyl medium
> I call BS. I know people who work in music mastering, and I've asked about this. They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl.
Nah, they don't. There is always a vinyl master. I have several here from records I have released. It may well be made from the digital master, but vinyl needs low and high end roll off and mono low end bass to stop the needle jumping out of the grooves.
I know that part. I was imprecise in the words I used. There is a different vinyl master of course, but its almost always based off the digital master that is than modified to not fuck up on vinyl medium. The vinyl master has more "attention" because the vinyl is more limited, it has nothing to do with being "better"
> The vinyl master has more "attention" because the vinyl is more limited.
This isn't really true from my perspective. There are a lot of factors as to why vinyl mastering gets more attention. It's harder to do right, so there's that. Artists will often pay far more attention to the vinyl master, so it's a crucial A&R issue. But there's an issue on digital master, we can easily (more or less) change the material on DSPs. It's not fun but it's possible. On vinyl, mistakes made on the mastering side may not even reveal themselves until past the test pressing stage and can be very costly.
> its almost always based off the digital master that is than modified to not fuck up on vinyl medium
This might be true at some levels of skillsets, I guess. But in my circles for at least the last ten years, the vinyl master is sourced from the original mix, not a digital master. In fact, on larger projects more independent labels and artists are hiring vinyl-specific engineers who can oversee what is a very physical process from mastering to lacquer cutting in one sitting. Having sat in an a number of sessions, there's a lot of attention to the ways in which the master is effecting the physical nature of the cut. This is actually how it used to be when vinyl was the imminent format, for reasons I've already stated (cost). In fact some vinyl plants had apartments for record label people to stay on site and oversee the vinyl mastering process.
I'm not a mastering engineer and I always send my pre-masters off and get a digital and vinyl master back. So, whether they prefer to create the vinyl master from the digital I wouldn't know for sure, but that would be my assumption, yes.
I would also agree that the vinyl master wouldn't have more attention outside of dealing with the limitations of the format. Most mastering engineers are working on pretty tight schedules, for not much money, so it wouldn't make sense for them to take longer on the vinyl master (outside of the known limitations). There isn't any aspect of vinyl which is (technically) better. So, it's not like they can improve on the digital master.
> They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl.
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. If the engineers you know do that, you don't know good engineers.
edit: I can't reply to tekla's comment, so I'm editing here. It's frustrating on Hacker News for an expert - like myself, who has sat in on dozens of mastering sessions - to be disputed by someone who "knows some people." I'll clarify further. Do some engineers use the same mixes for vinyl as they do for digital? Sure. They're not good engineers. Or the customer hasn't paid enough (it's usually about $60-$100 per song to master per format). Vinyl is a drastically different medium than digital - of course - and any decent engineer will 100% mix differently and accordingly. If there are artists reading this and your engineer is using the same mix, fire them. You're paying a lot to press to vinyl so do the followthrough and get vinyl-specific mastering.
Here's a good article from an engineer I have worked with many times on why mastering for vinyl is different:
https://www.oregonlive.com/music/2014/11/does_vinyl_really_s...
I'm a good engineer. I've done tons of mixes for records released both digitally and on vinyl or even tape. I never create different mixes for the formats - but I work with great mastering engineers and cutters who will create different masters for each format.
Thanks for commenting. I'm curious why you wouldn't master specifically to the format. There are so many nuances to vinyl with mistakes that can deeply impact sales when the job isn't done right.
For my own part, we had to recut the lacquers on a vinyl release five times to get it right, because the nature of the mix created a middling sound that bounced the needle around and caused intense surface sound. Once we solved that problem, the pressings sounded great.
Obviously with cassettes the profit margin isn't there to justify the additional expense of mastering, and to my ears cassette mastering rarely sounds different than the digital master (maybe some slightly different leveling). I believe NAC actually has a mastering guide to master to cassettes kicking around. But...not sure anyone follows it.
Just to be honest, I don't doubt you're a great engineer. But if you weren't mastering specific to format...I wouldn't hire you. Increasingly we've gone to vinyl-exclusive engineers on bigger projects, because it's so crucial to get the sound right at the start and poor vinyl mastering can cause problems months down the manufacturing line that are costly.
Are you confusing mixing and mastering, maybe? I just said that I don't MIX to different targets. I create the best mix I can, checking phase to mono every step of the way, then I deliver my mix to a mastering engineer who will create a master for digital as well as a master for vinyl. The vinyl master will sometimes be more agressively summed to mono in the bass if we're dealing with too much information in that registry. My point is you don't have to mix to different formats if your mix is good. Good mastering engineers and lacquer cutters will sort the rest for you! Maybe we just misunderstood eachother?
/shrug. He said/she said standoff is always fun, with a mix of insults.
People who are the type to buy vinyls will buy them no matter what, as long as its not obviously a bad press. Why would any sound engineer bother to do extra work for such a low volume, high chance of losing money, PITA to work with medium, unless they were some sort of super artist.
Vinyl is technically worse in that the low-end and high-end frequencies need to be rolled off to cut. It's also technically worse in that it can't do low-end stereo without the needle jumping out of the groove.
The reasons that people might prefer it (subjectively) are:
* The notion that it's 'warmer' - all this means is the high-end frequencies have been rolled off
* The subtle distortion effect you get from feedback through the needle. The needle, as well as picking up the groove, acts like a microphone for any sound nearby (i.e. the speakers playing the record). This then feeds back through the same loop, creating a subtle chorus effect (very subtle).
I've played in enough large nightclubs with massive sound-systems to know that my records sound completely different in them. The feedback is more extreme, so the chorus effect is more pronounced. This often turns into bigger low end at higher volumes. It can also be problematic if you have a record that's been cut too quietly. You need to turn the gain up on the mixer, picking up more of the club speakers, eventually creating audible feedback hum.
But, by having the same 'effect' on every record played, there then seems to be a consistency of sound from one record to the next. Creating something that's more 'glued' together.
It absolutely comes across. If you know what you're listening for then you understand, but most people just feel it. It's technically distortion, but humans like distortion. Anything too clean is boring to the human ear.
So, vinyl, is not technically better. But, it has some artefacts that are pleasing to the human ear. And, I suspect, that's what people pick up on subliminally (if they're not just trying to be boring hipsters).
If the general consensus is that vinyl sounds better, and the improvement is largely from rolling off highs and mono-ing lows - why don't the digital masters use the same technique? ie, why isn't there only a vinyl-ready master?
I'm not disagreeing - just interested. I actually roll off the highs via EQ for almost all my headphones and speakers.
