Vintage digicams are an artistic statement
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– Brian Eno
Nobody is nostalgic for ADAT.
After I graduated, I stuck to the all digital stuff and a couple of folks from my program and I went on to start a film company, and win 3 Emmy awards, over the years I was still in film I saw people bring various analog film things to set to try and see if they could somehow include it, be it some film type, some vintage light panel or whatever, but it was always just fad, there was a period of time everyone brought 35 to set just to "see if we could fit it in later" - it never got cut in, it was too difficult to match it to the digital.
It was always a fad bringing film to set, but those that did, I always admired they wanted to make that statement, no matter how foolish they seemed to many on set, I always appreciated the art they brought to the table.
I recently bought a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P5 with a broken back screen, honestly I've had so much fun with it, I went out with my wife this last weekend, left the phone at home and brought the Sony, had a blast looking at the frames when I got home, do recommend it.
Sorry for this random ass post, just this is my fav kinda HN content :D
For a recent movie, Strange Darling was filmed in analog. Great movie and looks unparalleled.
Dune was filmed on digital, transferred to analog, and the scanned back to digital for distribution.
I guess my point is, that there is some magic in analog. Whether the inherent limitations of the form, or by introduced randomness of the chemical process, or by placebo assumption of “realness”.
We live in an age of Netflix enforcing all shows to look exactly the same and even adding de-aging filters to actors. The gulf between the perceived reality of analog film and digital has never been larger. So yeah, analog excites me.
You don't need to print to film to dither and reduce banding, it's trivial to add grain to achieve the same (either digitally or via film grain scans which are overlayed).
The film outs are just a different method of getting a film tone, curve, and grain - though honestly I've done some where people were unable to identify which was the digital master and which was the post film out version. Much of the time it's just an ego boost for the director and dp and a competent colorist can easily recreate it. That said, it's fun to do and means less work on my end so I don't discourage it.
> 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.
Some people might even be nostalgic for Bing. (People are nostalgic for Clippy after all.)
In other words.... you are not nostalgic for the thing itself. (The thing kind of sucks.) You are nostalgic for your childhood.
I'm also not super clear on how digital video would have jitter in a way that analog video wouldn't?
I totally agree with his overall sentiment, I'm just a bit confused on the specific examples.
As for digital video jitter, I can think of MPEG compression artifacts, both spatial (e.g. DCT mosquito noise) and temporal (e.g. motion compensation errors, periodic keyframe refreshes).
Analog videos never stutter but digital formats tend to have non-constant processing cost and do stutter occasionally. Maybe he's referring to that?
Ha, that's a great description. Yes -- you're hearing more high frequencies.
Which is by design, because they're there in real life. Vinyl cuts off the highest frequencies, as do MP3's.
Nothing to do with first generation though -- if you listen to a FLAC on your computer with wired headphones the highest frequencies are still there.
It's a feature not a bug. :)
But when my kids started taking pictures with these cameras, I realized that the pictures were, subjectively at least, better.
We were in the Rockies and the pictures taken on their iPhones are sharper, more vibrant, but those photos lack perspective. It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.
Something else happens with digital cameras. My kids think more intentionally about the framing of the shot. They move into better positions. They think about light and shadows. With the iPhone it’s click and forget. So that contributes to better photos too.
Even with the point and click models that my kids bring to social gatherings, there’s clearly a sense of posture and special-ness about the photos that changes the dynamic more than everyone posing for a phone selfie or photo.
There are obvious limitations. My kids didn’t fully understand why older cameras perform so poorly in darker light without the flash.
But otherwise they really love their digital cameras. My eldest is studying abroad in France and it’s a real treat to get a batch of digital camera shots of life in Paris.
I now buy digital cameras in bulk and repair them slowly as a hobby and then resell them on eBay. It gives me a little spending money. I avoid the TikTok trend cameras - they’re too expensive to buy - but I make some nice pocket money on selling the in between models that perform really well.
And my kids get to pick their favorite models now and then.
Can you post a representative mountain photo from each camera? I'm very curious what generates this feeling for you.
Yes, vinyl is technically an inferior sound quality to FLACs. I'm happy to rant all day about the flaws of vinyl. I personally prefer high quality digital.
However on a good pressing there is an undeniable difference to a good vinyl pressing. It's not dissimilar from why I said that my kids frame the shots on digital cameras in ways that are different using an iphone. The processes that surround vinyl are different (better?) than those we use for digital mastering. Engineers pay more attention to vinyl mastering than they do digital. While there's a lot of shitty USB turntables, even those are often far better than how most people listen to music digitally which is often on iphones and shitty laptop speakers. The physicality of vinyl manufacturing incurs requisite different attention and processes that sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) results in a "better" listening experience.
Could you get the same "better" listening experience with lossless digital? Yes. but most don't. So vinyl is "better."
I call BS. I know people who work in music mastering, and I've asked about this. They use the same digital masters for the digital release and for vinyl.
