In Japan, digicams are the new film | Hacker News Reader

In Japan, digicams are the new film

casualphotophile.com

67 pointsingve82 comments

As an amateur/hobbyist street photographer, there's another angle to using old/unusual cameras like digicams, Kodak instant cameras, etc:

It's adds to your credibility and reduces how threatening you appear when you snap a photo of someone in public. If you're using your phone, the subject's assumption will be that they are about to be plastered all over your social media. If you use a huge DSLR, you come across as creepy.

If you're using something odd, unusual, uncommon, like a film rangefinder camera or digicam, it's much more clear that your intentions are not evil, and that you simply really like photography. I've had curious people ask me about my camera after they notice me take a shot of them, which would never happen if I had used my phone.

Your mileage may vary, I have an anecdote to tell.

About a decade ago, I went to North Wales for vacation and obtained a 70's Soviet camera in pristine condition (Zorki-4K) at a car boot sale, along with the original case and strap.

A couple days later, it came to my attention there was a carnival nearby. And, frankly, I'm not sure if "carnival" is what it's called, but they had a Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, stuffy prizes, that kind of thing.

All I had with me was my Zorki and a couple rolls of b&w 35mm film. By the time I got there, it was dark, I had to push the exposure quite a bit, and I was so focused in trying to understand the gear I had, a couple of local policemen came to me and start asking why I was taking pictures.

Even after hearing my thick accent, seeing my vintage camera, examining my Russian passport, they weren't satisfied and wasted almost half an hour of my time checking some sex offender database for my name.

I didn't even bother to process the roll, none of those pictures had enough light.

In a time before I had any awareness of international security concerns, I was taking photographs of an airport and the planes taking off from an adjacent abandoned industrial lot. To my surprise, the federal police showed up and ask what I was up to. Turns out explaining that you're taking pictures of something because it looks cool is not going to cut it, I guess it's shallow enough of a reason for it to be suspicious. They asked to see my photographs, because it was all sunset silhouettes I think they were satisfied I wasn't trying to gather intel on the airport and they went on their merry way.

You should check out Auditing Britain on youtube.

this is true - I was at a street fair a couple years ago with an old Graflex 4x5 camera, just walking around. People came up to me asking to have their pictures taken. This in a town where most except the crazies keep to themselves. It was surreal.

This is why I love micro 4/3 so much. You can get some truly tiny, forgettable/retro-looking interchangeable lens systems that will take amazing photos.

The Panasonic gm5 is that camera. I own it and love it. It’s great for travel and takes wonderful photos.

For me, it's the Olympus PEN-F. Not the most ergonomic camera, but there is something special about it.

Looks so... classic and not much larger. Well, maybe 20% larger. I may have to get one!

Bah, I miss it. It should've been so much more. I bought my first 4/3 in 2012... but my interest faded. Flash forward a decade and I bought my first full frame last year. The new Canon RF lineup has some great potential, but damn I would've loved it all in a smaller package.

I have many photos with the blurry camera strap hanging over the lens. Never noticed till the film came back from the developer.

My eyephone pics often have the corner of a finger over the lens.

I suppose some might celebrate that as art :-)

P.S. The strap over the lens comes from using a rangefinder camera.

>If you use a huge DSLR, you come across as creepy.

I think that's mostly true for those who rely on telephoto lenses --which have a use, but for street photography suck because they flatten things out.

If you want good street photography photos most [d/SLR shooters] will use 35 to 50mm lenses. There are outliers but for most of the "candids" that is the usual range. With these people don't come across as any creepier than a photographer using any other equipment.

Personally I quite like 100-135mm for street photography. You still need to get close to your subject, though, and I don't use random people as the dominant subject of my photos.

The thing with cameras, is that there is a spectrum. If your camera is small, it's fine. If your camera is very large, it's mostly fine. It's when it's between the two that there's a bigger issue.

I would love to buy a new "instant" camera, but it's hard for me to find something at the prosumer level.

