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Comment by hettygreen | Hacker News Reader

This is just make hipsters get into old point and shoot digital cameras... good thing I kept my Canon A540.

All the subtle trickery manipulation that the smart phone's doing to reality is concerning. Smoothing people's faces, making their eyes pop, enhancing the shit out of the colours, and now plopping fake objects overtop of the real ones.

Future concerns of this technology should range from a low-key disconnect from reality, to the complete inability to photograph certain objects or locations.

Imagine dusting off a 30 year old digital camera, finding some AA batteries to put in it, snap a selfie and then realizing just how ugly we all are and how washed out the polluted world actually looks without a bunch of narcissism-pandering enhancements.

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Not sure about hipsters, but it's apparently somewhat of a trend with young people.

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

Young people are opting for point-and-shoots and blurry photos."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/technology/digital-camera...

They are realizing that these things are all toys and fashion so you might as well save money and just buy old stuff and above all take photos.

I think it's great. It's the exact opposite of the person who spends all their time gear shopping and never using the gear.

I can highly recommend older Nikon DSLRs and older AF-D or manual focus AI-s lenses. Youbhet full frame bodies, the awesome D700 for example, and a very decent set of lenses rivaling the holly trinary for around the same price you pay for a Z50 with a kit lens. Nothing wrong with a Z50, it is a great camera. But the old, used gear is just such better value IMHO. Ai-s lenses are getting more expensive so since a couple of years so.

The remaining budget can go into going to nice places to shoot nice photos, and to print them nicely and large enough to put on your wall choice.

I picked Nikon, but I assume Canon works as well.

DSLRs are insane value right now as everyone jumps to mirrorless. Which is just silly fashion, IMHO. (Or, if you're like me and prefer optical viewfinders, kind of important). I'm jazzed that people are abandoning things like cds, physical books, and DSLRs - more for me. An aside: I can't believe people have so quickly gone from "geez should I even shop online" to "hey lets put my whole live online and burn the physical copies". That happened in the last 20 years. No engineer or risk analyst in the world could say this is a good idea. Computers, software, and the internet need to be stable for 100+ years to be relied on to that degree, IMHO.

Oh totally! I won't deny that mirrorless has some advantages, but it hasn't devalued dslr to the extent people think it has.

If you start from scratch, used mirrorless bodies are good value as well. Lenses tend to be on rather expensive so. I consider myself lucky so, old screw drive AF Nikkor lenses don't auto-focus on mirrorless, and thus rather cheap atm. The old AI-s lenses on the other hand are manual focus anyway, and since they are optically really good, are becoming more expensive now.

canon is also a great choice because the ef mount is larger than most other dslr and it can fit pretty much every dslr lens that exists (vintage and new) without the need for an expense adapter that has optical elements. You can even 3d print them

Between Nikon and Canon, the choice comes down to taste and personal preferences. Both are equally good. Same goes for mirrorless between Nikon, Canon, Sony, Fujifilm or Panasonic. Whatever you pick, it is not wrong or a mistake.

I'm 40 and did the same thing, bought a cheap analog camera with black and white film to shoot fun photos on my birthday party :) The film is still at the lab, but I guess it's worth the wait.

I love my Canon AE-1 but dang it's expensive to actually use.

The G9x Mark II, Sony RX100, Panasonic LUMIX and similar 1" sensor cameras are awesome though and I don't think they've gotten too crazy with computational photography. I imagine some color processing modes might be doing a bit of work though.

> Smoothing people's faces, making their eyes pop, enhancing the shit out of the colours,

Our brains do far worse stuff with our memories. Not sure how relevant 'high fidelity' is to people who mostly use phones for memories

That’s what photos used to be good for. They don’t fudge stuff like our brains.

What about and white photos though?

Their representation was consistent for one thing. For another it was well known that a) the world isn't black and white and b) b&w is just the tech we have right now. For a third thing, once color came out, black and white was still popular because it was a known art form that exposed characteristics of a scene which a color photograph might miss. So it was fudging images in a way that was predictable.

Compare this to AI/ML-manipulated photos that aren't labelled as such. In this case we no longer know if it's our brain fudging a picture or our camera, so we are starting to lose an arbiter of truth.

Side-rant but it'll be weird when this makes it into high-end cameras that save RAW images. Will RAW still be "raw?" I don't know enough to say.

Black and white photos are just missing information - specifically color. No new made up information is introduced.

I regularly take photos of text etc because I am not going to remember it. If a photo of a config password is AI fucked into showing the wrong digits, there’s a real problem.

“Future concerns of this technology should range from a low-key disconnect from reality…”

This phrase could cast a broadening net with each year’s new tech.

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