I’m hearing the word “Digicam” a lot nowadays, but what does it actually mean.

If you look up the definition you’ll find that it’s something along the lines of “A digital camera”. While that’s technically correct the way the words are used today seem to suggest a slightly different meaning: “A digital camera, often a digital point and shoot, but also frequently an older Digital SLR, or mirrorless camera”. Current or recent generation digital cameras do not fit this definition. Cameras with CCD (rather then CMOS) sensors seem to be particularly prized.

So why have these cameras become so popular?

I think you have to go back a few years to understand what’s going on. When I first started to collect old film cameras around 2011 they were dirt cheap. You couldn’t give them away. Since digital photography had become popular nobody wanted film cameras any more. Then came the lomography cameras, which were inexpensive and fun to use. They attracted a lot of younger people who were tired of the clinical nature of digital cameras and liked this style of photography and the slower, more patient type of photography that they offered. Eventually they tired of the somewhat primitive lomography cameras and turned to used copies of very sophisticated cameras that only a few years before had cost thousands of dollars.

Things continued liked this until comparatively recently when suddenly the demand for old film cameras started to rise. At the same time these cameras were getting older and were starting to break, often in ways that could not repaired because required parts were no longer available. With higher demand and a more limited supply the prices of film cameras started to rise. Perhaps even more important: a number of film manufacturers were discontinuing their offerings placing Kodak in an almost monopolistic position. Consequently the cost of film has sky rocketed to a point where many film photographers no longer find it economically possible for them the shoot a lot of film.

So what to do? You can’t shoot film because the cameras and film stock cost too much, but you don’t want to use current generation digital cameras because you don’t like the experience. Well, how about taking a look at older digital cameras? People have started to realize that very high resolution cameras are largely a marketing ploy by camera manufacturers. Most do not need a 50 megapixel camera. The best use of such cameras is to make extremely large prints, but how many people even make prints now. The most common use of a camera today is to produce fodder for social media and for that 4 megapixels is more than adequate. Current generation digital cameras tend to be large, heavy and expensive. So why not try older digital cameras, which are often smaller, lighter and much less expensive.

It’s true that many of the point-and-shoot variety of such cameras are fully automatic and not particularly interesting to use. But there are also many that are fully featured – offering fully automatic, partially automatic, and manual exposure modes; automatic or manual autofocus; raw file formats etc.; many even offer the much prized CCD sensor, which is supposed to give the images a more “filmic” appearance.

That was what motivated me to take out some of my older digital cameras, many of which I haven’t used for years as I replaced them with more modern cameras. I already had some (you can see three of them above) so out they came. OK the focus isn’t as good as it is on my more recent cameras; the LCDs are pretty pathetic; the dynamic range is often limited; noise at all but the lowest ISOs is problematic, but I’m having fun using them again. Moreover, I like to challenge myself to see what kind of pictures I can make with them. After all at the end of the day it’s the photographer who makes the picture, not the camera.

You can get a sense of what can be done by looking at the next post where I use one of the cameras above (the 15 year old Panasonic LX-3), the one in the middle.

Taken with a Fuji X-E1 and Fuji XC 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 OSS II