The Instax Mini by Fujifilm is a relatively "cheap" consumer solution [0].

What's its equivalent in the $600-$1,000 price range?

[0]: https://petapixel.com/2022/01/14/fujifilms-market-share-in-j...

Mint RF70 perhaps.

Do you want it to be portable or produce amazing images? Polaroid produces pull apart film for large format cameras.

There's really not much out there, because the chemistry of instant film is very difficult and without the film, there are no cameras. Fuji's only real competitor is The Impossible Project, now known as Polaroid, having bought the name. Their cameras are very nice, but their film is more expensive and technically inferior (though not necessarily aesthetically inferior, depending on your goals.) You can also buy film from them that is compatible with classic Polaroid cameras.

It's ironic- Fuji have a monopoly so they can charge however little they want.

Polaroid has always been worse than Fuji from a technical aspect, but that's always been part of the draw, I feel. It's why Instagram got popular in the first place as the filters mimicked the colors of a washed-out Polaroid still from various decades.

Wow I didn't know the current Polaroid isn't the Polaroid from back then. TIL

There's the Rolleiflex TLR Install Camera

https://mint-camera.com/en/shop/cameras/rolleiflex-instant-k...

Carry a printer such as a Canon Selphy (even the CP1300 can use a battery) and use a camera with WiFi.

Alternatively there are portable thermal printers with phone apps. Many will do 300dpi. But you are limited to black and white…though you’ll live.

The CP1300 is very awkward with its tray. The QX10 has no protruding tray, comes with a battery standard and the prints can be used as stickers. Otherwise the Fuji Instax line is pretty nice as well.

The CP series is less trouble than an inkjet and will print out of camera Jpgs from an SD card.

It might be less fiddly than a Polaroid back on a traditional film camera.

Then the question becomes: is there a prosumer-level portable printer out there? I haven't been successful in finding one.

I don’t know about prosumers, but I have a Selphy CP1300 for mobile printing. Its 300 dpi dye sublimation CYM is good enough for me.

It accepts SD cards and USB so it works with or without a post processing workflow. Or my phone via WiFi.

At retail, 4x6 output is about $0.30. That’s larger and cheaper than the instant film based systems. It is a price point where I don’t hesitate to print…my Canon inkjet runs about $0.15 per 4x6 at retail with media and ink…there’s no separate ink cost with the Selphy CP series.

Canon has been making the CP dye-sublimation printers for a long time. It is a solid system. The models just get more features over time. Aftermarket batteries are available (that’s what I have).

Finally, printing is not really in the middle of the prosumer wheelhouse these days. The CP is probably as good as you will do. Dye sublimation printers can travel well. Inkjets and lasers tend not to.

This probably doesn’t classify as a “digicam”—too much film camera styling, expensive, and has interchangeable lenses.

But since I’m apparently old enough to have digital camera nostalgia, I always did want an Epson R-D1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epson_R-D1

I have noticed that there has been a kind of resurgence in older digital cameras that used ccd sensors and different sensor filters compared to contemporary models. A lot of people feel like new cameras now are almost clinical in how they take pictures and because of that they lack personality that older, quirkier cameras had, a similar argument to why some vintage glass is desirable despite being technically inferior to what you can get now.

I find the color rendering of my 5D and 1Ds3 (2005 and 2007 designs) to be slightly, but noticeably, different from new cameras.

One quantitative difference is that there's less green sensitivity in the blue raw channel than modern sensors, which hurts their noise performance in warm lighting conditions.

I'm not sure exactly how that affects color rendering in terms of metamerism, but it is visible in my experience.

I have heard those complaints from a few--though not a lot of--people, but coming more from a video background that has always struck me as not really understanding how color works, either up front with aesthetic setting or on the back end with color grading.

And if you don't want to get into grading, Fuji loads up their cameras with film stock analogues that can give you all the quirk you ever wanted.