They know people will buy vinyls if they want to no matter what if they want to, so it doesn't matter if the digital master isn't perfectly attuned to the vinyl medium
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. If the engineers you know do that, you don't know good engineers.
edit: I can't reply to tekla's comment, so I'm editing here. It's frustrating on Hacker News for an expert - like myself, who has sat in on dozens of mastering sessions - to be disputed by someone who "knows some people." I'll clarify further. Do some engineers use the same mixes for vinyl as they do for digital? Sure. They're not good engineers. Or the customer hasn't paid enough (it's usually about $60-$100 per song to master per format). Vinyl is a drastically different medium than digital - of course - and any decent engineer will 100% mix differently and accordingly. If there are artists reading this and your engineer is using the same mix, fire them. You're paying a lot to press to vinyl so do the followthrough and get vinyl-specific mastering.
Here's a good article from an engineer I have worked with many times on why mastering for vinyl is different:
https://www.oregonlive.com/music/2014/11/does_vinyl_really_s...
People who are the type to buy vinyls will buy them no matter what, as long as its not obviously a bad press. Why would any sound engineer bother to do extra work for such a low volume, high chance of losing money, PITA to work with medium, unless they were some sort of super artist.
For my own part, we had to recut the lacquers on a vinyl release five times to get it right, because the nature of the mix created a middling sound that bounced the needle around and caused intense surface sound. Once we solved that problem, the pressings sounded great.
Obviously with cassettes the profit margin isn't there to justify the additional expense of mastering, and to my ears cassette mastering rarely sounds different than the digital master (maybe some slightly different leveling). I believe NAC actually has a mastering guide to master to cassettes kicking around. But...not sure anyone follows it.
Just to be honest, I don't doubt you're a great engineer. But if you weren't mastering specific to format...I wouldn't hire you. Increasingly we've gone to vinyl-exclusive engineers on bigger projects, because it's so crucial to get the sound right at the start and poor vinyl mastering can cause problems months down the manufacturing line that are costly.
But yes I think we are on the same page and agree! A single mix. And from that mix are multiple master cuts specific to format.
Nah, they don't. There is always a vinyl master. I have several here from records I have released. It may well be made from the digital master, but vinyl needs low and high end roll off and mono low end bass to stop the needle jumping out of the grooves.
I would also agree that the vinyl master wouldn't have more attention outside of dealing with the limitations of the format. Most mastering engineers are working on pretty tight schedules, for not much money, so it wouldn't make sense for them to take longer on the vinyl master (outside of the known limitations). There isn't any aspect of vinyl which is (technically) better. So, it's not like they can improve on the digital master.
This isn't really true from my perspective. There are a lot of factors as to why vinyl mastering gets more attention. It's harder to do right, so there's that. Artists will often pay far more attention to the vinyl master, so it's a crucial A&R issue. But there's an issue on digital master, we can easily (more or less) change the material on DSPs. It's not fun but it's possible. On vinyl, mistakes made on the mastering side may not even reveal themselves until past the test pressing stage and can be very costly.
> its almost always based off the digital master that is than modified to not fuck up on vinyl medium
This might be true at some levels of skillsets, I guess. But in my circles for at least the last ten years, the vinyl master is sourced from the original mix, not a digital master. In fact, on larger projects more independent labels and artists are hiring vinyl-specific engineers who can oversee what is a very physical process from mastering to lacquer cutting in one sitting. Having sat in an a number of sessions, there's a lot of attention to the ways in which the master is effecting the physical nature of the cut. This is actually how it used to be when vinyl was the imminent format, for reasons I've already stated (cost). In fact some vinyl plants had apartments for record label people to stay on site and oversee the vinyl mastering process.
The reasons that people might prefer it (subjectively) are:
* The notion that it's 'warmer' - all this means is the high-end frequencies have been rolled off
* The subtle distortion effect you get from feedback through the needle. The needle, as well as picking up the groove, acts like a microphone for any sound nearby (i.e. the speakers playing the record). This then feeds back through the same loop, creating a subtle chorus effect (very subtle).
I've played in enough large nightclubs with massive sound-systems to know that my records sound completely different in them. The feedback is more extreme, so the chorus effect is more pronounced. This often turns into bigger low end at higher volumes. It can also be problematic if you have a record that's been cut too quietly. You need to turn the gain up on the mixer, picking up more of the club speakers, eventually creating audible feedback hum.
But, by having the same 'effect' on every record played, there then seems to be a consistency of sound from one record to the next. Creating something that's more 'glued' together.
It absolutely comes across. If you know what you're listening for then you understand, but most people just feel it. It's technically distortion, but humans like distortion. Anything too clean is boring to the human ear.
So, vinyl, is not technically better. But, it has some artefacts that are pleasing to the human ear. And, I suspect, that's what people pick up on subliminally (if they're not just trying to be boring hipsters).
