[Tony Belding]

I begain with a sort of cheap VGA resolution (640X480) camera that was horrible and I never used for much. It was really just a novelty item, or a toy. Please don't ask me to try and identify the make or model!

My first digital camera that I got much use out of was, I believe, an Olympus Camedia D-460, with 3X zoom and 1.3 MP resolution. (At least, that's what I see on eBay now that looks like what I had!) I bought it because it looked a lot like my Olympus 35mm film pocket camera, and I thought it might work similarly. It didn't really. It was clunky, and the images from it were. . . okay, I guess.

http://www.steves-digicams.com/d460z.html



I used it for a while before moving up to a Canon Digital ELPH S110 (just like the S100, plus a microphone), which was tiny and cool-looking. Even at 2.1 MP, the image quality humiliated any 110 film pocket camera I'd ever owned. The Olympus was my first semi-successful digital camera, but the ELPH was the first one that was an unqualified success for me. That was a little gem. I don't think I ever would have voluntarily got rid of it, but when it failed mechanically I did the pragmatic thing and discarded it, and picked up a newer Canon pocket camera -- the technology was advancing very rapidly, as I'm sure you must recall. (The replacement had 8 MP and was even slimmer than the S110, but never had the same charisma.)

http://www.steves-digicams.com/s100.html

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Last edited by Tony Belding; 05-04-2016 at 01:48 PM. Reason: added links and photos

[MJSfoto1956]

My first photographs taken with a digital camera was with a Leaf Digital Back, circa 1993. Here's what it looked like:





The sensor was 2048x2048 pixels and required three shots through three different filters (RGB)

Was a great studio camera in fact!

Michael

[mikeSF]

I paid $40 for it, a Kodak EasyShare something or other. Thing was tough, as I remember driving over it at least twice to get it to even crack. Then I bought a Pentax *istD

[mattb123]

We had the Mavica that used floppy disks at work. My first personal one was a 3.2MP P&S Sony Cybershot DSCP72.
I was still shooting my ME Super for "serious" shots and just got this as a P&S adventure cam. IQ was decent for the time and the biggest problem was that it relied on Sony Memory Sticks and I think 128MB was the biggest one we could get and it was stupidly expensive compared to SD.

[vinni]

Great topic My first digital camera was a Casio QV-R4, a camera that I enjoyed a lot! I especially remember how it felt quite durable.



Edit: I only noticed now that it actually had a pentax lens!!!

[kiwi_jono]

Fuji MX-700

[yucatanPentax]

I wish I could find my first one. I was just thinking about it the other day. It was an unusual-brand (not a standard camera brand), 1MP device about the size of a deck of cards. The lens was fixed and there were no controls other than the off-on switch and shutter release. The flash went off if it wanted to, no controlling it. The entire camera was just a silver rectangle of pure plastic. It may have taken AA batteries, I can't recall. The memory was on a "smart media card" which was like a very thin SD card.

Despite it being very primitive, I actually have several good photos from it. A couple of them I printed at 5x7 and framed as a gift to a friend. They're still hanging on the wall of his house, 15+ years later.

I bought that device because it was relatively cheap and I wanted to see how well it compared to film. Well, it was pretty flaky in operation, but when it captured a decent image, the quality of the image was pretty good. Only actually acceptable in strong sunlight, but great colors and fairly sharp (cheap) lens!

My first name brand digital camera was a 2MP Canon PowerShot Elph S100 in about 2000 or so. I loved using that thing and carried it all over, replacing it with multiple Canon PowerShot Elphs as technology progressed. I loved that they slipped into a pocket and I had a camera everywhere.

Finally, an ad for a refurbished Pentax K200D came along and I was re-hooked on Pentax and big cameras again.

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Last edited by yucatanPentax; 05-05-2016 at 01:36 PM.

[virusn3t]

My first camera was a P&S, a Samsung HZ-15, must be somewhere on the house, i lost the cable charger that was a Samsung propietary, i think if i find a compatible cable maybe still work, that camera was my "bridge" to DSLR.

[TomTom]

My first digital camera was the Canon Powershot S200 Digital Elph in December 2002. I'm glad that I waited as long as I did to go digital. While the camera was a point and shoot it took great pics compared to most cameras in its class. I loved it so much that I bought the gf an S230 and she became the envy of all of her family events because she had the best looking pics. I eventually upgraded to another Canon P&S but was not as pleased with that one. My original S200 was given to my mom. Fast forward to 2014 and I made the jump to a Pentax DSLR, one of the best decisions I've ever made. :-)

[Arjay Bee]

First used was a Kodak something and a Mavica at work.
First owned was sent to me as a prize for answering a corporate survey - big surprise. Canon Powershot A10 in early 2000s
Then Powershot A70. Both of these I used with reversed Takumar 50mm lens for Macro. A70 started to get purple banding so ...
Then *istDL2, K20D, K3 and the Takumar set I had prior to digital.

[Paul the Sunman]

Minolta Dimage S414. Very limited manual control (choice of two apertures). The big problem though was that it had absolutely terrible battery life.

[pathdoc]

I considered the Sony Mavica, but this was because I had, at the time, a laptop computer with 3.5" A drive and CD-reading D Drive. When I eventually settled on a digicam, it was a Nikon Coolpix 8700 and it was bought, in part, becuase it had an attachment to go on my microscope. This did not work anywhere near as well as I'd hoped it would, probably because of user error, but before buyer regret could reach critical levels my house was broken into and the Nikon is now in the hands of a person or persons unknown.

Insurance replaced it with a camera of value equivalent to what the Nikon would have fetched used. I decided I had had enough of fixed-lens cameras, regardless of how sophisticated they might be, and went for a DSLR - hello, *ist-DL, hello Pentax digital, and goodbye Nikon. At this stage I'd been fooling around with a P50T for a few years, and that was probably what swayed me in my DSLR choice, even though I wasn't acutely or consciously aware that the P50T's lens was cross-compatible.

[JimC1101]

Epson PhotoPC 700. 1998 I think, when my son was born.

[wtlwdwgn]

I used this for several years before buying a K10D.

[Bruce Clark]

I don't think anyone has mentioned my first digital the Olympus U Digital 600 yet. A 6 MP point and shoot. Not a bad little beast except for the rear screen which is almost invisible in bright sun and suffers somewhat from jpeg artifacts in high contrast details.Nice colours though. I do recall getting a (gasp) 1 GB XD card with it which was an extraordinary capacity in the day. So much so none of my built in card readers in PC or laptop could read it and I had to buy an external card reader especially to handle it. I very quickly came to dislike the rear screen method of composition and shooting which lead to my first digital SLR a Pentax K-7.

I still use it occasionally for "ebay" type product shots.