There's definitely a difference in the way CMOS and CCD sensors render colors. CMOS does not do well with highlights. C-41 process negative film is still the gold standard as far as dynamic range goes, but CCDs and non-Bayer CMOS sensors like the Foveon come far closer than modern Bayer CMOS sensors. They also tend to look warmer than modern CMOS images, especially older Sony sensors from the late 2000s. Comparing the RAW output from one of my older Sony Alpha DSLRs vs a Canon 6D from a few years ago it's definitely noticeable.

How do you compare the RAW data? If you're just loading up images in your editor then the editor is probably applying a camera specific profile that modifies colors and curve among other things. Color rendering depends on the lens too somewhat IIRC.

You're correct in that the demosaicing algorithms have a huge impact on image quality as well, I'm just comparing the finished result of whatever Lightroom spits out at me. It's entirely possible the camera profiles are affecting image quality but if you assume everything else is the same then I've generally found better highlight recovery on CCDs than CMOS sensors. Totally anecdotal, I know, but there's a decent bit of agreement on photography forums as well (I know how superstitious and subjective photographers tend to be, so take this all with a grain of salt.)

I've heard that argument from people before. I love that the stock images from my nikon z5 are fairly clinical. its the best starting point for when I load them up into dx0 photolab and start adjusting all the variables/adding film simulations.

What I love is that I can get a nice SHARP, low distortion rendering. You can't fix that in post.

Perhaps you caught this news story, but Epson very recently found 30 brand new unsold R-D1s and planned to distribute them somehow. Could be your chance! I suspect these are pretty collectable now, especially having used the Leica M mount.

One of the strangest things on that camera is it has a physical analogue gauge to display how much free space the memory card has, like the fuel level in an old car.

> https://petapixel.com/2021/11/02/epson-found-30-r-d1s-rangef...

Humor:

For just a moment I thought you were advising carrying an Epson scanner, with a power brick + battery, and pointing at the world, and scanning it. (Like people who use iPads for photography.)

I read this article, but I found no content discussing the title itself (that in Japan, digicams are the new film) - maybe I am missing something?

Same here. Probably clickbait.

Personally, I don't see anyone in Japan using digicams. Everyone's on iPhone.

Phone cameras are really good in daylight and getting better in low light, but there's one thing they'll never have and that's a decent flash. It doesn't matter whether Xenon flashtube or LED, to get real flash you need a real flash capacitor, and that's just not a priority in a slim smartphone.

Bonus if your old-school digicam also has a front element over half an inch in diameter and zooms to 10x. That still gives a satisfying "real camera" feel. I have a Panasonic ZS3 that I still use quite a bit for vacation snaps, and one of these days I hope to (inexpensively) snap up a Canon G series.

This is the main reason I bring a film point-and-shoot to parties and social events: people look way better with a “real” flash than they do with a phone flash. That and the dynamic range of film are still unsurpassed by just about anything in phone form.

As a (very) amateur photographer, this doesn’t make sense to me. Flashes indoors always look terrible in my experience, and modern smartphones are great in low light.

Modern smartphones perform very admirably in low light, but with some undesirable (IMO) tradeoffs: you get all kinds of weird artifacts from extrapolation, and the overall image frequently looks muddy compared to a low-light capture on a DSLR or mirrorless camera (which tend to look noisy instead). I do, however, regularly make those tradeoffs when I don't want to bug people with a flash or haul a full camera body to a show, though!

I think my use of flash indoors amounts to an aesthetic preference: I like the way skin tones come out on the combination of a ludicrous P&S flash and a "cheap" color stock like Gold 200. The tradeoff is glare and red-eye, both of which can be compensated for during compensation or with editing after the fact.

You can get very good results by turning the flash power down a few notches and pointing it at the ceiling.

For built-flashes that can’t be aimed I usually hold a white sheet of paper just in front of it.

The flash of P&S Film cameras have their own look that people like and are often associated with a "party aesthetic."