I'm not disagreeing - just interested. I actually roll off the highs via EQ for almost all my headphones and speakers.
The distortion and chorusing are definitely aspects of 'warmth' too. So, it's not just about the highs and lows. Producers absolutely try to 'warm up' their digital sound sources, stems, and masters with harmonic distortion. I guess you'll always get a bit more with vinyl.
I think some of this is the culture of the industry itself. The major recording studios, engineers, etc. were on a 'war against distortion and noise' from the early 50s. Then digital came along and suddenly it was possible to have low-noise floors and pretty much zero distortion through digital sound sources (plugins).
Because digital was deemed to be 'cold', there has been a bit of a backlash against that in the past decade or so:
* Major mixing console manufacturers, like SSL, after decades of trying to make their mixers as clean as possible are now releasing desks like the Origin [1] which are throwbacks to their late 70s desks. Every classic compressor, EQ, delay, flanger, phaser... from the 50s onwards, still exists either in original form or cloned-form. People are still buying the equipment of the past to make music. And digital plugin manufacturers are stil releasing plugins that try to emulate the old gear.
* New genres appeared like 'lo-fi' [2] that actively does what you say. It tries to degrade the sound for digital too.
* The fact that vinyl isn't just still here, but resurgent, is I guess more evidence of that.
But I still think, to a certain extent, that professionals in the industry want to use the full range and accept that some of it will be lost with a vinyl press. Brighter music is perceived to be louder, so on a radio or something like that, it will cut through better and be more likely to be noticed. I think the recent end of the 'loudness wars' [3] may well see some changes toward releases with different EQ curves.
I own over 10,000 records. I don't buy them because they're 'warmer', I buy them for the UX! I have a terrible memory, but I remember the sleeve of every record I own. I don't know what they're called, just "it's the green one"! I think the warmth argument is slightly overplayed, but I also understand why subliminally people might feel that records are subjectively better because of it.
[1] https://solidstatelogic.com/products/origin
[2] https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-lofi-explained
On the physical aspect - I do miss that from CDs, especially looking through liner notes. Streaming in particular made remembering albums difficult for me. I still find the convenience (especially when it comes to storage!) of digital worth the trade-off though, so now I have everything ripped or bought digitally and available from my media server. It's not quite the same as browsing through CDs, but it's a lot closer.
10k records is quite the commitment - that must need a dedicated room? My ~300 CDs were annoying enough to store, lol.
Exactly this. If you're destroying the dynamic-range of your song so that it sounds louder, only for it to be turned down based on perceived loudness (LUFS [1]), then all you're doing is making your song worse.
"Ended" might be an extreme statement, you still need to maximise loudness, but destroying dynamic range, to the extent that was happening before, isn't needed any more.
> I still find the convenience (especially when it comes to storage!) of digital worth the trade-off though
Me too. I play most music off Spotify, don't have an issue with that, just need to find out what everything I like was called :D
I was a DJ at a pro-level for a long time (from 1999), so vinyl was how I got fresh underground music each week. Going to record stores listening to what had just come in. Used to get vinyl promos too, but those have long since finished, all promos are digital now.
I haven't really taken DJing seriously for more than a decade now, but if I'm buying music to play then I still buy vinyl (again for the UX, not some pretentious 'vinyl is better' reasons). For home listening though, digital is better quality and easier to access. Personally, I prefer having the extra fidelity also.
> 10k records is quite the commitment - that must need a dedicated room?
Two rooms, under the stairs, and some are used as to partially acoustically treat my studio [2], although that doesn't make them particularly easy to access! Not all vinyl was made equal ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUFS
[2] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9swzlgk3wszeq6jfjxmw1/IMG_141...
I'm not an audiophile, but that's actually probably objectively true, but for non-obvious reasons that are not clear if you're just looking at technical specs. Digital music can sound better, but opens up the technical possibility of prioritizing other things, which are in fact prioritized.
IIRC, it was the "loudness war." Digital audio capable of a much wider dynamic range than vinyl, but the record companies choose to throw most of that away in order to make the music sound "louder." Technical limitations of vinyl prevent those shenanigans (I believe the grooves would be too wide or something), which forces the music to be mastered in a better way than sounds better.
For this reason buying modern albums on vinyl doesn't make much sense to me besides for collectibility and sentimentality. I have a few hundred LPs sitting in my closet behind me but it's for those reasons, not because I have any delusions about a non-existent inherent sonic advantage of the medium.
Are you saying you prefer the bottom ones?
Ultimately, photography is less about the quality of the equipment, and more about what you do with it (cliché, I know), and phone cameras are pretty high quality but clip your wings by taking all control away from you.
Your kids might benefit from an entry-level Sony a6000 or a6100 (the a6000 is ancient but shockingly capable) or equivalent, and some practice with raw processing software (Lightroom Classic is the default choice here, but Darktable is great if you don't want to give Adobe your money. Apple Photos is a pretty damn decent beginner option too).
