My first digital camera

[FowlersFreeTime]

I wasn't sure where to put this in the forum structure but I figure "macro & close-ups" seemed appropriate.

I found my first digital camera, a truly unremarkable lump of plastic now, but fun at the time, oh so long ago...

• ILCE-6700
• E 30mm F3.5 Macro
• 30.0 mm
• ƒ/9
• 1/200 sec
• ISO 100

• ILCE-6700
• E 30mm F3.5 Macro
• 30.0 mm
• ƒ/9
• 1/250 sec
• ISO 100

• ILCE-6700
• E 30mm F3.5 Macro
• 30.0 mm
• ƒ/9
• 1/250 sec
• ISO 100

Definitely NOT a classic, by any means

 

[Unframed Dave]

Cool, it wasn't mine, but the first I used was a Sony mavica. It wrote to 3.5" floppies.

 

[iain clyne]

I had a Fuji, I think it was 1.3mp

 

[AlphaWorld]

My first was the first Canon Ixus - I think it was 2megapixel, JPEG only, and came with a Canon branded CF card which was an ENORMOUS 8MB (yes, megabyte!). It was pretty, and felt more metal than plastic. Solid little beast.

CF cards were large and thick, and had the fun feature of being able to bend a pin deep in the slot if you weren’t gentle inserting the card. I didn’t have that problem, but the dealer showed me a broken Ixus that someone had damaged on the first day they had it.

 

[Richard A]

My first digital camera was a Pentax *istD DSLR, however I was scanning film for about 6 years before that. The *istD was a pretty good camera back in the day. I took some great photos with it. Shortly after, I bought my wife an Olympus C-5060 WZ on the advice of someone from the club I was in. It was a terrible camera. It was full featured but we had no end of trouble with it. Would never consider an Olympus after that.

I can't say I ever had a problem with CF cards but you did have to be careful with them.

 

[AlphaWorld]

My first digital camera was a Pentax *istD DSLR, however I was scanning film for about 6 years before that. The *istD was a pretty good camera back in the day. I took some great photos with it. Shortly after, I bought my wife an Olympus C-5060 WZ on the advice of someone from the club I was in. It was a terrible camera. It was full featured but we had no end of trouble with it. Would never consider an Olympus after that.

I can't say I ever had a problem with CF cards but you did have to be careful with them.

Depended upon the camera. I don't remember which camera it was (might have been a Canon 1D series), but the CF slot's rails were extra deep - guiding the card into the slot carefully. A lot of the slots had much shorter guide rails, and it was a lot easier to misalign the card.

 

[Richard A]

Yes, I seem to remember that being the case. The C-5060 used CF cards also. Both those cameras I had used slots with quite tight tolerances to prevent the cards from misalignment.

 

[Angus Cameron]

The 1st for me was a Sanyo VPC-G200 1997
0.35megapixel
At the time i managed an air conditioning import company and had not long signed a deal with Sanyo Air Conditioning (no longer a brand - Panasonic bought them over). Digital cameras were not common place, we gave them to customers when they spent a target figure on Sanyo AC kit.
Engineers and surveyors in the industry were throwing orders at us to get these. The novelty and value of including photos in reports was not lost on them. We take the ability to take photos as a given.

Other items i remember less fondly, pagers and fax machines, these brought with them the expectation of instant response.

 

[Richard A]

A place I worked at around the mid '90's had a couple of those Kodak digital cameras built around (I think) a Nikon body. Or was it a Canon. Can't remember exactly.

 

[FowlersFreeTime]

Sounds like I triggered some nostalgia!
Thanks for sharing everyone.

 

[iain clyne]

I remember buying a 512 mb cf card and it cost a fortune, I can’t remember exactly how much but it was in the hundreds.

 

[Clix Pix]

Coming from film camera shooting (which started with Minolta and eventually wound up in the Nikon camp) my first digital camera was a Nikon Coolpix 900 as just sort of a fun, casual camera..... I loved that thing but of course I didn't really trust it to shoot "serious" images.....but I marveled at the convenience it offered not just in the shooting experience but with the way it handled the images I shot. Wow..... This little Compact Flash Memory Card could hold all the images and I could process them in my own computer??!!!

For a while I progressed through a series of Coolpixes before one day it dawned on me that just then at the point I had (accumulating frustration in a few ways) reached I now really, really, needed to move into a DSLR.....and then is when I began moving forward with the Nikon D70. From there, inevitably, I went through several Nikon DSLRs as time went on.

Sony had initially entered my life with the NEX 7 and also the RX100 M3 , (the latter followed by upgraded versions),. This mirrorless thing was really intriguing, In 2018 I happened upon the larger Sony RX10 IV. That camera, which I still have and still love and which in fact I used today, was instrumental in reigniting a flame within me which had begun to seriously dwindle away.....

In a different context there is the expression "gateway drugs." Well for me, that RX 10 IV actually turned out to be a very helpful "gateway drug." Increasingly ignoring what was stashed in camera bags, I kept shooting with that RX10 IV ....and the more I shot that inner flame burst into full life again. Eventually I realized that again I was ready to move on. I missed being able to do macro and I missed a couple of other things which I was pretty sure that I could do with a new camera, a genuine mirrorless full-featured one. Even at that, it took me a while to get from where I was to where I more than happily wound up.

It was a scary and hard day when I took a deep breath and traded in my DSLRs and jumped into the world of Sony mirrorless on (to me) a new level and its (at that time) brand-new A7R IV.

Now, a few years removed from that first scary day, it still surprises me what I can do with my current Sony bodies and lenses......