If the ceilings are white and not too high, aim the flash to bounce off of the ceiling; that looks way better.

That's mostly to do with the direction of the light from the flash and how bright it.

For example if you can make use of a bounce flash you can get a lovely soft fill light.

Light coming from very close to the axis of the lens as the dominant light source is going to make your scene look very flat.

It works well for a day light fill a few stops down but generally looks a bit crap as the only light.

Using flash on color negative film is a very different experience from digital. Xenon flashes do really well with film, and don't blow out highlights like digital, giving a smooth rolloff that's very pleasing to the eye.

> modern smartphones are great in low light.

This is only true if you only view images on a smartphone. Blow them up on a 23 inch or larger monitor and you'll notice tons of digital NR, artifacting, and other fuckery where the image processing algorithms have tried to recover detail and not really done so all that well.

More importantly: a cell phone's flash can never be significantly off-axis or diffuse. Flat and/or hard lighting is often worse than no lighting.

I bet you could get an off-camera flash to trigger off a cell phone's flash though.

Couldn’t you rig up a mirror to point the flash at the ceiling?

Seems simpler to buy a slave flash that's triggered by the burst of light.

I did a bit of googling and it seems it's a bit more complex than I realized (sync issues), but can be done.

handheld flash for phone:

https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Certified-Generation-Flashlight...

That's an interesting thought about flash.

Of course you could do something like turn your phone's flash down to the lowest setting, put a filter over it and use it to trigger an off camera flash. Something like an old Nikon SB-800 in SU-4 mode.

You could even hold the SB-800 in one hand and the phone in the other, sort of Bruce Gilden style. (dear gods what am I suggesting...)

Personally I love an X100 and its leaf shutter. My fav old digital camera.

I get this. I'm a big fan of Straight Out of Camera photography for the same reason. i.e. just use JPEGs rather than RAW files.

If you need RAW, use it obviously. To fix white balance or exposure later for example.

Letting the camera render your JPEGs though has the pleasing quality of being limited by the processing of camera model at the time you took the image.

Now that may not give you the "best" results but it will give you a certain look that's tied to the time you took the photo. A bit like using film that's not available any more.

I prefer shooting RAW+JPG

You get the best of both world, the interpretation of the camera and the possibility to render your own if the camera messed up. It's a lot easier after a trip to just delete all the raw images than to try to fix the white balance of a jpg.

When I started photography a decade ago, I tried to optimise by using Raw when I thought I could get a benefit (eg. night photography) and jpg for the rest. Now storage is cheap/fast enough that the impact is negligible and it can save you when the camera or you (manual mode ftw) mess up the exposure.

On my Canon 60D my jpegs seem to come out looking noticeably blue while my raws look pretty normal. I save in both formats for each pic, so I see the side-by-side constantly.

> I'm a big fan of Straight Out of Camera photography for the same reason. i.e. just use JPEGs rather than RAW files.

Same here. I bought a Fujifilm xe2 few years back and it is one of the best purchases I made. Gives excellent JPEGs straight out of the camera without needing all that RAW post-processing.

Cached link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:c7CQLu...

Some filmmakers are so enamored by digital camera aethetics that they opt to shoot entire feature films in digital cameras.

- Anno Hideaki (of Evangelion fame) shot his first feature Love and Pop in digicam.

- Lars von Triers's Dancer in the Dark won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000.

I got some of my favorite photos from a $20 digital camera. I had spent thousands on various early cameras and decided to go to the lowest quality tool in order to improve other aspects of my photography, such as lighting and composition. It’s low cost also let me put the camera in positions I wouldn’t let my expensive cameras near (mud, water, traffic, etc).

When the camera stopped working, I hard wired an external battery pack on it, but it was never the same with the modifications.

Unfortunately, I had the photos stored on the Photo Bucket service and they decided to dump old photos of free users. Yeah, I know better, but I didn’t realize how important the images would become.

