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Post by belgiumreporter on Jul 23, 2014 3:24:02 GMT -5
Can you remeber when you first went digital? well i can and this little beauty was my first digital camera. Before that i've had the canon ION but i guess you can't call that a digital camera as it was a video still camera . The AGFA Ephoto on the other hand was a true digital camera with very neat specs for its day, capable of producing 1024 x 768 pixel images that looked like real photographs with remarkable quality for what now would be considered as a very low resolution. Agfa's American wing in Wilmington, Massachusetts designed the 1280with its wonderfull revolutionary swivel body, a design later succesfully copied by nikon with their 900 series. It had a38 to114mm equvalent 2.8/3.5 quality zoom lens on wich 46mm filters could be used. On the downside it took 15 seconds writing time between each shot and it ate batteries, the rechargable ones of that day would only give you 12 shots and a set of fresh duracells would last for 50 shots (making shooting this camera almost as expensive as shooting film!). The price for the 1280 in 1997 was around 1000$ and in that price range nothing could beat it. I am glad it is still in my possesion as a sweet reminder that it is the camera that convinced me digital would be the future. It is sad to see that AGFA didn't succeed in maintaining their advance in digital camera design and production and have now become only a footnote in the history of digital photography.
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Post by philbirch on Jul 23, 2014 10:03:55 GMT -5
I bought a £69.99 no-name camera from an electronics discounter in 2000 it used 2x AA's and like yours took about 20 seconds to write the image. It took about a minute for the flash to charge. It was slow and useless. I carried on using my Minolta Riva 150 until one evening in 2005 coming home on the all night bus, I found a camera on the vacant seat in front of us. I took it to the driver and handed it him. "What do you think I'm going to do? Hand it in? get real" he gave it me back. A Minolta Dimage E500 found on a bus changed my photographic life. The camera was fast, had a nice zoom and was only the size of a pack of cigarettes. The image quality was outstanding. I made an A3 image of my children and put it on the wall. Pin sharp. Thats when digital arrived for me. a photo from the first cam. No exif info at all only the date 29th July 2001
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2014 10:28:07 GMT -5
I had my first P&S digital camera in the late 1990s. Don't remember the brand. It had a 1.6 mpx sensor and a fixed focal length lens. Actually took decent pictures if you didn't try to blow them up past 5x7 inches. The lag between the time I pushed the button and when the shutter actually released drove me to distraction. In the mid 1990s I was managing editor of a daily newspaper and the only media using digital cameras were the sports magazines and the wire services. Starting price on a DSLR with only a 2 or 3 mpx sensor was $15,000!!! My first DSLR was a used Nikon D100 that I acquired before going on our first trip to Europe in 2007. Sorta wish I had hung onto it as a backup to my D300. The photo below was taken with that 1.6 mpx camera and was actually used as an illustration for a biography of billionaire J.R. Simplot. W.
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Post by philbirch on Jul 23, 2014 11:05:15 GMT -5
Twice as many pixels as mine.
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daveh
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Post by daveh on Jul 23, 2014 17:10:41 GMT -5
June 2002, as a still, 1.2mp, photo in a digital camcorder.
First still digital camera, Panasonic Lumix FZ1. 2mp, great lens and really nice photos - and it didn't stop working like the film camera did in the humidity and rain in Panama.
An FZ20 followed in October 2004, 5mp.
First DSLR. Pentax *ist DS, June 2005, 6mp.
May 2007, Canon 30D, 8mp.
December 2009, Canon 7D, 18mp.
August 2013, Pentax K-x, 12mp (second hand)
June 2014, Panasonic Lumix FZ200, 12mp.
(One or two other miscellaneous items along the way as well.)
I would post a photo from each, but flickr seem to have totally screwed up its system at the moment and nothing, but nothing, is working properly. Well that's not quite true, there is a photo coming up on each page, although none seems to want to snap into full focus and the links have disappeared.
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Post by philbirch on Jul 23, 2014 17:24:04 GMT -5
I progressed from the Minolta to a Nikon D40. An amazing leap in technology and image quality.
