Memory lane

Came across a fairly old (well Christmas) blog on DPR from one of their writers, remembering the golden days of digital camera development...a very edited extract below.

Reminded me of the first digital camera I ever saw/used - which was one of those which took a 3.5 floppy disk (might not have even been a proper "digital camera", not sure how the technology worked). The art department at school acquired one at huge cost in the early 1990s.

From DPR:

First digital camera writer used was a Casio QV10 with 77,000 pixels.

"The first cameras I reviewed were, looking back, almost uniformly poor (I apologize unreservedly to anyone who spent £1000 on a Ricoh RDC-2 after my glowing review of a 0.4 megapixel camera with a 20 minute battery life and an appalling removable LCD monitor).
"Few cameras had a zoom, many had no screen, most relied on internal memory and anything over 0.3 megpixels (VGA) was considered 'high resolution'. Even the simplest things we take for granted these days - user controllable ISO, AE compensation, scene modes and so on - were unheard of at the 'affordable' (sub $2500) end of the market. Heck, we didn't even have EXIF or USB back then."

Lowest price for 32MB CF card £520
Fuji's first consumer digi-cam - 0.3MP DS-7 at £600
Cheapest pro DSLR - Minolta 2.5MP RDC-3000 at £4,000