640by480: Instagram Clone for Vintage Digital Cameras | Hacker News Reader

640by480: Instagram Clone for Vintage Digital Cameras

640by480.com

86 pointskscottz73 comments

Brian Eno once said: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided."

So, Instagram emulated cheap, plastic film cameras and now we've finally moved on to OG digital cameras...

CD's had no distortion.

IIRC CDs were the first use of dithering in audio. It's not distortion, but both it and distortion change the signal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

While its true that dithering changes the original signal, dithering is a necessarily evil that prevents quantization errors as a result of downsampling 24-bit+ source material due to CDs being 16-bit. It’s a choice between some barely audible noise, or some weird spectral artifacts..

I was under the impression that the dithering level is well below our threshold for hearing. Can someone confirm or deny that?

Dithering modulates the least significant bit of the audio signal, so at normal listening levels it should be inaudible. Of course, one can amplify the silence by 120dB or so and hear the noise.

Sources: http://www.dspguide.com/ch3/1.htm

https://www.bruce.audio/post/2022/05/26/dithering/

I often wondered about the noise I was hearing from my Discman with headphones. You'd hear this hiss when you pressed play, even before the CD loaded, so it was probably the cheap consumer audio hardware rather than the CD format itself.

I think an additional layer of hiss would show up when it actually started playing.

Indeed, no inexpensive portable digital electronics was going to give you perceptible-noise-free 16-bit audio.

Depending on how the original audio was mastered, it could also have it's own hiss in the sound data if the CD itself. You can tell if you load the raw CD data into a wave editor and see low amplitude noise where you'd expect silence.

This can be a contentious area as a lot of different sources will throw different figures for the noise floor of a CD. I recall anywhere from -98 to -130dB. Either value, at the minimum level, is something like 4.6dB. Which is completely inaudible in normal listening conditions.

Your comment has strong “well, actually …” energy. We’re talking about faulty blocks from physical abrasions and the two common error mechanisms (skipping or repeating). They were both “weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty.”

I recall reading a music artist (Akufen, maybe?) would scribble over CDs with a marker to get them to skip, then use the resulting sounds to make music.

Records would skip as well due to worn tracks, worn needle or someone bumping the turntable.

CD Reed-Solomon forward error correction did make that pretty rare though. You had to abuse a disc a fair amount to overcome the coding.

"Vinyl" would make more sense in this context.

When I first used CD music it was ugly to my ears. It was full of high frequency sound compared to the hissy tape. I got used to it and all this digital sound DSP was available to change the sound to your liking.

In theory yes, but in reality it has a plenty of distortion from various sources.

For instance the jitter - the early CDs didn't have a super stable clocks that governed the conversion, so the slight changes of the pace when D/A conversion takes place would create slight distortion and it would also affect intersample peaks making it more apparent. Then you have the non-linearity of D/A converters themselves that were essentially acting like waveshapers.

Neil Young once said: Did you ever go in a shower and turn it on and have it come out tiny little ice cubes? That's the difference between CDs and the real thing – water and ice. It's like gettin' hit with somethin' instead of havin' it flow over ya.

For real, that's a very "ok boomer" phrase

What is "the real thing?" Vinyl? The other day the audiophiles were aghast when they found out their vinyls had digital intermediate steps. Yawn.

The hiss and popping of vinyl definitely has a nostalgia aspect, but digital is much better. Get a good digital source though

Many musicians play musical instruments and sing and so forth.

Fyi the material records are made from is called vinyl.

Thanks, fixed - this is a confusing word :)

Did you really just ask what the “real thing” is? It’s live music.

I'd argue that in some cases, the live show is not the "reference form" of the a sing. It might be the product of multiple sessions mixed, or a pair-up they can't do at the live show.

Presumably the real version of recorded music is live music.

> 640x480

Just like God told him it has to be.

Needs to be 16-colors though, with that distinctive dithering effect.

I believe the comment is a reference to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

Yes, both comments. RIP, King Terry.

RIP Lord Terry

Do your server a favor and add thumbnails for list view. There are some huge 2MB images slowing down loading.

The real instagram feels like it compresses images down to below 640x480, so this is definitely an improvement.

I'm curious what a vintage digital camera is.

I've got a Casio QV-10A[1] somewhere that almost certainly counts? Can't beat the constant fear that you could brick it if the batteries ran out at the wrong time.

[1] https://cameralegend.com/tag/qv-10a/

what about sony mavica fd5 where images is saved on floppy 3'5

I still have one of those! It has a floppy drive but also supports the Memory Stick.

My earliest surviving digital photos were from this camera. Made a satisfying sound when it wrote to disk, too.

Mine too, I just posted one to the site, it shot them at 800x600 though :)

https://www.vintagedigitalcameras.com/

I remember a Kodak dc210 whose main feature was 1 megapixel resolution, meaning one could get a 4x6” print that wouldn’t look pixelated. It had zero control (no aperture/shutter speed settings and only crappy slow fixed focus) and took ages to take a picture, meaning it was unusable for moving subject photography. It was still better than other cameras of the time which only achieved vga resolution.

