wiretap wrote:

DaveJustDave wrote:

taken with a Kodak DC200, one of the first "megapixel" digital cameras at 1152x864 resolution . IIRC it was like $400USD!

picture of my engine bay, when i had no money for proper modifications. extra points if you can guess the car (and which generation of said car)

photo_2019-04-17_13-58-50.jpg

1985 Celica Supra MK2?

close! Supra Mk3 !

xjas wrote:

I always wondered about those "disposable" digitals. I figured they were just bargain-basement regular cameras with some BS DRM firmware. Guess so.

Indeed that's what it was, just a standard digital camera chipset severely crippled with custom firmware. The firmware was programmed to lock down the camera once 25 pictures were taken, regardless of how much free memory remained. The firmware also required a security code to unlock the camera and access the memory contents via USB (which was very easy to crack according to the guy who developed the hack), and the USB connection also had some physical pseudo-DRM in the form of using a non-standard port (which, by coincidence, happened to be physically identical to the dock connector on old Palm Pilot PDAs). The initial reusability hack didn't do anything to address the 25 picture limit, but it at least allowed you to unlock the camera, download the pictures and clear the memory so it could be reused. Later on, someone made a modded firmware image to remove the 25 picture limit entirely, allowing you to take however many would fit in the camera's flash memory (typically around 40 from my experience). Once I flashed that onto the camera, that's when my father and I started to give it the heaviest use.

I have never owned or even used one, but I really, really, REALLY want one of those Sony floppy disk cameras. They're getting quite expensive though.

A Mavica FD-81 was my first camera - I bought it used (for $800) after using a friends FD-5. It was the camera that got me interested in photography - past attempts to use various family film cameras has always failed miserably. With the FD-81 I could finally see what I was taking. Back then I thought the pictures were amazing, looking at them now not so much.

The floppy drive was both a blessing and a curse - On the plus side you could load your pictures on any PC without needing any specific software or adapters and (at least back in the day) you could buy more floppies in almost any shop if you ran out while you were out somewhere and still wanted to shoot more. It used relatively large camcorder style batteries, so even though it had run the floppy drive it seemed like you could shoot all day. On the down side the floppy drives were fragile - I had a stuck shutter on one floppy kill a drive, a short drop killed another drive. After replacing 2 drives at ~$200 each (just for the part, they weren't standard drives) I gave up on it.

I replaced with the Kodak DC4800 which in some ways was definitely inferior. Despite being 3.1 megapixel it's macro shots were definitely worse. The battery life sucked - I bought a 2nd battery and often both would be flat before I filled the memory cards (which were only 32MB each).

Got insanely lucky while thrifting & managed to score some goodies for the Coolpix 995. There are actually screw-in, interchangeable lenses for this camera using a 19mm thread format that was only around for a few years, AFAIK. They're not particularly expensive, but I don't think they were all that common either. However, I went in to one of my usual thrifting spots and found these in a plastic bag on the "wall of crap", priced at $7.99. Hell yes!

(^^ taken with: Nikon Coolpix 8800 VR)

One Nikon WC-E63 wide-angle lens, a spare MH-50 battery charger (I'd already received my NIB EH-21 but a spare is always handy!) and a Sony VCL-HG0737C, a similar wide-angle for some of Sony's Handycam models. I don't have one of those [yet :p], but not complaining!

The WC-E63 fitted to the 995 creates an odd-looking thing:

I guess that's one of the reasons I like it so much. It was an experiment from the early days of decent digital, but this kind of design really didn't carry into modern times.

I'm starting to get quite a collection of kit for these things:

(^^ taken with an old Sony CyberShot W220 using the Sony lens from above, and then cropped so that you don't notice the wide-angle effect. Oh well, at least it's there. 😜 )

Unfortunately the last piece of the puzzle isn't here yet - the 18-year-old battery in the 995 just won't hold a charge, so I ordered two new aftermarket ones. Once those arrive I should have a great setup to use! Thankfully both batteries I have for the 8800 VR (right) charge fine, despite it only being a few years newer.

Speaking of the Coolpix 8800 VR (ca. 2004; also, "VR" stands for "vibration reduction", not what you think 😜) , here's some examples I took with it. It has an insanely long zoom lens for a camera of its type, so I like to use it for shooting the moon & other astrophotography.

All of these are unedited except for resizing by 1/3.

^^ this is actually the sun... look up the 2018 forest fire season in the PNW if you don't believe me 🙁

Same day as above.

Obviously not the same day. 😜

I would love to join in this thread but first of all I need to work out how to use this camera... I haven't used a film camera since I was a child, and my Dad would have changed the film etc for me back then!

Finally got a scanner that can do 6x6 medium format negatives! Boy, is it cool to just scan film and not order all these prints I'll never need.

I took these with my Soviet Lubitel 166B:

Yeah.. I forgot to clean the dust off these. Still fun, though!

^^ those are gorgeous! Especially that middle shot; that's some incredible depth-of-field.

Is the square aspect ratio particular to that camera, or did you crop them?

First digital camera was a Kodak CCD4000 Flashsync RGB camera, used it on the Futura 100

Hmm how to represent the photos taken

xjas wrote:

^^ those are gorgeous! Especially that middle shot; that's some incredible depth-of-field.

Is the square aspect ratio particular to that camera, or did you crop them?

Thanks, xjas, I'm pretty happy with that first roll of film! The focus on the camera is terrible but DOF is very rewarding, if you can nail it.

The camera uses 6x6 medium format. It's square and a bit more than 3x the "resolution" of normal 35mm film, which makes it possible to blow the images up quite a bit (i.e. for large prints).

Having medium format developed is a bit more expensive and prints are apparently very expensive. I didn't even ask how much they charge at the photo lab. The guy said "just take the negatives for now, trust me" 🤣