Pepsi made a clear cola in the early 90's called Crystal Pepsi:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Pepsi
Here's an old pic of me drinking it. (and eating a turkey leg).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Pepsi
Here's an old pic of me drinking it. (and eating a turkey leg).
Godspeed, Crystal Pepsi fan. May we all meet again in the glorious, clear syrup'ed Elysium of the afterlife.
And I'm amazed that people are amazed by photo quality from two decades ago. The resolution of standard 35-mm film was fairly hard to achieve in consumer digital cameras until recently (or maybe it still is, but I guess DSLRs have gone consumer enough by now).
When I got my first digital camera, I went nuts with it on my trip that I bought it for, looking back at the photos I took years after, it was kind of obnoxious now that I think about it how often I pulled it out. Many times to the point of missing just experiencing the place/situation I was in rather then wanting to get a picture of the experience. Thankfully, the novelty wore off, but now I have to remind myself, "Hey, you have a camera, you should get a picture of this." or find myself realizing it a little too late.
I was expecting something much different here. Something to do with the lack of a requirement for someone at the photography lab to view the photos while developing the prints. I know I found that liberating, ifyouknowwhatImean.
Which is basically, in terms of relative convenience, the equivalent of developing your own film in the 1990s...
Anything that wouldn't be accessible to historians in the same sense that photographic stuff is basically.
Black and white from the late Victorian era can be stunning as lenses have got no sharper (in fact less sharp in the centre of field just more even and better for smaller film) while wet plate and albumen were a very well matched combination.
I think historians will be able to figure this one out. Especially when people are aware of it at the time it's happening.
I think this is the point: the poster was seemingly unaware that digital camera quality has been worse than analog until recently.
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Historians have broader perspective than you give them credit for.
It's partly because the media (especially TV news) deliberately blurs and desaturates pictures to indicate what decade they are from. Which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the film technology of the time. But it is easy to forget that they are doing this and assume that the original photos are really like this. Why would 70s and 80s photos be desaturated more than 60s photos for example.
Even for digital media (e.g. youtube) tools like this are popular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChY8IIc_fv4
This was done recently for the first few season of Star Trek: TNG and the difference is amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZQetJVRu0I
Furthermore, these sources are often cropped/zoomed/stretched from 4:3 to 16:9, which lowers quality even more.
And then there's the difficulty of producing good pictures. I remember, when I was younger, my father gave me his old 35-mm. No auto focus, manual settings for everything. Even buying the right film required some knowledge of what you were going to be doing. I can see why people would find good pictures from that long ago surprising, it was harder to do - you had to invest time to get good at it. Even if you knew what you were doing from a technical perspective - You could shoot a roll of film and get three or four good pictures.
Heh. What I find surprising is how good the really old pictures are. Boer war/Victorian kinda things. Considering what they had to work with at the time.... There's some damn nice stuff out there. If you can get yourself a tour of a photographic archive from a newspaper or something, it's well worth doing ^_^ There's stuff there that's never been digitised just because there's so much of it and high resolution scans on something like a drum scanner are so expensive to do.
Edit:
> The resolution of standard 35-mm film was fairly hard to achieve in consumer digital cameras until recently
To be fair, the obsession some people have with resolution, without regard to like noise (goes up hugely when you cram more pixels - so to speak - into a small frame sensor) and colour balance has probably done significant harm to the evolution of digital cameras.
Not that I'm saying you are one of those people, but thought I'd mention it for random readers ^^;
I'd say resolution/sharpness in consumer digital cams has surpassed film, but digital (personal opinion) lacks the tones, depth, highlight-details, and overall 'magic' look of film :)
If I was unaware of the quality of film, my first instinct wouldn't have been to ask if the photo was a scan of one.