That's what I hate about cameras, the 'ancient' model is still $450 used and ~$850 new.
I'm never going to be bale to unsee this.
I dunno... I've never seen anything like the photo of the mountain (IMG_6491) in real life. The reality is that our eyes have an extremely wide range of contrast. But in that photo, the clouds are blown out and all the immediate scenery is essentially black. In real life, clouds don't get blown out, and you can see everything around you just fine in every situation where there's a big blue sky above you. The iPhone photo is a much more accurate approximation of what our eyes perceive.
And the poster claims the mountains feel like more massive objects on the older camera. I'll respectfully disagree -- on the older camera, I can't judge their size because I can't see any of the landscape leading up to them for comparison. Whereas on the iPhone, I intuitively feel how massive they as my eye is drawn up the road, up the valley, up into the sky. I have full context for comparison.
Of course, there's no arguing with taste. :)
But maybe I can never unsee this either -- I appreciate the iPhone even more now...
A big difference between smartphones and cameras is the focal lengths. On an iphone, a 48mm focal length is considered tele, and the main cam is 24mm. That will surely take away the perspective from the Rocky mountains, if not your nose.
They get confused, because one tends to / has to adjust one's position to obtain the framing one wants given one's focal length choices...
Might be due to a combination of sensor size, focal length on the older camera, and the distance to the subject.
It's partly about sensor size and tech., partly down the the limitations of tiny smartphone lenses, and partly down to what's added (or should that be taken away) by the "computational photography" software in modern smartphones.
It's those filters, and the colour reconstruction algorithms that change colour response, not the underlying sensor.
I'm in love with this phrasing.
It's similar to this whole discussion about CD vs. vinyl in one of the threads here: CD is technically a far superior medium, but the mastering engineers are too damn lazy to use it properly, and instead compress everything to hell ("brickwalling") and eliminate all dynamic range, whereas the vinyl mastering engineers apparently put a lot more effort into their work, so vinyl ends up sounding better.
The gecs as a music act is a weird cross between extremely scuffed and extremely glossy, so the 3DS is somehow the perfect way to capture it imo.
Certainly they can have a pretty special and endearing look.
Back in the 90s some artists discovered the LOMO LC-A (Lomo Kompakt Automat), a soviet era cheap film camera which they used for self-expression. The distortions of the cheap camera were the preferred feature. And for a time a lomography movement started, with a focus on spontan snapshots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_camera#Lomography
https://aboutphotography.blog/blog/history-of-lomography
The echoes of Lomography then found themselves in the very early German/Austrian blogosphere – Lomographic snapshots, then with digicams, were often seen in blogs of the early 2000s. There were even group weblogs, some of which are even going 20 years on:
In my opinion the very early artistic filters with whom Instagram started – long before Kardashian culture - must have been influenced by cheap film or digital cameras and tried to replicate those effects with smartphone cameras:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#/media/File:Instagra...
I asked my wife to buy me a new Polaroid for Christmas. And bought two 35mm film cameras in the last year.
I got "tired" of the perfect reproduction offered by my digital cameras. Along with the less-perfect reproduction, the delayed gratification and higher cost/shot has brought some pleasure back to taking photos. Even the shots that look straight out of a late-80s family photo album bring me more joy than pixel-perfect shots.
FWIW, I'm 48, so grew up using mostly 35mm disposables or cheap P&S. By the time I was post-college, it was early digital P&Ss and an early Canon Rebel.
I would pay good money for a digital camera that could take photos as well as the average flagship phone and fit as easily in a pocket (and I'm a woman, so I'm including sometimes pathetic little pockets), but they could only be tweaked and edited later, on a computer or companion device.
I think that desire for spaces occupied only by the people in them, not the whole rest of the world and its opinions, explains even more of this trend than the aesthetic of the photos.
[0] https://www.campsnapphoto.com/collections/camp-snap-screen-f...
What I'm looking for has the form factor of a phone (potentially even much smaller) and a camera like a phone, but all it does is take pictures. I'm fine with seeing the pictures on a screen, just not editing them.
Phone cameras are great at what they do, but are absolutely neutered in terms of the degree of control they afford you. If you want to make an artistic statement in photography, your hands are tied. A standalone digital camera that gives you even basic exposure controls is miles ahead even if technically inferior (older crappier sensor, worse autofocus, etc).
Jumping from there straight to vintage equipment amounts to dumping the baby with the bathwater, but modern digital cameras can be quite pricey (starting at around the cost of a mobile phone), so vintage stuff can make sense as the budget option for dedicated hardware.
1600x1200 pixels is plenty! The CMYG CCD matrix gives incredible fidelity of green. With the IR bandpass filters, I get saturated two-tone IR: Leaves reflect IR that passes the C+G filters and water transmits IR that passes the M+Y filters, so I get foliage in ice cyan and water in wine red colour.