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SidW
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Post by SidW on Jul 23, 2014 20:02:50 GMT -5
I held off for a long time, watching specs improve daily. In the meantime I was scanning Kodachromes regularly. Then it occurred to me that scanning film was effectively copying one matrix (the molecular structure of the emulsion) onto another (the pixel layout), creating noise in the process. So, in June 2004 I got a Canon G5 (5MPX at that time) while on holiday in New York. This is the very first picture (or at least the first I've kept) - Lower Manhatten from the Statten Island ferry: I was so pleased I followed up in November with an EOS 20D.
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Post by kodaker on Jul 23, 2014 20:42:00 GMT -5
My first digital was in 1995. It was the Sony that used a 3 1/4 floppy disk and had a 1/3 megapixel sensor and the pictures were 640x480. Next in 1998 was a Fuji that was 1.3 megapixels and made a 1280x1024 picture. My real interest in digital though came in 2000 when I bought the Nikon 990. Wow, 3 megapixels and pictures of 2048x1536. I still have a bunch of 11x14 pictures framed from the 990 that to me look great, and today it is my favorite one for closeups, even though I have Olympus and Panasonic 4/3 cameras and dedicated closeup lenses.
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Post by kodaker on Jul 23, 2014 20:49:33 GMT -5
My bad, the Sony was in 1997. Sometimes I can't read my own writing.
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truls
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Post by truls on Jul 24, 2014 13:16:11 GMT -5
Enjoyable to hear your digital stories, and the images produced. I was late, very late. From 1992 until christmas 2011 I did not care much about photography, I had a Nikon FE10 and Nikkor-H 50mm for years, only vacation and sporadic photography. I got a Canon S20 in 2004, a cheap 3.2mp second hand camera. Did not use it much. Christmas 2011 I got a Olympus Pen m43, so some more images where produced. In january 2012 I "discovered" ebay and other auction sites, where all my dream cameras could be had for almost nothing. After joining CC, I discovered I was an aspiring collector. Period.
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daveh
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Post by daveh on Jul 24, 2014 17:01:57 GMT -5
All photos are full frame, but are cropped to 1000 x whatever, depending on the original dimensions. Panasonic nv-gx7: Panasonic FZ1: Panasonic FZ20: Pentax *ist DS: Canon 30D: Canon 7D: Pentax K-x: Panasonic FZ200:
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truls
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Post by truls on Jul 25, 2014 14:39:16 GMT -5
All photos are full frame, but are cropped to 1000 x whatever, depending on the original dimensions. I liked the images a lot! Lesson learned:: It is not the camera, but the human being behind it depends on. I am sure you could take stunning pictures with whatever camera!
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daveh
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Post by daveh on Jul 28, 2014 22:12:24 GMT -5
Truls, thanks.
Actually I've realised that the Pentax *ist DS photo is cropped. The lady with the green earrings is more central in the original.
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Post by belgiumreporter on Aug 6, 2014 4:17:18 GMT -5
Last week was my lucky week as not only i've been able to buy the missing canon for my collection and find an A1 for 4€ i also found this Agfa early digital Ephoto 1680 the second ( and last) version of the 1280. Now i've got a nice pair to display. When going through some boxes with camera stuff i also found my canon ion back, this is in my opinion THE camera that started the digital revolution on an amateur scale, even though it wasn't a digital camera, it was a video still camera writing the files on a special sized floppy disc, files wich later had to be digitized in your PC in wich a special board was added to work with the ion files. Even though it was only VGA resolution i still used it extensively and professionaly to make catalogues of small items ( nuts and bolts kinda stuff of wich there where a 1000 variations) for this kind work it came out cheaper and faster than working on film. A year later came the agfa and another year later came the kodak DCS series and so on each year a better and faster and higher res camera leading to my current D3 of wich i guess will be the last one pro camera i've ever bought as my pro days are over.
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daveh
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Post by daveh on Aug 6, 2014 14:06:32 GMT -5
My nephew, who is a professional commercial photographer, has sold his Hasselblad equipment. He has sold most of his Nikon film equipment too - I think he has just kept one film body. He is now (and has been for a while) all digital work-wise. He doesn't have a perspective control lens, finding it much easier (and significantly cheaper) to do corrections in the software. He doesn't know anyone who is still using film for his sort of professional assignments.
No more taking a Polaroid, holding it under an arm for a couple of minutes while it develops and no more peering at the result through a loupe to see if the lighting and setup look reasonable. Shots taken go straight on to the computer and can be looked at and assessed easily at a decent size on the screen. What's more they can, if necessary, be sent instantly to the client.
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