> It's probably along the same line as how vinyl records supposedly sound better.
I'm not an audiophile, but that's actually probably objectively true, but for non-obvious reasons that are not clear if you're just looking at technical specs. Digital music can sound better, but opens up the technical possibility of prioritizing other things, which are in fact prioritized.
IIRC, it was the "loudness war." Digital audio capable of a much wider dynamic range than vinyl, but the record companies choose to throw most of that away in order to make the music sound "louder." Technical limitations of vinyl prevent those shenanigans (I believe the grooves would be too wide or something), which forces the music to be mastered in a better way than sounds better.
Vinyl is technically lower-performance than well-designed digital but albums that came out in the heyday of the LP sound better on that medium because they were generally mastered with more range. Vinyl has less practical dynamic range than 16-bit PCM but in that era they only had hardware limiters which meant that your mastering engineer couldn't just slap Ozone or L3 on the two-track and brickwall it to within an inch of its life via transient shaping and other DSP tricks. This is also why early CD releases of these albums often sound quieter (and better with a slight turn of the volume knob) than the remasters. Don't get me wrong... some older releases were mastered hot (presumably to stand out on a jukebox in a crowded bar) but even Motown's best attempts can't hold a candle to the nihilistic tidal wave of digital crunch that is possible with modern pop and rock mastering.
For this reason buying modern albums on vinyl doesn't make much sense to me besides for collectibility and sentimentality. I have a few hundred LPs sitting in my closet behind me but it's for those reasons, not because I have any delusions about a non-existent inherent sonic advantage of the medium.
Here are two examples:
https://postimg.cc/gallery/g8kzGHB
https://postimg.cc/gallery/ChSgbdd
Thanks! Which is which?
Are you saying you prefer the bottom ones?
In the mountain photos, IMG_1187 and IMAGE 2024-12-03 08:31:09 are the iphone photos. I think they're fine. But the alternate images (which are by a Canon PowerShot S50) convey better the lighting of how the scene actually looked IRL.
The Canon shots are also more zoomed in, shot with a longer focal length on the lens. The obvious effect of focal length is zoom, but it’s the change in foreground-background distortion that makes the photos look weird or good. Flat, wide lenses like the one used for the iPhone photo exaggerate the foreground and shrink the background. As you lengthen the lens you shrink the distortion and pretty soon you hit a point where it matches the distortion of your eyes’ lenses. That’s when photos look most natural.
The iPhone photo of the mountain has a really nicely balanced dynamic range. The Canon one has blown out highlights where the clouds meet the peaks, and really dark shadows with almost no discernible detail. From a purely technical point of view, the iPhone picture is a "better" photo, but this serves as a perfect example of how "technically better" and "artistically better" are not the same thing.
Ultimately, photography is less about the quality of the equipment, and more about what you do with it (cliché, I know), and phone cameras are pretty high quality but clip your wings by taking all control away from you.
Your kids might benefit from an entry-level Sony a6000 or a6100 (the a6000 is ancient but shockingly capable) or equivalent, and some practice with raw processing software (Lightroom Classic is the default choice here, but Darktable is great if you don't want to give Adobe your money. Apple Photos is a pretty damn decent beginner option too).
>Your kids might benefit from an entry-level Sony a6000 or a6100 (the a6000 is ancient but shockingly capable)
That's what I hate about cameras, the 'ancient' model is still $450 used and ~$850 new.
Wow, I thought it was really obvious which was which, which I found surprising (and I guessed before I read this comment). The thing that gives it away is that the post processing means there's a uniform amount of illumination throughout the picture, which rally makes it look like an iPhone picture.
I'm never going to be bale to unsee this.
The poster said they "convey better the lighting of how the scene actually looked IRL."
I dunno... I've never seen anything like the photo of the mountain (IMG_6491) in real life. The reality is that our eyes have an extremely wide range of contrast. But in that photo, the clouds are blown out and all the immediate scenery is essentially black. In real life, clouds don't get blown out, and you can see everything around you just fine in every situation where there's a big blue sky above you. The iPhone photo is a much more accurate approximation of what our eyes perceive.
And the poster claims the mountains feel like more massive objects on the older camera. I'll respectfully disagree -- on the older camera, I can't judge their size because I can't see any of the landscape leading up to them for comparison. Whereas on the iPhone, I intuitively feel how massive they as my eye is drawn up the road, up the valley, up into the sky. I have full context for comparison.
Of course, there's no arguing with taste. :)
But maybe I can never unsee this either -- I appreciate the iPhone even more now...
You should teach them to also move into better positions and think about light and shadows when they take phone pictures.
A big difference between smartphones and cameras is the focal lengths. On an iphone, a 48mm focal length is considered tele, and the main cam is 24mm. That will surely take away the perspective from the Rocky mountains, if not your nose.
Perspective depends on distance to subject only. Focal length decides framing.
They get confused, because one tends to / has to adjust one's position to obtain the framing one wants given one's focal length choices...
the pictures were, subjectively at least, better.
I'm in love with this phrasing.
> It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.
Might be due to a combination of sensor size, focal length on the older camera, and the distance to the subject.
It's partly the ccd sensor, it's unfortunate we moved on past these as no modern digital camera can quite match the best of those color-wise imo
CCD or CMOS sensors count photons. They presumably have some natural frequency response curve, but the actual colour discrimination comes from the filters (usually some flavours of RGB, but has been other choices too).
It's those filters, and the colour reconstruction algorithms that change colour response, not the underlying sensor.
The article is about the aesthetics of old cameras but doesn't include a single image.
Welcome to modern "journalism" on the web. The medium (HTML) easily allows including as many high-quality images as you want in an article, but the writers are too damn lazy to bother including any.
It's similar to this whole discussion about CD vs. vinyl in one of the threads here: CD is technically a far superior medium, but the mastering engineers are too damn lazy to use it properly, and instead compress everything to hell ("brickwalling") and eliminate all dynamic range, whereas the vinyl mastering engineers apparently put a lot more effort into their work, so vinyl ends up sounding better.
Every now and then I come across a picture on wikipedia that hits me, colour/texture wise, in a "they don't make 'em like that anymore" way. Usually they're old film pics (e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F-14A_VF-114_over_bu...) but a while ago it was this one, from a 2005 digital compact https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fittja_2007a.jpg
Certainly they can have a pretty special and endearing look.
The film secret sauce is usually varying temperature/hue in different regions/brightnesses of the image. The 2005 digital example exhibits this via red/magenta being excessive in the shadows, but falling off in brighter areas
Was "digicams" a word people regularly said in the 2000s and I just somehow didn't notice? I only remember these being called cameras or, when necessary, digital cameras.