I miss my Sony DSC U20 from 2004 or so. The focusing was really good for some reason - you could just point it randomly, press the button and it would instantly take a well focused picture unlike modern phone cameras that tend to wait a few seconds and then get it wrong. (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-Cybershot-DSC-U-Digital-Camera...). They weren't very long lived though - most seemed to pack up in a few years.

That camera (and a lot of similar cameras from around then) is fixed focus, so there's no focus delay, but you also can't adjust the focus either. With a fixed focus camera usually everything farther away than X is going to show up in focus (or nearly so) and anything closer isn't going to be in focus. But a lot of the time, you will be at least X away to frame your shot anyway, so no big deal.

I don't think so "The auto focus system works from 4 inches to infinity" https://www.steves-digicams.com/camera-reviews/sony/dsc-u20/...

Whoops, somebody put wrong info on the US amazon page[1] I had skimmed.

"The DSC-U20 offers a fixed-focus 5mm f2.8 lens"

Of course if I had read a bit more, it does mention autofocus in the next sentence. So anyway, that's not why it's fast then. Sorry for the misdirection.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Sony-DSCU20-Cyber-shot-Digital-Camera...

I'm considering getting a decent camera, or even going back to my old Iphone honestly. The images it took were so much more photorealistic than my current Iphone. It's like modern Iphones oversaturate everything and add trashy these unrealistic colors to things like the sky. I've tried to capture beautiful sunsets, but even by adjusting exposure I still cannot nail what was once so easy to get.

I even wonder sometimes if is using some kind of algo adding colors based on what it thinks things should look like? Don't know enough about this stuff.

Because a tiny sensor could only do so much due to those pesky laws of physics, the latest trend in mobile camera tech is so-called "computational photography", where they use a shitload of algorithms and AI to enhance your pictures. And I think they do segment them somewhat to apply these "enhancements" selectively?

Anyway, no idea about iOS, but many Android phones are capable of capturing raw pictures that you could then process however you wish in Lightroom or whatever else you prefer.

I believe there are apps on the app store that do this sort of thing, Halide[1] comes to mind as something I've read about, but I've never used it.

[1]: https://halide.cam/

It sounds like you're describing HDR (high dynamic range), which your iphone uses by default when image contrast reaches some threshold. The effects can be unwanted, to say the least. Have you tried disabling it?

Nikon CoolPix 950 FTW. I have at least 4 of them. Just wishing I could fine more Harrison Duraline 630μ IR filters.

After seeing some of my party photos from 15 years ago on Facebook I got nostalgic for the excessive flash type photos that the digital pocket cameras of that era took. Picked up a Canon Ixus (3 Megapixal) for 10 Euros and have been having a lot of fun with it.

This article makes me want to buy something even older.

It can become an expensive hobby but Canon Sure Shot Max is a blast from the past.

Not just Japan, it's the new take on filters for the cool kids in Asia. China/Philippines/Indonesia - look at their local market places for camcorders and digi cameras and even film too an extent. More Instax, but even regular film devlopment and such.

A similar reason to using the Game Boy Camera today.

Art is what happens when people try to surmount the limitations inherent to their tools.

I'd pay to watch unique GBC pictures. I would hardly pay to see pictures taken from an iphone, because I can do that myself.

GB, not GBC. The GBC added a custom color pallete over a GB with a button combo on start and that's it.

Game Boy Camera

Ah, sorry.

Why does this website require a database connection to render a static site? This trend infuriates me, and PHP developers are the worst offenders. So many PHP sites can be static assets but no, for some reason they use MySQL. Grinds my gears.

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

So many sites run wordpress cause it's easy. Wordpress doesn't cache by default unless you run on one of the major hosts like kinsta or wp engine. Wordpress needs MySQL. Can you really fault them for picking out a standard CMS instead of rolling a static site that requires someone to be slightly technical.

because it's easy to use for end users (non programmers)

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