The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera | Hacker News Reader

The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera

nytimes.com

46 pointshecanjog40 comments

I am always a smidge skeptical about the Times and trend pieces, especially about the kids these days. Culture is so atomized and fragmented that I don’t know if we really have fads now.

But if it is a trend: yeah, that won’t last. I am an old Millennial, we had the analogous trend of shooting with instant film cameras and Polaroids. And then that trend fadedaway, because that isn’t what photos “are” now. Photos used to be a semi-scarce good—cost a lot per individual photo, and you had to wait for results. But now that photography is absolutely 100% ubiquitous, everywhere, photos are the most base commodity, and though you think you will appreciate these less-than-instant photos, the novelty fades away.

Photos are every where, but the ability to screen out the less than perfect ones has lead to everybody's photos looking the same. Background bokeh, perfect smiles. Most of the pictures I have from my teen years would not have made the cut, but the weird ones often represent memories better than a million perfect phone pictures.

On top of that, people insist you take a dozen photos of anything at all. If someone asks you to take their photo today, and you take just one and hand the phone back, you are seen as a sort of gruff asshole. Then the phone itself is recording a video for each photo, so you now have 30 frames to choose for each photo.

In college, I used to take formal portraits of friends, including developing and printing with chemicals in a darkroom, old school. My rule of thumb was we'd be lucky to get one good shot out of a roll of 36, even with careful choice of pose, costume, location, background, lighting, and generally knowing what I was doing.

Yeah if there is something gumming up the process people will understand. No one asks for a retake with a polaroid for example.

Aside from that, the process will probably just be:

- Trend inspires camera apps that recreate the effect

- One app takes off

- NYTimes publishes a trend piece on the app that takes off

- Olds start using this app unironically

- It falls out of fashion

- Everyone forgets it ever happened, again

Which seems likely considering this part of the story:

> But the comments by despairing millennials and people with more modern tastes were overwhelmed by those where users had tagged their friends and asked how to upload photos from their digital camera to their smartphone.

Eliminate the hassle and kids will do it more, then it'll go mainstream, then kids get sick of it, dump it, come up with another clunky old/dumb/cool, unhad-nostalgia revival (plush animals with audio recorders! portable TVs! leisure suits! uncut cocaine!), and repeat the cycle.

Every NYT trend piece reports it breathlessly, like this one is the one that's gonna stick.

It’s definitely a more refined type of clickbait— a step above the local news reporting on some fake drug trend. But film is alive and well!

A more accurate title for this might be, “Group of Gen Z people discover new hobby.”

I'm a younger millennial. Instant cameras are definitely a thing around me, but not a trend. It's more like someone buying an Instax and shooting with it every now and then just for the sake of experience of it. FWIW I know more people who shoot on film than with instant cameras.

I remember making fun of that 4-5 years ago in a film photohgraphy forum. We were viewed as hipsters for still using film and predicted people would sooner or later find out about these old CCD pieces of crap and start a new cycle

Hardcore consumerism and the fast cycles it brought us in the last 40 years is making us speedrun nostalgia. I also think some people would do anything to appear out of the norm

I'm not sure if its a big contributing factor, but prices for film stuff are very high now. Ten years ago you could get an olympus stylus epic with the prime lens for like $25 dollars, now I see examples on ebay going for $300. These digital cameras are the new $25 old camera now. It's also not cheap to buy and develop a roll of film, compared to buying a cf card reader.

Well the norm for their generation is terrible. Look up "instagram mental health".

https://archive.ph/b30hk

Modern point-and-shoots are amazing, too! As a professional I use the Ricoh GR IIIx on a regular basis and highly recommended it. Older models are also available and have somewhat of a cult following.

As an avid user of the same camera, I share this recommendation. While my iPhone sure is able of capturing some moments pretty well, the Ricoh is still way more capable and ergonomic. It is built by people who understand how do design that follows the need of their users and seems to be less concerned with bigger-is-better-marketing-number-games. Basically any parameter can be controlled with the same hand that holds the camera (I really tried it, shooting a moving target with pretty dynamic lighting while riding my bike [1]). I think that phones are lacking the haptic feedback is prohibitive to building muscle memory.

Also, people tend to react differently to a point-and-shoot camera than to a phone camera or a DSLR in my experience. That is because it feels less likely that the pictures end up on social media I’ve been told on request.

[1] https://44hz.de/assets/img/generated/R0001096-2-1200-9e3a59a...

Great work! I have had the same reactions. The camera seems much less threatening than a DSLR. I've been able to carry it anywhere in the world without anyone batting an eye.

I actually used the macro function to shoot this abstract photo on my homepage: https://daniel.fo

Awesome portfolio! It’s always impressive to see what can be achieved with this little thing.

Oh this is kinda funny for me. I just bought a 2009 model PowerShot for $10 last summer so that I could experiment with the Canon Hack Dev Kit, [0] and use it to get RAW photos on my trips without having to lug around or risk my DSLR. Some of the eBay listings of that same model are going up to $70 now.

The PowerShot has been pretty nice to have. Been developing the RAWs with DarkTable, and the PowerShot's auto mode is sufficient for me to develop a nice image, and it's better at capturing a random moment where I would otherwise have been trying to adjust my DSLR.

I'm also not surprised at this new trend. Most of my close Gen-Z friends have Fujifilm instant cameras or a PaperShoot, a digital camera that markets itself emulating the film look, and I could see them jumping on this.

[0] https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK

I should really use my digital camera. It's not even that old. But it is free of all the AI bs that is invading phone cameras. All that doesn't sit right with me. An example is the magic eraser stuff. Outdoor photos where you can erase all bystanders? idk something about a world where that's the norm skeeves me out.