People love fancy names when getting scammed ;)
Back when I was shooting on film, various "Toy Cameras" came in and out of vogue. I enjoyed the subtleties of the Lomos and Dianas, so when digital cameras became mainstream, I kept a lookout for similarly quirky DCs. My favorite was the JamCam (640x480) which was fun for awhile. But soon realized, the same quirkiness could easily be achieved with digital filters applied to photos from cameras that were more enjoyable to work with. That's about when my interest in toy digital cameras died. But I have to admit, do miss the 9v consumer battery of the JamCam :P
It seems Lomography is back. Again.
Back in the 90s some artists discovered the LOMO LC-A (Lomo Kompakt Automat), a soviet era cheap film camera which they used for self-expression. The distortions of the cheap camera were the preferred feature. And for a time a lomography movement started, with a focus on spontan snapshots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_camera#Lomography
https://aboutphotography.blog/blog/history-of-lomography
The echoes of Lomography then found themselves in the very early German/Austrian blogosphere – Lomographic snapshots, then with digicams, were often seen in blogs of the early 2000s. There were even group weblogs, some of which are even going 20 years on:
https://lomo.blogger.de
https://mks.antville.org
In my opinion the very early artistic filters with whom Instagram started – long before Kardashian culture - must have been influenced by cheap film or digital cameras and tried to replicate those effects with smartphone cameras:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#/media/File:Instagra...
Not sure if this counts but my original Canon 5D is still my favorite camera. It came out in 2005 which is almost 20 years ago. I've tried many other cameras but always come back to my 5D. I don't think it's nostalgia though, it just works really well, I love using it and I love the results.
I still take photos on a 5D Mark II because I don’t see a big reason to upgrade. The photos look great and I’m familiar with the layout. I know there are plenty of improvements to be had in newer and better models, but I’ve managed to work around its flaws and still take good photos. It being old helps me feel comfortable taking riskier shots, too.
Ha!
I asked my wife to buy me a new Polaroid for Christmas. And bought two 35mm film cameras in the last year.
I got "tired" of the perfect reproduction offered by my digital cameras. Along with the less-perfect reproduction, the delayed gratification and higher cost/shot has brought some pleasure back to taking photos. Even the shots that look straight out of a late-80s family photo album bring me more joy than pixel-perfect shots.
FWIW, I'm 48, so grew up using mostly 35mm disposables or cheap P&S. By the time I was post-college, it was early digital P&Ss and an early Canon Rebel.
I have a pile of Nikon CoolPix 950 (1999) mostly cheap from eBay, along with tele, wide, 183° fisheye lenses, and IR filters. It started with a pro photo friend who had upgraded and I went for the complete set.
1600x1200 pixels is plenty! The CMYG CCD matrix gives incredible fidelity of green. With the IR bandpass filters, I get saturated two-tone IR: Leaves reflect IR that passes the C+G filters and water transmits IR that passes the M+Y filters, so I get foliage in ice cyan and water in wine red colour.
It can see your eyes through your sunglasses, but not through your cornea.
It's a joyful thing from end to end!
They are a fad because in most cases their entire purpose is nostalgia, i.e. pointing at the screen and saying "OMG it's just like the 1990s!!!". In the recent Batman movie, soviet lenses from the 1950s were used. Did anyone feel a "soviet" look? A "1950s" look? No, they were chosen because they look unique
I still have a couple digicams, between the fact that they don't ping cell towers, and let me manually and quickly adjust exposures between shots, they still have a lot of value for me.
Makes sense.
Phone cameras are great at what they do, but are absolutely neutered in terms of the degree of control they afford you. If you want to make an artistic statement in photography, your hands are tied. A standalone digital camera that gives you even basic exposure controls is miles ahead even if technically inferior (older crappier sensor, worse autofocus, etc).
Jumping from there straight to vintage equipment amounts to dumping the baby with the bathwater, but modern digital cameras can be quite pricey (starting at around the cost of a mobile phone), so vintage stuff can make sense as the budget option for dedicated hardware.
You can get a lot of good deals on basic/entry-level DSLR cameras such as the Nikon D3500 on ebay and such.
A friend brought out a "Camp Snap"[0] camera at an event the other day, and the thing everybody enjoyed about it was that it didn't immediately bring the whole internet into our event. It doesn't even have a screen.
I would pay good money for a digital camera that could take photos as well as the average flagship phone and fit as easily in a pocket (and I'm a woman, so I'm including sometimes pathetic little pockets), but they could only be tweaked and edited later, on a computer or companion device.
I think that desire for spaces occupied only by the people in them, not the whole rest of the world and its opinions, explains even more of this trend than the aesthetic of the photos.
[0] https://www.campsnapphoto.com/collections/camp-snap-screen-f...
What you are looking for is a Ricoh GR III or IIIx [0] (same camera, different fixed lens focal length). It's super pocketable, and you can turn the screen off completely, although it doesn't have a viewfinder, so with the screen off you can't really know what you are framing - it could be fun to try and guess after getting the hang of it. Image quality would be much better even than the latest flagship phones. Finally, you can browse the images on the camera afterwards and wirelessly transmit the ones you want to edit/post to your phone/tablet/computer. You can also have presets for color filters and highlight/shadow tones, so you don't really need to edit in post if you prefer. It's truly a great little camera, and the price is not that bad (usually around $1000, but can be found for less, or you could go with the previous model, GR II).
[0] https://www.ricoh-imaging.co.jp/english/products/gr-3/
There's not a chance in the world that thing fits in women's pants pockets!
What I'm looking for has the form factor of a phone (potentially even much smaller) and a camera like a phone, but all it does is take pictures. I'm fine with seeing the pictures on a screen, just not editing them.
If the image quality is good enough for you - you could try out an iPod touch.
I recently had burst of vintage digicam nostalgia.
For her birthday, my daughter received a toy digital camera that instanly printed photos on thermal receipt paper. It's great fun, and the print quality has lovely B&W dithering.
Her gift reminded me of my Gameboy Camera and printer. The printer worked by printing on thermal stickers. I bought several Gameboy Cameras back when they could be found in discount bins for 10 USD.
I bought a Gameboy printer off ebay and it came with several rolls of tape. Still have it all in my basement.
> For her birthday, my daughter received a toy digital camera that instanly printed photos on thermal receipt paper.
I got one of those recently. Immensely gratifying to have the photo printed immediately (even if all the tourists in London look at you funny.) Wish the camera was a little better but then again it's probably not worth it given you're printing relatively lo-res B&W dithered output...
