Cameras that we dismissed as inadequate at the time now coming back exactly because they fall short of perfection? I think the world’s gone mad.
Considering they’ve had a smartphone in hand since birth, the current teenage and twentysomething obsession with ‘vintage’ digital cameras is particularly puzzling. That’s whether we’re talking Panasonic Lumix, Nikon Coolpix and Fujifilm FinePix snappers sourced via eBay, or newer, licensee-badged ‘Yashica’, ‘Minolta’ or ‘Kodak’ cameras.
It would have been mum and dad’s generation that considered dedicated digital cameras a must-have – back when they were twentysomethings themselves and camera phones were in their infancy.
Back then, let’s say the early 2000s, musical ‘flash mobs’ were all the rage. Due to short notice, I only had my phone on me when I headed to Covent Garden to catch US rock band Jane’s Addiction – a group that had previously split up at their festival-headlining height – perform to a hastily assembling ‘crowd’ of 10, maybe 20 people.
Though I witnessed something very special indeed, the blurred, pixellated images I got with my early handset were so bad that I deleted them afterwards in embarrassed disappointment.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and, evidently, I should have held on to them. Not only because Jane’s Addiction has again dissolved, but because unsharp, rough-and-ready imagery – a far cry from the AI-enhanced results delivered by the latest phones – is exactly what the kids want.
Because I’ve tested the latest Kodak and Yashica-branded compacts, now elbowing aside more sophisticated, fixed-lens alternatives from Canon, Panasonic and Ricoh in the bestseller lists, I know that their essence and picture quality remains unchanged from what a cheap, snapshot camera provided 20 years ago.
Granted, there is still demand for the PowerShot, Lumix and GR digital ranges from discerning photographers. But what is currently available here is priced around a grand. These aren’t pocket money-priced, impulse buys.
Potentially to their detriment, bigger, more traditional manufacturers haven’t pursued the stack 'em high, sell 'em cheap sales method (I’d almost forgotten that digicams were once staples of supermarket shelves) embraced by cheaper Chinese imports for years.
But that’s exactly what the current generation is asking for. That demand is not just based on anecdotal evidence – and watching my daughter’s friends go wide-eyed at her own vintage digicam – but reflects hard, current sales data from Japanese camera industry watcher CIPA.
While, as a camera reviewer, I’ve automatically compared any new tech with the very best of what I’ve experienced prior, a lot of the current discourse talks of quality being ‘good enough’. Not the best, but something acceptable.
That a badly shot and exposed image is now deemed ‘authentic’ – as in so bad, it’s authentic – is a further unexpected twist.
Kids today, eh? Continuing to confound, perplex and confuse parental expectations.
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