It can see your eyes through your sunglasses, but not through your cornea.
It's a joyful thing from end to end!
For her birthday, my daughter received a toy digital camera that instanly printed photos on thermal receipt paper. It's great fun, and the print quality has lovely B&W dithering.
Her gift reminded me of my Gameboy Camera and printer. The printer worked by printing on thermal stickers. I bought several Gameboy Cameras back when they could be found in discount bins for 10 USD.
I bought a Gameboy printer off ebay and it came with several rolls of tape. Still have it all in my basement.
I got one of those recently. Immensely gratifying to have the photo printed immediately (even if all the tourists in London look at you funny.) Wish the camera was a little better but then again it's probably not worth it given you're printing relatively lo-res B&W dithered output...
Stomping your feet and telling me why it's not a fad is very fad behavior.
Took a few pics, couldn't see myself using it regularly with the terrible quality and the horrible sync story, so it was a pretty short experiment.
Ask anybody why they are doing it any you won't get an answer any deeper than "I like the way it looks", "It's nostalgic", "I saw other people doing it", or even "It's trendy" and it doesn't take much digging to see that.
Digicams are a fad and a shallow artistic statement. That's not to say you can't make great art with a digicam nor that switching to one won't make you a more mindful artist. Switching from a modern graphical shell to a bourne-like shell will make a non-programming computer user (if there is such a thing) a more careful programmer, but in doing so you are cutting out an entire space of tasks that you could be doing.
If you have to write a article about how a thing is not a fad, its almost definitely a fad.
Original iPhones shot in a very similar way, but over the years, newer versions have lost those 'faults' I like as the sensor got faster and 'better'.
Am I selling an outdated Sony Cybershot 6MP? Nope, it’s a “vintage CCD digicam.”
It's quite strange. It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use - but trying to pretend it isn't.
I'm no photographer but I feel there's something similar going on here.
Especially for anything that needs harmonic distortion. I get the impression they use regular random number generators for some of the random variance, rather than trying to emulate the physicality of a valve. They just don’t quite have the mojo. For some things it doesn’t matter, but often music production is about a 1% improvement here, a 1% improvement there, which sums up to a lot. It’s still easier to get those wins with hardware. Like ‘mojo’ is the default setting.
A really good example is the Chandler Curve Bender [2]. I have the real hardware. A new one will cost you £6,700 - so it would be insane to buy one when UAD have a plugin version for £179. I have the plugin too. The plugin is my favourite digital EQ. It sounds great. But the hardware does things that the plugin just doesn't touch. The hardware is all discrete circuits (with massive transistors). I think the slight latency shift between the left and right channels gives a 3D-ness to the sound that the plugin doesn't even attempt. Anyway, this demo [3] really shows what it can do and why hardware is still in the game.
In many areas plugins are good enough, I tend to use the plugins for more precision and to have similar curves to the hardware, but there’s still a ways to go to until there’s parity with the hardware.
That doesn’t mean you need the hardware, plenty of successful artists use digital alone. Just it’s still easier to get ‘the good stuff’ with hardware.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9swzlgk3wszeq6jfjxmw1/IMG_141...
[2] https://www.thomann.co.uk/chandler_limited_emi_tg12345_curve...
Brain wasn’t engaged, I meant capacitors
Audiophiles are ridiculous, frankly. I'm on the ATC group on Facebook. ATC make pro speakers used in many top studios, but they also make home 'audiophile' speakers. The speakers are amazing, but I often see them talking utter nonsense about how X sounds great or whatever, when they have pictures of their setup in an untreated room. Like they could even tell if the speakers are good in a room like that. They're hearing the room.
Audiophiles are like astrologers, it's all in the wind with them. But they shouldn't be confused with people into pro-audio for music or film production. The name of the game is to get the best sounding room you can, so that it's easier to make your art, there is a motivation to get it right and not be hoodwinked by the things you state.
Not that pro-studio people don't have their blind-spots too (especially around things like cabling), but they're not the same.
I would argue that these types of designs made an anti-consumerist statement which is why you don't see them anymore. An appliance that tries to look like furniture doesn't need to do that, it is a non-essential feature of the appliance that the manufacturer chooses to include. And it makes a statement: "I'm part of your home. Care for me. Display me. Treasure me. Enjoy me ... and don't throw me out because I'm not disposable plastic."
The dedicated camera vs smartphone topic doesn't necessarily align with the concept of appliances as furniture, but it does strike me as being the difference between a specialized tool and a multi-tool.
Everyone owns a smartphone. There's nothing special about that. And while taking a good photo arguably requires some degree of skill regardless of your tool, smartphones represent the average consumer; the lowest common denominator. Anyone can, and does, snap pictures with a smartphone.
A dedicated camera, on the other hand, represents a conscious decision to take photography more seriously. To want to focus only on that, free of other distractions. To climb whatever learning curve stands in the way.