This article existing strikes me as a sign its at least in some context a fad. If someone uses a tool, in this case vintage digicams i guess, to make a piece of art and the use of the tool comes through as part of the statement it was in that context an artistic statement. If they're using it to make nothing and just bought it because they saw someone else using it and found it novel, seems like they got caught in the fad.
Stomping your feet and telling me why it's not a fad is very fad behavior.
And the entire article includes 1 .jpg image along with 4 duplicate advertisements, yet not one image showing the difference, retro vs new?
I saw a few of these posts and dug up my 5MP Sony digicam from ~2006. The LCD had a few artifacts, but it still worked. Unfortunately, the memory card was in bad shape, and it took a really long time to boot, making it useless as a "point-and-shoot". Without the card, it had enough onboard storage for 15-20 pics.
Took a few pics, couldn't see myself using it regularly with the terrible quality and the horrible sync story, so it was a pretty short experiment.
Tangentially related, I've been doing video art, both analog and digital, and there is a quality in analog video that cannot be replicated by digital processing (at least not yet). In addition, every camera and device has it's own "look", like a personality. In the end it is more about the artistic result that one wants to achieve rather than pure technical specs.
This is a great resource I check every day:
https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageDigitalCameras/
The title isn't mutually exclusive at all. I'd wager the vast majority of artistic movements are fads, let alone statements. That doesn't mean it says anything deep about reality
Ask anybody why they are doing it any you won't get an answer any deeper than "I like the way it looks", "It's nostalgic", "I saw other people doing it", or even "It's trendy" and it doesn't take much digging to see that.
Digicams are a fad and a shallow artistic statement. That's not to say you can't make great art with a digicam nor that switching to one won't make you a more mindful artist. Switching from a modern graphical shell to a bourne-like shell will make a non-programming computer user (if there is such a thing) a more careful programmer, but in doing so you are cutting out an entire space of tasks that you could be doing.
I saw a Youtube video recently that looked like it was filmed using a late 90's webcam. The presenter looked too young to have owned it from new so I assumed it was a lo-fi aesthetic choice but having suffered those cameras at the time the appeal of them eludes me.
Photography is among the lower forms (if not the lowest) of artistic expression on account of how it captures the "exactitude" of a subject's matter. It's no surprise to me that people are shunning high quality images and embracing the imperfections of older devices to capture a semblance of the quirks and personalities that make humans who they are and consequently what makes "Art" art.
May be fun, but expect 20th Century-era battery life :)
I really like my old 2010 pictures on my Canon PowerShot, I wish I had shot in RAW mode. I even miss my iPhone X, the AI upscaling has gotten out of hand.
I honestly like my photos more from my iPhone 3 than my current iPhone SE. The photos were blurry, noisy, and crunchy while my current photos are just flat and without character. It's not nostalgia for me, it's the photos looking too good and a bit plastic.
Algorithms are to Gen-Z like GMO is to Millennials.
I reject the title as a false dichotomy. Fads are artistic statements.
Michael Mann achieved remarkable results on Collateral and Miami Vice with the Sony CineAlta HDW-F900.
That's a three-sensor camera which is quite special IMO.
So fad and "artistic statement" may be quite closely related. Quite possibly every popular artistic statement is a fad. The opposite is clearly not true (some fads are silly plastic toys).
Umm...I've got an old HP 1.3? MPix digital camera that I hang on to because, yeah, I like how it paints. The sensor acts as if it has a slow focal plane shutter and that combines really nicely with some specifics of how I take pictures to give some really amazing effects.
Original iPhones shot in a very similar way, but over the years, newer versions have lost those 'faults' I like as the sensor got faster and 'better'.
Yeah I don't buy it. Juicy Couture tracksuits are also trending right now, but I haven't seen any thinkpieces about how they're not a fad, but really a bold artistic statement about modernity and AI...
Nice! I've got a whole basement full of computer stuff from the late 1970s until a few years ago, probably time to put some of that stuff up on eBay!
I had a Nikon Coolpix 950 in 2000 or 2001. I loved it.
https://camerapedia.fandom.com/wiki/Nikon_Coolpix_950
I love stories like this because they tell me what to call the old things I’m trying to get rid of.
Am I selling an outdated Sony Cybershot 6MP? Nope, it’s a “vintage CCD digicam.”
One of the few times I agree with the ArsTech Comments section.
If you have to write a article about how a thing is not a fad, its almost definitely a fad.
There's a bizarre "Old stuff is better" tendency which sees vintage tech as somehow more credible, ethical, characterful, expressive, and individual than modern tech.
It's quite strange. It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use - but trying to pretend it isn't.
I agree with all that.
But smartphone cameras are not progress on all fronts. They are small and seem to be optimized to take pictures that look impressive.
I sometimes have a slideshow with family pictures running on a large monitor. Sometimes I stop and look at a picture that somehow just look much nicer that the rest when you spend some time looking at it. If I then check the metadata, it almost always turns out to be one of few pictures I took with my old DSLR camera or a newer compact camera.
Of course those cameras are much bigger and has bigger lenses and should be able to make better pictures. But the best camera is the one you brought with you. Which is why so few of the pictures are made with a smartphone.
But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular.
Smartphone cameras will never compete with full size optics.
They can only simulate the physical properties of optics. Eventually we’ll get to the point where they’re far from “photos” and more AI generations that look like photos.
Comparing the output of the camera app to the RAW you can also get it to produce, you can already see an absurd amount of reconstructing taking place.
The newest iPhone and Pixels have much larger sensors than older phones. That is the reason for the hump on the back. The sensors are bigger, and better, than digital compacts. They are half the size of the 1” fancy compacts and with newer sensors might be better.
The only difference with compact cameras is not having zoom lenses. But the telephoto and wide cameras on some models help make up for it.
There is a big jump to interchangeable lens cameras. But those aren’t what is popular as vintage.
>But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular.
It seems like if you have the latest top tier phone: iphone, pixel, samsung s, etc., you get decent photos, if you have any of the 2nd tier phones, they all continue to suck no matter how many mp they claim to have or whatever optics they claim to have.
I think low light performance is still worse than I thought it would be with an iPhone 16 Pro. With enough light the cameras are great.
My girl has an S24U and outside it is badass. Indoors, low light, it's really weak. We just bought a 13 year old Canon EOS (Rebel) and it takes much better photos inside. You can get some amazing bargains on old DSLRs.
