My First Digital Camera Was Simply Awful
I wanted to like it. I really did. Go Bruins!
Sometime around the holidays of 1997, my girlfriend bought me a digital camera. Of course, back then, digital cameras were mostly a novelty, and nothing like what we have now. Being graduate students, neither of us could afford much of anything, but somehow she found a Kodak DC-25* point and shoot camera for sale as an open-box buy, and there it was. I wasn’t sure what to think of it, but it had a cable to connect to my Mac, and it took photos.
Let’s talk about this little camera. It captured images at 340x240 pixel resolution in “normal” mode, or 493 x373 “high res” mode. Yep, that’s 0.18 Megapixels. This little thing had 2 MB of internal memory, which gave me about 8-16 images. I guess it could take a Compact Flash card, but back then those were a FORTUNE! It also ate batteries like a ravenous wolf in Yellowstone.
I remember taking this little camera to a UCLA football game at the Rose Bowl and taking some photos, which were sort of viewable on the rear LCD. Sort of, being that the screen was barely as large as a postage stamp and you could just make out the lines on the field.
The battery life on this thing was abysmal, too. Good luck trying to have spares as it took CR123 Lithium batteries which were pretty expensive, too. Using this camera was a race between taking photos and the batteries running out… don’t chimp!
I got back from the game and transferred the images to my computer, looked at them, and realized that I should have just brought my little Olympus compact 35mm camera. Heck, at least then I’d have gotten 36 exposures!
The other thing about that time… I had Internet access through my university, but most people did not. I could email these blurry images that resembled me and my friends, but printing them was kind of futile. I think I emailed them to my college buddies just for fun, and that was indeed kind of cool.
Either way, it was a very nice gesture to get a gift of technology that wanted to be cool but didn’t end up being practical for much other than the novelty factor. I stuck with film until 2005, just sayin’.
*I’m pretty sure that was the model, but that camera is long gone, along with the photos I captured.