Then, consider, that there are people who appreciate history and have no illusions about whether or not a particular historical time period was "better" or not. I follow a historic costumer on YouTube, from whom I learned how to sew by hand and how many historic clothing was constructed. Do I think that living in the Victorian era would be better on the whole? No. I value modern medicine and social advancements that have been made since that time. But do I love the Victorian aesthetic and value the knowledge of how to do things without modern machinery? You betcha. I feel like a more rounded person and, despite coming from a hobby, I have life skills that I didn't have before, like being able to fit, hem, repair and even produce some of my own clothing.
Trends and fashion changes, and the phenomenon of "older is better" is human nature that has always existed. It is easy to find artefacts of the past that are less common, or gone entirely, that you consider to be better than the trends of the present.
This doesn't mean things are worse on the whole now, nor does it mean that those artefacts aren't valid examples of things of value that are no longer produced. I guess it's part and parcel of change.
Plastic looking finish is the one that was luxurious at the time. And wood was just a way to get a good-looking finish for cheap... Like shiny black plastic is today.
There's a reason brand new tech isn't favoured for safety-critical systems.
They loved them. They liked writing notes on the border. The photos aren't nearly as good as even the most basic smartphone camera, but there was something genuine about them.
For all the advances we've made in technology over the years, people are still thoroughly analog. And while digicams are not analog in any way, there is something about them that scratches that itch. Maybe it's as simple as hitting an actual button to make it go.
For all the amazing high-tech in today's smartphones, you still feel like a monkey at the monolith as you paw at it.
One's pure joy, the other's a damn to-do item.
The fact that manuals were produced with such care when it was really hard to do so is insight into how much thought was given to the entire product. It's not necessarily that the products are technically superior. It's that honest hard work was put into the products. You walked into a store and purchased it from a person. It couldn't be easier to produce product manuals these days with modern software, and yet it's never done. Today's consumer landscape is about disposability and scale. You have companies like Apple that intentionally remove features so that they can sell you them separately, like the dongle mess. Apple lied to their customers for the reasons they were removed and now sell them parts that costs sub-cents for dozens and hundreds of dollars.
There is something real about all of this that modern people yearn for. I remember having to buy technology as a kid. You talked to people, asked them questions, and they new things about the product. It wasn't about just pushing a virtual button.
Well stuff produced at 1/10000th the number of units sold of, say, a modern iPhone or Android phone is obviously more "individual". I mean: I see a dude driving an AC Cobra vs one driving a mass produced chinese EV... They're both cars but that's about it. That'd be Hank Moody driving an old beaten up Porsche 911 Carrera in Californication. I mean: for one reason or another, Hank Moody is driving an old beaten up Porsche and not a Hyundai. And the series shows him as liking his car and liking to drive his car.
Where's the lack of use in someone daily driving an AC Cobra or an old Porsche? Where's the lack of use in someone using an old camera to take pictures?
> It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use
Someone takes his old camera, goes out at night, snaps a picture of the sunset, and goes back home. Where's the ownership of display?
I don't post picture or my cars online. I take one out at night and go for a drive on desert roads. Where's the ownership of display? On HN?
Sure, everything is still an object. But then everything is consumerism, unless you make your clothes yourself (funnily enough my mother-in-law knits clothes).
Regarding ethics: I think something can be said about older tech. For example an old "dumb" 1080p projector both gives that "movie theather" feeling (mine had a gigantic diagonal no TV could match) and it's neither listening to everything you say nor sending your data to the motherload nor constantly updating apps for seemingly no reason nor can it be bricked remotely. Nor can it be hacked.
I mean: there's at least something in vintage tech I think.
P.S: I'm currently in the process of buying a "vintage" HP Z series workstation that I'll use a small server but that's because I want shitload of cheap ECC and huge, big, cheap SAS drives... And it's going to get lots of love and use. I may blog about it if I want to display ownership though.
But smartphone cameras are not progress on all fronts. They are small and seem to be optimized to take pictures that look impressive.
I sometimes have a slideshow with family pictures running on a large monitor. Sometimes I stop and look at a picture that somehow just look much nicer that the rest when you spend some time looking at it. If I then check the metadata, it almost always turns out to be one of few pictures I took with my old DSLR camera or a newer compact camera.
Of course those cameras are much bigger and has bigger lenses and should be able to make better pictures. But the best camera is the one you brought with you. Which is why so few of the pictures are made with a smartphone.
But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular.
It seems like if you have the latest top tier phone: iphone, pixel, samsung s, etc., you get decent photos, if you have any of the 2nd tier phones, they all continue to suck no matter how many mp they claim to have or whatever optics they claim to have.
Seriously, even on a modern Pixel (mine) and iPhone (gf's), I'm often disappointed in the level of detail you find once you want to crop an image or zoom in on something distant/small.