Probably because everybody is convinced they can beat entropy with math
With enough light all cameras look great
* until you zoom in or look at it on a screen larger than you'd hold in your hand.
Seriously, even on a modern Pixel (mine) and iPhone (gf's), I'm often disappointed in the level of detail you find once you want to crop an image or zoom in on something distant/small.
The software has come a long way and does incredible things within the limitations of such tiny lenses and sensors. But I've got much lower resolution images from point and shoot cameras in the mid/late 2000's that show more detail and none of the weird software sharpening artifacts of a 20-40+ megapixel phone pic.
I was at an event recently, with a bunch of teenagers (one of which was mine) and I passed around a couple of those Fuji Instax cameras.
They loved them. They liked writing notes on the border. The photos aren't nearly as good as even the most basic smartphone camera, but there was something genuine about them.
For all the advances we've made in technology over the years, people are still thoroughly analog. And while digicams are not analog in any way, there is something about them that scratches that itch. Maybe it's as simple as hitting an actual button to make it go.
For all the amazing high-tech in today's smartphones, you still feel like a monkey at the monolith as you paw at it.
I've got to admit, digging through a shoebox of fifty blurry lightly-water-damaged family or childhood photos is kinda better than finding a directory of 10,000 perfect digital photos of the same stuff.
One's pure joy, the other's a damn to-do item.
those little printers were a big hit a few years ago for this use case; haven't seen or heard much of them since.
We had one of those out at my girlfriend's kid's graduation party for anyone to use. It was a lot of fun.
It's not "old stuff is better" as much as "I'm better than you."
For a long time, that was by having sharper, higher-quality pictures. Your friend had some Kodak Instamatic and you had a Hasselblad and you could assert your dominance over them.
But nowadays, the phones in everyone's pocket take such outstandingly sharp pictures that there isn't really meaningful room for improvement. So, people now differentiate themselves by getting vintage digital cameras which are hard to find, cost extra money, break frequently, etc., so that they can demonstrate their uniqueness.
Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling
When I first had got my nexus 4, my first upgrade over another Android phone that I can't remember, I was astonished by the improved fidelity of the pictures.
Then after I got my next phone I looked back and saw that the pictures had terrible artifacts that weren't hard to find. Now I'm on a Pixel N after having a handful of earlier Pixels and I can see the shortcomings of the photos it takes (and all its predecessors have taken) without much difficulty. Just zoom into the picture a little.
There's something to be said for analog.
It’s a good old status game just with different metrics.
A: Which iPhone do you have? Mine is an iPhone 13.
B: I have got the 2019 iPhone 11.
A: Wow. Respect! You’re better than me.
Of course. People are never genuine in their interest or preference of things. It's always about status, wealth, and their standing among their peers. /s
God y'all need to have some hobbies.
It’s not about being ‘better’. Older tech is just more fun! There are more moving parts, more differences between models, more to enjoy repairing, maintaining, hacking, comprehending! Modern tech is now so mature that it’s obfuscated to the point of being magic.
I don’t think it has much to do with ‘ethics’ at all — at least not for me.
It is also reasonable for one human being to fully understand a piece of the "older tech". Modern stuff is often just a black box, even to the people designing parts of it because they only work on a single part.
Sometimes missing features are a feature. For example, older stuff comes without surveillance capitalism built in.
Cameras imbue a grain onto what they shoot, both in the physical sense of grain in analogue cameras and the digital grain of the iPhone camera (The technical high quality but AI smearyness and color grade of modern iPhones is it's own grain) and that iPhone grain is now the aesthetic of almost all social media content so anything filmed in it has the same feeling as every janky social media video shot with it.
If you're creating art and easy route to differentiate and not feel like everything else in the timeline is to use an entirely different "grain" and you'll stand out from the mass.
It's not as simple as "old stuff better" it's more "other stuff feels different".
I try not to be this guy, but actually your terminology is a little off.
Film cameras have grain. Literally, there are tiny physical grains of photo-sensitive material on the film. Those grains, which are distributed semi-randomly in a film across the medium determine the limit of film's resolution and give it part of its organic, non-digital feel.
Digital cameras have noise. That's the term for randomness injected in a signal from the effect of physics: Brownian motion, heat, quantum effects on photons, etc. Noise means that while each pixel on the sensor is in principle quantizing a measurement of the real world, that measurement has some random error that can never be fully eliminated.
A digital image recorded from a digital sensor has no grain. There was no film, and no grains of photosensitive media involved. (It might have simulated grain from some "film effect" look applied to the image.)
The distinction matters because they look different. It's one of the key reasons film looks like film and digital looks digital.
Going against the grain, you say?
On the other hand it helps preserve history so I'm not sure I care the intentions are not pure. I know I got on this bandwagon with a simple analog camera over ten years ago and now I'm drowning in 1800s and 1900s electrical engineering books and newspapers.
I don't know take valve amps for example, the subjective qualities the clearly imperfect technology produces can be quite pleasant. Yes you could just as well simulate such an amplifier in software because there's no 'magic' to why it sounds that way, but there's something aesthetically pleasing about warm glowing glass.
I'm no photographer but I feel there's something similar going on here.
UAD and WAVES, amongst several other companies, operate their business on the premise that there is some 'magic' as to why it sounds that way that is somewhere between difficult and impossible to manage (sufficient to enthuse a musician/producer).
As an owner of a UAD Octo and plenty of their plugins, but also lots of analogue hardware [1], including valve based compressors, EQs, and distortion units that are emulated by UAD. The plugins still aren’t there.
Especially for anything that needs harmonic distortion. I get the impression they use regular random number generators for some of the random variance, rather than trying to emulate the physicality of a valve. They just don’t quite have the mojo. For some things it doesn’t matter, but often music production is about a 1% improvement here, a 1% improvement there, which sums up to a lot. It’s still easier to get those wins with hardware. Like ‘mojo’ is the default setting.
A really good example is the Chandler Curve Bender [2]. I have the real hardware. A new one will cost you £6,700 - so it would be insane to buy one when UAD have a plugin version for £179. I have the plugin too. The plugin is my favourite digital EQ. It sounds great. But the hardware does things that the plugin just doesn't touch. The hardware is all discrete circuits (with massive transistors). I think the slight latency shift between the left and right channels gives a 3D-ness to the sound that the plugin doesn't even attempt. Anyway, this demo [3] really shows what it can do and why hardware is still in the game.
In many areas plugins are good enough, I tend to use the plugins for more precision and to have similar curves to the hardware, but there’s still a ways to go to until there’s parity with the hardware.
