Hey everybody, digicams are back!
Well hot damn! This certainly was a bit of a surprise. Those early 2000’s digicams are probably the last types of cameras that I would have expected to make a comeback, but little did I know — here they seem to be again trendier than ever.
Digicams are those very inexpensive point and shoot cameras that you most likely had with you on your family vacation in 2007, before smart phones were around. After the release of the first iPhone, these cameras became more or less obsolete and forgotten… until now!
When film photography started to make a comeback in around 2016 or so, the resurgence took a somewhat surprising turn when against all odds those 80’s and 90’s point and shoot film cameras became really popular. As you know, there are few rather infamous camera models out there, such as Olympus MJU II, that is more expensive now than when it was originally in the late 90’s when it was released. The whole thing with film photography got really out of hand when the camera and film prices skyrocketed to the point of being not much fun anymore.
Enter 2023. All the Olympus MJU II’s and alike are running out of this world. The remaining ones are broken, too expensive or simply seen as a thing of the past at this point. The world is also running out of Kodak Portra 400 or in fact, any colour film. Maybe the whole film trend is starting to be passe all together and people are realising that with a cost of a single roll of Portra (at the moment 15€ per roll give or take — way too much), you can now literally get three digicams (no joke, I actually bough three of them for 15€ few days ago) that essentially gives you a very similar shooting experience with equally questionable image quality, usually referred as vibez. From what I’ve heard, and I absolutely understand it, people also are missing the days when you’d be able to find old cameras for five euros/dollars from a charity shops. Even my local charity shops are now selling MJU II’s for several hundred euros. Where’s the fun in that?
The image quality of these early digicams is the last thing on earth I could have expected someone to romanticise. It seems that whatever the shortcoming of any recording medium is, at some point in the future, it turns into nostalgia. Film grain or those cracking sounds on a vinyl record are of course good examples of that and really easy to understand. I also see the allure of cheap colour film and point and shoot cameras too. Gif animations with 8 colours, very pixelated video game graphics, VHS glitches are in their own way very nostalgic, even though, back in the day, they were undesirable. Fast forward 20 years and what do you know, now we it looks cool.
But dear god these old digicams. They’re just crap, aren’t they? What nostalgia could possibly come out from them? Now that I started to think about it, I too am starting to see the point of this whole thing. I remember owning a very early Canon digicam (Ixus 400 I belive) in 2004. I was a student back then so it has a very strong association with my youth. The camera featured a 4 megapixel CCD censor (remember this word) and honestly a really nice lens. The image quality wasn’t half bad I now that I think about it, I actually feel very nostalgic about the camera and the kind of photography I was into. (I eventually replaced the camera with a newer Ixus which was a significantly worse in terms of everything and I was constantly dissapointed with the optics and image quality.)
if MJU II is now out of style, what is the new hot thing? The word CCD censor certainly seems to pop up a lot and apparently anything featuring it, has the merit of being good by delivering vibez. Apparently they deliver the most film-like image quality.
For the sake of couriosity, I took out my box of old cell phones and USB cords and underneath of that mountain of electrical waste, lied my old digicams, all in working order. As I mentioned, I even picked up few more of them, out of sheer pleasure of finding something potentially useable but cheap from a charity shop.
I think it’s neat that there things are coming back but I’m probably not going to be shooting them terribly much. Now that they’re a trendy thing, I might pick them up if I happen to stumble upon a good one in flea markets. Who knows, maybe there’s one that has some characteretic that I relly love. I’m certainly open for that and more than anything, as a environmental point of view, it makes me very happy to see that people are seeing value in these things and don’t treat them as junk. I have seen really nice work done with digicams and some of them do have nice optics and meet all the other criteria for making good photos.