The software has come a long way and does incredible things within the limitations of such tiny lenses and sensors. But I've got much lower resolution images from point and shoot cameras in the mid/late 2000's that show more detail and none of the weird software sharpening artifacts of a 20-40+ megapixel phone pic.
They can only simulate the physical properties of optics. Eventually we’ll get to the point where they’re far from “photos” and more AI generations that look like photos.
The only difference with compact cameras is not having zoom lenses. But the telephoto and wide cameras on some models help make up for it.
There is a big jump to interchangeable lens cameras. But those aren’t what is popular as vintage.
You pick the tool that gives the artistic effect you WANT.
I'd love a nice mp3 player set up, but it's sometimes harder to get those legally for music compared to a CD or even an old tape now! streaming has a lot of downsides in comparison and I think that's fueling the desire to own a full album in some form.
but ofc at that point you can use a flash drive and it's way easier
I don’t think it has much to do with ‘ethics’ at all — at least not for me.
Plenty of reasons why the new ways are worse.
Reality is strange. Like how Apple owners somehow think they own a product that expresses individualism and artistic freedom where it really is a mass-produced product that looks the same as everybody else's, and more so than any other brand with less choice, while almost every aspect of customization is heavily controlled by the company ...
I understand that was Apple's marketing a decade ago, but it doesn't really seem to be their pitch anymore.
Hard to feel artistic and like an individual when everything is a piece of black plastic, metal and glass.
If someone eventually makes a non-broken computer that's in no way cool, I'll switch to that.
[EDIT] Though nb a mostly-just-works ecosystem of devices and integrations is basically table stakes for a competitor now. Just a better computer is almost useless to me, it needs to take just a couple clicks or taps (if any at all) to have it integrated with the rest of my shit. That's where the time savings and utility comes in, and fiddling-with-electronic-crap becomes computers actually doing things useful for me in my life, making paying any money at all for the damn things worth it.
This, I knew a guy 20ish years ago that was super into vinyl right as the rest of us were getting into MP3, and it was a whole experience of dusting off the records and cleaning them with a soft brush and waiting for the electronics to warm up and such. It's like the modern equivalent of those Asian tea ceremonies.
Are you just saying it's bizarre that we live in a consumerist economy? Or are you saying that you think we live in a capitalist economy with people brainwash by capitalists into a consumerist culture? Or are you just acting like a naive purist who thinks that art isn't economically motivated?
I love old tools, both hand tools and power tools.
There are many criteria by which you could judge the older tools, made in the USA, Canada, or UK, and say they are objectively better than even the highest-end tools I could buy today at Home Depot.
Thicker metal, designs which are more repairable with swappable parts, they were obviously designed to be more durable. I have a roofing square I use on the job site which is over 100 years old, and it's better than one I could buy at the store. I use a chop saw which was made in Japan in the 80's and it is going to outlast any equivalent chop saw I could buy at the store today. You can tell immediately by just using the thing that it is more durable and higher quality.
Yes, older tools lack some modern improvements like lasers or safety stops, but when it comes to reliability and durability you can't buy a brand new tool with the same quality of old tools for any price.
I don't know if the same is actually true for digicams or whatever, but things like record players or typewriters have similar qualities to what I'm talking about with tools.
Loopin' Louie? The modern one's lighter and has a weaker motor, even if the original was never exactly greatest-games-of-all-time material, the modern one's just non-functional.
Rock 'em sock 'em robots? Weaker punches, plastic's lighter, new models are often smaller. They suck compared to vintage ones.
Hell even soda bottles are kinda like this. Those things used to be thick and you could re-use them for all kinds of stuff.
It seems like at some point around the late '90s and early '00s we got a ton better at precisely optimizing plastic use in mass manufacturing processes, and all plastic products got somewhere between a little, and a lot, worse, because manufacturers could make them just barely thick enough to not fall apart. Good for waste on the one hand, for disposable things, so that hits "reduce" at the expense of making "re-use" a lot worse. But also makes non-disposable things so shitty they become disposable (often because they suck so bad to begin with that you're gonna toss them out after one use)
Instead of winding a spring, the wind knob turns on an electric motor that takes batteries.
Instead of playing the music with an embedded set of metal tines in the play head, the disk just holds and RFID and the player loads the mp3 file of what the original 1980s toy sounded like.
The thing is an abomination.
My X100 still has better photos than my iPhone 12. I have an iPhone 16 Pro and I think it’s better as a camera than the X100 but I still prefer the X100 when I want a shot and I will put the time into it. That is 13 years old. I also have a canon S95 and it was still more useful for photos than my iPhone 12 was.
If you're creating art and easy route to differentiate and not feel like everything else in the timeline is to use an entirely different "grain" and you'll stand out from the mass.
It's not as simple as "old stuff better" it's more "other stuff feels different".
Film cameras have grain. Literally, there are tiny physical grains of photo-sensitive material on the film. Those grains, which are distributed semi-randomly in a film across the medium determine the limit of film's resolution and give it part of its organic, non-digital feel.