That doesn’t mean you need the hardware, plenty of successful artists use digital alone. Just it’s still easier to get ‘the good stuff’ with hardware.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9swzlgk3wszeq6jfjxmw1/IMG_141...
[2] https://www.thomann.co.uk/chandler_limited_emi_tg12345_curve...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUv9GtMlUwA
I mean, audiophiles will gaslight themselves into believing and hearing what they want to hear. There are some areas where ok, maybe there is some difference to the sound, unlikely as it is, but once you start getting into "audio optimized SSDs" and "audio optimized ethernet switches" then it's all a 100% scam(and yet audiophile forums are full of people swearing that they can hear a difference in their audio tracks saved to an SSD that had a few extra capacitors added). So I'm not surprised that there are companies making money off that belief into what is effectively magic.
> audiophiles
Audiophiles are ridiculous, frankly. I'm on the ATC group on Facebook. ATC make pro speakers used in many top studios, but they also make home 'audiophile' speakers. The speakers are amazing, but I often see them talking utter nonsense about how X sounds great or whatever, when they have pictures of their setup in an untreated room. Like they could even tell if the speakers are good in a room like that. They're hearing the room.
Audiophiles are like astrologers, it's all in the wind with them. But they shouldn't be confused with people into pro-audio for music or film production. The name of the game is to get the best sounding room you can, so that it's easier to make your art, there is a motivation to get it right and not be hoodwinked by the things you state.
Not that pro-studio people don't have their blind-spots too (especially around things like cabling), but they're not the same.
Old stuff feels better because people are familiar with it. People grew up with them and if anything their expectations are set by those very things.
I suspect their failure mode, limitation and purpose are more characterized and less surprising ? Single purpose tech vs magical black mirror that does everything.
It’s super weird to find out that my old camera sitting in a drawer, the cheap one everybody had, is now an object of desire for people who weren’t even born yet when it was manufactured. However silly I think the motivations are though, I’ll get behind any trend that extends the useful life of our electronics.
Especially since so many of the cheap cameras made right before the smartphone era were essentially manufactured e-waste that barely worked. Same with things like portable tape and cd players, the Sony ones were good, but any of the other brands were just the same trash electronics repackaged in slightly different packages for each brand.
Millennials went through the same thing with 70s Polaroids.
What is bizarre? Ethical, characterful and expressive they certainly can be, right? I also haven't seen anyone pretending it's not consumerism. People are just trying to have some fun.
Before 2008 or so a 35mm SLR has higher quality photos for the price if you weren’t taking that many photos and you could still process film all over, with good quality scans if you had the right place. When DSLRs hit 10+ MP and dropped to $700 or so that changed things a bit.
My X100 still has better photos than my iPhone 12. I have an iPhone 16 Pro and I think it’s better as a camera than the X100 but I still prefer the X100 when I want a shot and I will put the time into it. That is 13 years old. I also have a canon S95 and it was still more useful for photos than my iPhone 12 was.
My girl just got a 13 year old Canon DSLR and for indoors, low light, it's better than her Galaxy S24U.
That's probably some of it, but I recently took up film photography again.
A few aspects of shooting film appeal to me... the imperfection (memories aren't perfect, the photos shouldn't be either - but I'm also a huge Impressionism fan, so maybe that's it). The delayed gratification - in a world where most things are "instant", waiting a few weeks+ to get results changes the way I mentally process the images and associated memories. And the higher cost per shot forces me to be a bit more planful about shots.
Of course, that said, I get the photos scanned (not prints), and view them in the same apps as pure digitals. So maybe I'm just weird or a hipster.
I did ask for a Polaroid for Christmas - full analog baby! The Go model is dirt cheap (for a camera), maybe it'll be great, maybe I'll use it a few times and stick it in a drawer.
just go find a used Polaroid and shove some film in it. no need to spend money on a camera someone will probably give you for nearly free. That said, the instax wide is a better value. unless you really want the brand and square photos.
I'm looking a the Polaroid Go 2, primarily because it's the smallest of the bunch. And on sale for $60.
I'd love an Instax wide or square, but the camera bodies are just too bulky (at least as big as my rangefinders or micro-4/3+prime). Same for vintage Polaroids, plus the need to use the older battery-included (and more expensive) film packs.
And I'm aware of the limitations inherent in the current Polaroid chemistry and small size. It's a toy and I'm ok with that.
> It's quite strange. It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use - but trying to pretend it isn't.
Reality is strange. Like how Apple owners somehow think they own a product that expresses individualism and artistic freedom where it really is a mass-produced product that looks the same as everybody else's, and more so than any other brand with less choice, while almost every aspect of customization is heavily controlled by the company ...
As someone with more-or-less the full Apple ecosystem in my home: I don't think it expresses any sort of individualism or artistic freedom. It just all works together really well without any nonsense.
I understand that was Apple's marketing a decade ago, but it doesn't really seem to be their pitch anymore.
This thread makes me miss see through coloured plastic on electronics.
Hard to feel artistic and like an individual when everything is a piece of black plastic, metal and glass.
Yep, don't give a shit about making a statement, just finally gave them a try and realized I'd been wasting my time with half-broken computers my whole life until then, rather than the 75% broken computers I could have been using.
If someone eventually makes a non-broken computer that's in no way cool, I'll switch to that.
[EDIT] Though nb a mostly-just-works ecosystem of devices and integrations is basically table stakes for a competitor now. Just a better computer is almost useless to me, it needs to take just a couple clicks or taps (if any at all) to have it integrated with the rest of my shit. That's where the time savings and utility comes in, and fiddling-with-electronic-crap becomes computers actually doing things useful for me in my life, making paying any money at all for the damn things worth it.
"What's a computer" was less than 10 years ago.
While I gladly embrace the shift to solid state, I find the mechanical engineering in old electronic devices, cameras in particular, quite fascinating.
Old stuff is harder to use and you have to put in more effort to get good results out of it, so the act of creation using old tech feels more meaningful
Hardly. People are talking about point and shoots here. On button, flash button, click, shoot. The phone paradigm is way more awkward. Some buttons become shutter but one still locks the phone. Have to tap the screen for autofocus. Have to futz with touch screen menus to adjust settings. On an iphone you straight up fight with the exposure setting that is both stuck in molasses and wants to reset and ignore your instructions. Oh and someone could blow up your phone with notifications in the middle of this. And having that camera on and screen on tanks your battery.
Plenty of reasons why the new ways are worse.