Apple QuickTake 100! I remember using it in 8th grade and was pretty amazed with its 640x480 goodness when the alternative was waiting a week to finish a roll of film, drop it off at the grocery store photo counter, and pick it up the next day or two (no way would my parents pay the extra $2 surcharge for 1 hour processing).

i was thinking of the gameboy camera module

"Vintage Digital Cameras" is a phrase that makes me feel old.

Funny little idea. Not sure how much traction it’ll get :-) but the creator likes to fiddle with some cool nerdy things it seems [1]. Made me think it’d be interesting to have an Instagram clone that downsamples the media and maybe makes it monochrome (or colors more monotone at least) and removes some of the most offensive ML smart rankings, just to have a more calmer less addictive media consumption site?

[1]: https://bbenchoff.github.io/

I love that his page forwards hn users to a tweet[1] that coincidentally accurately describes the content that still thrives on this site.

[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/violenceworks/status/148712570863...

The real shame is why the linked page even gets referral information at all (and why we cannot disable it on a browser)...

I'd love to have a browser setting to just completely disable "Referer:" headers and blank out `document.referrer`. Like, clearly hosts can control referral information to high granularity (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...) but why can't users... (actually apparently you can set this for Firefox)

I agree. I’m surprised Safari of all browsers doesn’t at least provide an option to obscure this.

At least for cross-domain URLs. Within a domain I could understand context, back buttons etc being useful.

firefox has 'network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy' to send referer depending on domain

0 - no restrictions (default), 1 - base domain match, 2 - fqdn match

Useful how? Within a domain/origin you can already track/control this stuff with a plethora of things: cookies, URL params, localStorage, JS access of history to implement fancy back behavior...

Exactly, so it isn't a security/privacy leak, so there's no harm in leaving it on.

No, the other forms require sites to opt-in whereas this just sends the information whether the site wants/needs it or not.

There is plenty of harm in just this fact alone, because tracking via the other methods is transparent: you know sites are doing internal tracking if you see them being used. With referral information sent by default you have no idea whether the site uses the information or just ignores it.

Either way the important thing shouldn't be how much referral information should be sent (because clearly people disagree on that). Rather all browsers should let you customize this if you want to.

Well, he's not really wrong

(there's still good content here of course, but I'm sure the tech-crypto-bros are the ones most likely to cause trouble on his site)

"So anyway, I updated my blog so all referrers from the orange website are redirected elsewhere. Because fuck those tech bros, and doubly fuck the mods for not just banning these fucks. They didn't ban them in the beginning, so now it's all full of crypto nazis."

How is this site full of crypto nazis exactly? Like seriously dude, how does this "accurately" describe the content on hn?

This experience is distinctly "looking at a vintage website on a 2022 monitor".

The only things missing are the diagonal pinstripe background, drop shadows & glass borders round the thumbnails, and glossy reflections & lens flare on the images.

"640x480 ought to be enough for anybody" --Bill Gates (paraphrased)

Lol my first digital camera was a Mavica and I don’t think I once was under any impression that the quality was better than my 35mm point and shoot.

They were basically Polaroids for nerds. Nobody else took them seriously.

They were fine for the generation of websites optimized for 800*600

They were great for putting beanie babies on eBay. Not great for printing out on those early inkjets.

Why does the front page give off a creepy vibe?

On mobile it looks like a captcha where you identify buses or stoplights.

I think the front page might be a little too exploitable from the looks of it right now (currently plastered with The Thing).

It looks like you can upload larger images and it does not crop nor resize them.

Complete with a top-down loading.

What Flickr wants meant to be

Or 500px

If the site owner is here, you might want to take off the "width: 50%;" on the container. This makes it centre properly on narrower widths.

Consider using a css grid instead of a table too.

Ah the good* old days of table layouts! Had a whole book about how to achieve all kinds of page layouts using tables pre the CSS3 days.

*: Not actually good.

HN is a table layout.

It does. What I like about HN is they are very conservative about making changes. They have done some work in the past to make it more mobile friendly, but clearly they kept the table layout.

The upside to this is the familiarity - which is something I love. I am not keen on redesigns unless the original design was really really bad. If I am even using your thing, it isn't that bad!

Too many companies redesign their sites, for almost no advantage to the user. This also applies to all software. For example look at Windows. Horrendous multiple levels of dialog style and behavior of various vintages. This leads to very hard discoverability in Win11. Ubuntu is so much nicer and hasn't changed much over the years from what I can tell.

The "old frowned upon thing" + "familiarity" can trump "keeping up with so called best practice" + "great I have to relearn this thing I was familiar with".

> Consider using a css grid instead of a table too.

That would not be vintage.

How is this anything like an instagram clone at any point in time?

It's a website where you can upload and browse pictures. Like Instagram.

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