Digital cameras have noise. That's the term for randomness injected in a signal from the effect of physics: Brownian motion, heat, quantum effects on photons, etc. Noise means that while each pixel on the sensor is in principle quantizing a measurement of the real world, that measurement has some random error that can never be fully eliminated.
A digital image recorded from a digital sensor has no grain. There was no film, and no grains of photosensitive media involved. (It might have simulated grain from some "film effect" look applied to the image.)
The distinction matters because they look different. It's one of the key reasons film looks like film and digital looks digital.
In the sense that the iPhone sensor > internal AI process > Apple Camera app post-processing choices imbue an iPhone Camera Image "grain" to what you shoot.
For a long time, that was by having sharper, higher-quality pictures. Your friend had some Kodak Instamatic and you had a Hasselblad and you could assert your dominance over them.
But nowadays, the phones in everyone's pocket take such outstandingly sharp pictures that there isn't really meaningful room for improvement. So, people now differentiate themselves by getting vintage digital cameras which are hard to find, cost extra money, break frequently, etc., so that they can demonstrate their uniqueness.
A: Which iPhone do you have? Mine is an iPhone 13.
B: I have got the 2019 iPhone 11.
A: Wow. Respect! You’re better than me.
God y'all need to have some hobbies.
Then after I got my next phone I looked back and saw that the pictures had terrible artifacts that weren't hard to find. Now I'm on a Pixel N after having a handful of earlier Pixels and I can see the shortcomings of the photos it takes (and all its predecessors have taken) without much difficulty. Just zoom into the picture a little.
There's something to be said for analog.
A few aspects of shooting film appeal to me... the imperfection (memories aren't perfect, the photos shouldn't be either - but I'm also a huge Impressionism fan, so maybe that's it). The delayed gratification - in a world where most things are "instant", waiting a few weeks+ to get results changes the way I mentally process the images and associated memories. And the higher cost per shot forces me to be a bit more planful about shots.
Of course, that said, I get the photos scanned (not prints), and view them in the same apps as pure digitals. So maybe I'm just weird or a hipster.
I did ask for a Polaroid for Christmas - full analog baby! The Go model is dirt cheap (for a camera), maybe it'll be great, maybe I'll use it a few times and stick it in a drawer.
I'd love an Instax wide or square, but the camera bodies are just too bulky (at least as big as my rangefinders or micro-4/3+prime). Same for vintage Polaroids, plus the need to use the older battery-included (and more expensive) film packs.
And I'm aware of the limitations inherent in the current Polaroid chemistry and small size. It's a toy and I'm ok with that.
I get that this is a ridiculous nit-pick to kick off a comment, but how do they define "young adult?" Because I'm not sure that that statement is actually true just yet.
I have two Gen Z daughters, the youngest having been born in 2001. Smart phones didn't really start to land on the scene until 2008. It then took a few years until everyone had one and the cameras were good enough that people were getting rid of their digital cameras and switching to smart phones.
Granted, my daughters are several years older now than an 18 year-old, which I would consider to be the "youngest" possible "young adult."
Even then, an 18 year-old today was born in 2006. I suppose that part of their childhood was likely captured on smart phones rather than digital cameras. But being old enough that I remember the 00s like it was just yesterday, and having two "young adult" children whose childhoods' were almost entirely documented using digital cameras, even having packs of old printed photos that were printed at the same places you would get film developed ... I just can't help but question the statement that today's young adults had their childhoods documented on smartphones. Today's children and young teenagers, sure. But the modern smartphone, with camera, actually hasn't been with us for a full generation quite just yet... as much as it feels like it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_adult
.. this one silly statement really triggered my autism this morning lol.
You call it young adult fiction because most teenagers would rather be perceived as young adults than children.
You call people middle aged in their 50s because no one wants to be reminded that they're statistically 2/3 of the way to the grave.
Peak film sales was in 2001!
Film sales in 2006 was the same as in 1994 ...
After 2006, the decline was drastic¹.
But the long tail of childhood memories stored on film and cheap digicams stretches far into the smartphone era. Remember, not everyone had a smartphone or even a good way to transfer the images out of there. Also, smartphone cameras were really bad in the beginning.
1: https://petapixel.com/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm-thrived-a-...
Additionally, before the explosion of digital camera sales in the early 00s, many childhood memories simply went unrecorded.
Growing up my family had a couple film cameras that rarely got used. They might come out for holidays and a handful of events but they spent a lot of time in the closet.
Even when they were used a roll of film only got two dozen photos that weren't cheap to develop. We'd get maybe one or two photos per roll that had decent focus and lighting.
There's a Cambrian explosion of photos I have from my first digital camera onwards. There's so many events and several people I'd love to have pictures of today that don't exist because no camera was handy at the time. Today I can capture pretty much anything I want to remember.