My wife and I were just watching a YouTube video about the history of the Mattel Intellivision gaming console. If you've never seen one, the thing had wooden panels. It was definitely inspired by an era where your appliances were meant to match your furniture. I remember, as a child of the 80s, seeing televisions that were cased in wood as well.
I would argue that these types of designs made an anti-consumerist statement which is why you don't see them anymore. An appliance that tries to look like furniture doesn't need to do that, it is a non-essential feature of the appliance that the manufacturer chooses to include. And it makes a statement: "I'm part of your home. Care for me. Display me. Treasure me. Enjoy me ... and don't throw me out because I'm not disposable plastic."
The dedicated camera vs smartphone topic doesn't necessarily align with the concept of appliances as furniture, but it does strike me as being the difference between a specialized tool and a multi-tool.
Everyone owns a smartphone. There's nothing special about that. And while taking a good photo arguably requires some degree of skill regardless of your tool, smartphones represent the average consumer; the lowest common denominator. Anyone can, and does, snap pictures with a smartphone.
A dedicated camera, on the other hand, represents a conscious decision to take photography more seriously. To want to focus only on that, free of other distractions. To climb whatever learning curve stands in the way.
Then, consider, that there are people who appreciate history and have no illusions about whether or not a particular historical time period was "better" or not. I follow a historic costumer on YouTube, from whom I learned how to sew by hand and how many historic clothing was constructed. Do I think that living in the Victorian era would be better on the whole? No. I value modern medicine and social advancements that have been made since that time. But do I love the Victorian aesthetic and value the knowledge of how to do things without modern machinery? You betcha. I feel like a more rounded person and, despite coming from a hobby, I have life skills that I didn't have before, like being able to fit, hem, repair and even produce some of my own clothing.
Trends and fashion changes, and the phenomenon of "older is better" is human nature that has always existed. It is easy to find artefacts of the past that are less common, or gone entirely, that you consider to be better than the trends of the present.
This doesn't mean things are worse on the whole now, nor does it mean that those artefacts aren't valid examples of things of value that are no longer produced. I guess it's part and parcel of change.
> Treasure me. Enjoy me ... and don't throw me out because I'm not disposable plastic.
Plastic looking finish is the one that was luxurious at the time. And wood was just a way to get a good-looking finish for cheap... Like shiny black plastic is today.
Like walkmans! Beyond the portability - which on modern hardware is better in every way - the qualities were all worse than comparables at the time. Why anyone would want to relive cassettes and batteries is beyond me.
I actually got a refurbished tape deck the other day, and the sound is quite good. A CD would sound a little better but they seem to actually become unreadable faster in storage than tapes? very counter intuitive.
I'd love a nice mp3 player set up, but it's sometimes harder to get those legally for music compared to a CD or even an old tape now! streaming has a lot of downsides in comparison and I think that's fueling the desire to own a full album in some form.
A CD is a lot better, but the discman was crap because it was too big and it ate batteries. Converting a CD to MP3s is trivial though.
yeah, and you can go the other way and fit most of an mp3 library on one DVD or something with later CD players. (my car has one that can do this for instance).
but ofc at that point you can use a flash drive and it's way easier
Old stuff is better understood. Parts and information are often more available, and the failure modes etc are well known. New stuff is more in the "unknown unknowns" territory.
There's a reason brand new tech isn't favoured for safety-critical systems.
The friction that they have in their use, means you have to be more intentional when you use them - you put in more effort and it feels more special.
>The friction that they have in their use, means you have to be more intentional when you use them - you put in more effort and it feels more special.
This, I knew a guy 20ish years ago that was super into vinyl right as the rest of us were getting into MP3, and it was a whole experience of dusting off the records and cleaning them with a soft brush and waiting for the electronics to warm up and such. It's like the modern equivalent of those Asian tea ceremonies.
Not really. Different cameras, both old and new, draw differently. It's not a question of "good" or "bad". Sometimes I want a nice, sharp image, sometimes I want the scratchy, somewhat random image I get from a Holga.
You pick the tool that gives the artistic effect you WANT.
There is something real to it. It's not just nostalgia or a fad. Go and look at product manuals from the 70s through 90s. They're awesome and detailed with diagrams and even exposition discussing the general genre of product. For example, synth manuals would actually teach you about synthesis while also covering the synthesizer in question in great detail. Nowadays, you are lucky to get a little placard of quick tips.
The fact that manuals were produced with such care when it was really hard to do so is insight into how much thought was given to the entire product. It's not necessarily that the products are technically superior. It's that honest hard work was put into the products. You walked into a store and purchased it from a person. It couldn't be easier to produce product manuals these days with modern software, and yet it's never done. Today's consumer landscape is about disposability and scale. You have companies like Apple that intentionally remove features so that they can sell you them separately, like the dongle mess. Apple lied to their customers for the reasons they were removed and now sell them parts that costs sub-cents for dozens and hundreds of dollars.
There is something real about all of this that modern people yearn for. I remember having to buy technology as a kid. You talked to people, asked them questions, and they new things about the product. It wasn't about just pushing a virtual button.
It focus on nostalgia and repairing of old things (because they don't make them anymore, so you have to), rather than buying the latest Apple shit, so there is a distinction from modern disposable consumption patterns.
It's not bizarre at all, if you assume a consumerist or marginal+consumer sovereign economy then after years of phone releases making cuts to whatever buzzword some group cares about eventually anything they buy will be worth less than whatever they already own, after that all it takes is someone pointing them to a old device.
Are you just saying it's bizarre that we live in a consumerist economy? Or are you saying that you think we live in a capitalist economy with people brainwash by capitalists into a consumerist culture? Or are you just acting like a naive purist who thinks that art isn't economically motivated?
> "Old stuff is better" tendency which sees vintage tech as somehow more credible, ethical, characterful, expressive, and individual than modern tech
Well stuff produced at 1/10000th the number of units sold of, say, a modern iPhone or Android phone is obviously more "individual". I mean: I see a dude driving an AC Cobra vs one driving a mass produced chinese EV... They're both cars but that's about it. That'd be Hank Moody driving an old beaten up Porsche 911 Carrera in Californication. I mean: for one reason or another, Hank Moody is driving an old beaten up Porsche and not a Hyundai. And the series shows him as liking his car and liking to drive his car.
Where's the lack of use in someone daily driving an AC Cobra or an old Porsche? Where's the lack of use in someone using an old camera to take pictures?
> It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use
Someone takes his old camera, goes out at night, snaps a picture of the sunset, and goes back home. Where's the ownership of display?
I don't post picture or my cars online. I take one out at night and go for a drive on desert roads. Where's the ownership of display? On HN?