I much prefer taking photos with my digital camera. The only thing where phone cameras have the edge is with the automatic GPS tagging. My inner nerd really likes to know the exact location where my photos were taken. The more so, the older they are.

Unfortunately, very few digital cameras have GPS tagging built itn. They nearly all require pairing with your smartphone to 'attach' GPS data via Bluetooth when you take a shot. But most of the time, I forget to activate this before going out with the camera.

This is one of the things that attracted me to the YN455 which has the exact same (Sony-manufactured) 20MP FT sensor as my Olympus PEN-F: https://www.hkyongnuo.com/productinfo/660161.html

My OG Canon PowerShot (Compact flash!) took better photos in many ways than almost every Point-and-Shoot digital camera I've had since. It just didn't have the megapixels.

But it was free of chromatic aberrations, didn't have bleed or other fringing on high-contrast edges. There were clear advantages to not pushing the limits of how many megapixels you can pack into a small sensor.

20 megapixels is 5000x4000 which is unpractical, and always scaled down on the web. The phone lens aperture might be too small to capture meaningful details beyond a certain distant from the camera, so 20 megapixels is probably physically overkill anyway.

Also, post/processing on the phone lightens underexposed regions and darkens regions that would be overexposed, and then evens white balance to a "nice" contrast.

So, understandably, people can find cameras with better optics and "raw" images better for artistic use.

Mid 2000s digital cameras were quite good and still better on some metrics than recent top of the line phones. However, their video quality was atrocious, as I was reminded recently looking at a 2004 vacation. My Sony had grainy 640x480 MPEG with mono 32khz sampled sound. Stills from the same day are gorgeous at 5MP.

I couldn't understand having a nostalgia for a time when cameras sucked. At least go film. Hell, go for disposable film cameras or something. Cheap 35mm point and shoots rule.

It’s because they’ve all grown up with great digital cameras that take a good neutral photo. To get any sort of interesting film effects they’ve had to apply filters after the fact. These 2000s point and shoots take photos that look like a “retro” filter but straight out of the camera so it’s somehow more authentic. Also it’s a entire piece of hardware dedicated to this one seemingly simple task, which is endearing. But it’s also digital so it’s familiar. It’s from 20 years ago which means it’s something their parents probably used, so it’s personally relevant nostalgia too.

> It’s from 20 years ago which means it’s something their parents probably used, so it’s personally relevant nostalgia too.

Oh my god this makes me feel ancient now.

  >Oh my god this makes me feel ancient now.

Interesting to muse on people's various "Now I feel ancient" moments.

For me it occurred about 5 years ago when I used to teach at a university. The first time I picked up an application form from an 18 year old applicant, which had the year of birth filled in as '2000', I thought it was a typo. It barely seemed like a handful of years since I'd been seeing in the new millenium at some sleazy nightclub --and here I was interviewing 'adults', who weren't even born then.

Except that they don't suck?

They were made by companies specializing in imaging, had decent sized sensors, glass lenses, and no fake computational/"AI" photography.

They were terrible, because the resolution was low in the early models.

And they were JPEG, so they were "fake" computational.

Resolution isn't important in small sensors, and the JPEG processing can't be compared to what phones do. A 2007 P&S isn't going to turn a grey overcast sky blue because it thinks skies should be blue like an iphone does.

  >They were terrible....

If these kids want to really push the envelope of crappy digital imagery, they should get themselves an early Apple QuickTake. Now that was a dire camera. A mighty 640x480 resolution and colour rendering that made poeple look like they were made of clay.

I wonder whatever happened to the company that made them? Probably went bankrupt, soon after inflicting that monstrosity on an unsuspecting world.

Cheap 35mm point and shoots are no longer affordable. The once thrift store staple mju-II is now over $300 and film prices are closer to $5-10/roll.

Because Gen Z grew up with parents who used these digital cameras, it makes sense to covet them now. And luckily they're easily attainable because they're cheap. Film is a luxury for a past that was never theirs.

Name an era when "stuff from 20 years ago" was not a nostalgia trend.

Any year before 1980

Grease the movie came out in '78 and fronted a mid 50s revival.

But yeah before that the eras dull for a while. Guessing WWII was popular in the 60s though.

Midnight in Paris explores nostalgia in two periods... 1920s and 1890s if memory serves.

People in the 1960s liked the idea of the gi joe perhaps, but they didn't want a 1940s/1930s america again what with the great depression and widespread malnutrition. I'm also not sure if midnight in paris is considering real nostalgia that people back then had, or present day nostalgia that we assume people back then probably had. The 1920s and 1890s were probably good decades to far fewer people than later decades that we are presently nostalgic about, for example. If you were rich maybe you partied lavishly in the roaring 20s, but if you were poor maybe your memory of that decade is dominated by the spanish flu, prohibition, and the stock crash that came a few years later.

Hmm, the writers/artists of 1920s Paris probably weren't filthy rich. Enough to do what they loved, rent a meager apartment, and knock a few back at the pub on the weekend. Mildly rich perhaps.

Also, a huge number of people is not usually required for nostalgia, just enough that a few get together and discuss or write it down.

Basically most ~45 year olds think back fondly to when they were ~25 and decide things are changing for the worse. Rather universal unless you grew up during a horrible time.

  >Name an era when "stuff from 20 years ago" was not a nostalgia trend.

I don't think this modern nostalgia is anywhere near as good as the nostalgia we had when I was a kid.

Word! Stuff from 20 years ago 20 years ago was hella better than stuff from 20 years ago today, amiright?

As if the NYT has the finger on the pulse with Gen Z?

A handful of hipsters in social media used older cameras, and now it's a general Gen Z thing?

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