Sure, everything is still an object. But then everything is consumerism, unless you make your clothes yourself (funnily enough my mother-in-law knits clothes).
Regarding ethics: I think something can be said about older tech. For example an old "dumb" 1080p projector both gives that "movie theather" feeling (mine had a gigantic diagonal no TV could match) and it's neither listening to everything you say nor sending your data to the motherload nor constantly updating apps for seemingly no reason nor can it be bricked remotely. Nor can it be hacked.
I mean: there's at least something in vintage tech I think.
P.S: I'm currently in the process of buying a "vintage" HP Z series workstation that I'll use a small server but that's because I want shitload of cheap ECC and huge, big, cheap SAS drives... And it's going to get lots of love and use. I may blog about it if I want to display ownership though.
I think the new stuff is getting worse. Enshittification and such. Digital cameras don't show you ads.
In a lot of cases, older stuff is actually better by many objective criteria.
I love old tools, both hand tools and power tools.
There are many criteria by which you could judge the older tools, made in the USA, Canada, or UK, and say they are objectively better than even the highest-end tools I could buy today at Home Depot.
Thicker metal, designs which are more repairable with swappable parts, they were obviously designed to be more durable. I have a roofing square I use on the job site which is over 100 years old, and it's better than one I could buy at the store. I use a chop saw which was made in Japan in the 80's and it is going to outlast any equivalent chop saw I could buy at the store today. You can tell immediately by just using the thing that it is more durable and higher quality.
Yes, older tools lack some modern improvements like lasers or safety stops, but when it comes to reliability and durability you can't buy a brand new tool with the same quality of old tools for any price.
I don't know if the same is actually true for digicams or whatever, but things like record players or typewriters have similar qualities to what I'm talking about with tools.
I've run into this with nostalgia-toys and board games. Modern "reprints" usually suck, even if they superficially look the same.
Loopin' Louie? The modern one's lighter and has a weaker motor, even if the original was never exactly greatest-games-of-all-time material, the modern one's just non-functional.
Rock 'em sock 'em robots? Weaker punches, plastic's lighter, new models are often smaller. They suck compared to vintage ones.
Hell even soda bottles are kinda like this. Those things used to be thick and you could re-use them for all kinds of stuff.
It seems like at some point around the late '90s and early '00s we got a ton better at precisely optimizing plastic use in mass manufacturing processes, and all plastic products got somewhere between a little, and a lot, worse, because manufacturers could make them just barely thick enough to not fall apart. Good for waste on the one hand, for disposable things, so that hits "reduce" at the expense of making "re-use" a lot worse. But also makes non-disposable things so shitty they become disposable (often because they suck so bad to begin with that you're gonna toss them out after one use)
I was very disappointed when I bought my kid a “vintage” Fischer Price record player. Turns out it’s made in 2023 by a company that licensed the look. [1]
Instead of winding a spring, the wind knob turns on an electric motor that takes batteries.
Instead of playing the music with an embedded set of metal tines in the play head, the disk just holds and RFID and the player loads the mp3 file of what the original 1980s toy sounded like.
The thing is an abomination.
1: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003CGVCXS
Based on the reviews, it seems a lot of purchases are grandparents thinking they’re getting their grandkids the same thing they played with…
> Today’s young adults grew up in a time when their childhoods were documented with smartphone cameras instead of dedicated digital or film cameras.
I get that this is a ridiculous nit-pick to kick off a comment, but how do they define "young adult?" Because I'm not sure that that statement is actually true just yet.
I have two Gen Z daughters, the youngest having been born in 2001. Smart phones didn't really start to land on the scene until 2008. It then took a few years until everyone had one and the cameras were good enough that people were getting rid of their digital cameras and switching to smart phones.
Granted, my daughters are several years older now than an 18 year-old, which I would consider to be the "youngest" possible "young adult."
Even then, an 18 year-old today was born in 2006. I suppose that part of their childhood was likely captured on smart phones rather than digital cameras. But being old enough that I remember the 00s like it was just yesterday, and having two "young adult" children whose childhoods' were almost entirely documented using digital cameras, even having packs of old printed photos that were printed at the same places you would get film developed ... I just can't help but question the statement that today's young adults had their childhoods documented on smartphones. Today's children and young teenagers, sure. But the modern smartphone, with camera, actually hasn't been with us for a full generation quite just yet... as much as it feels like it.
"Young Adult" is a weird term -- think of the book/movie genre called "young adult" or "YA" -- it isn't actually literally for people in their twenties but for children. It's like calling people like me in their 50s "middle aged" -- most of us aren't going to make it to 100.
Both terms are euphemistic for the groups they refer to.
You call it young adult fiction because most teenagers would rather be perceived as young adults than children.
You call people middle aged in their 50s because no one wants to be reminded that they're statistically 2/3 of the way to the grave.
I had considered the YA genre in fiction, which is marketed at teenagers. But I did a quick search for the general term "young adult" and Wikipedia seems to suggest that it is the period immediately following adolescence, which is generally considered to begin at 18.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_adult
.. this one silly statement really triggered my autism this morning lol.
Exactly. Kodak stopped selling film cameras in 2004.
Peak film sales was in 2001!
Film sales in 2006 was the same as in 1994 ...
After 2006, the decline was drastic¹.
But the long tail of childhood memories stored on film and cheap digicams stretches far into the smartphone era. Remember, not everyone had a smartphone or even a good way to transfer the images out of there. Also, smartphone cameras were really bad in the beginning.
1: https://petapixel.com/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm-thrived-a-...
The first generation iPhone will enter "adulthood" on Janury 9th, 2025.
Yeah, I wondered that, too. That line might be referring to the handful of people whose parents were tech enthusiasts who went to midnight launches of the first iPhones and were born at roughly the same time. A very small group.
> I get that this is a ridiculous nit-pick to kick off a comment, but how do they define "young adult?" Because I'm not sure that that statement is actually true just yet.
Additionally, before the explosion of digital camera sales in the early 00s, many childhood memories simply went unrecorded.
Growing up my family had a couple film cameras that rarely got used. They might come out for holidays and a handful of events but they spent a lot of time in the closet.
Even when they were used a roll of film only got two dozen photos that weren't cheap to develop. We'd get maybe one or two photos per roll that had decent focus and lighting.
There's a Cambrian explosion of photos I have from my first digital camera onwards. There's so many events and several people I'd love to have pictures of today that don't exist because no camera was handy at the time. Today I can capture pretty much anything I want to remember.
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We can all use chatgpt what is the point of this copy/paste exercise?