[paulh]

Where do I begin? All of my cameras, with the possible exception of the K-5, are "vintage".

*ist D (2) - My first Pentax and first DSLR, purchased in 2010. Still going strong, and is a fulltime m42 shooter. I picked up another, almost unused copy a few years later for use with k-mount lenses. Love the small but solid feel, and of course the CCD rendering. Love using it with small primes.

K10D (2) - I succumbed to the siren song of that fabled 10 mpx CCD sensor in 2012. Still working perfectly, but I got another copy last year for m42 use. My favorite camera, great handling and build, and of course those unbeatable colors.

I have a bunch of old point & shoots I still use quite a bit. (see Rupert's Toy Camera thread ) A couple Canon Powershots - SD1100 IS (8 mpx) and an A560 (7.1 mpx) - those are my "dogwalk & bad weather" cams. They have a decent macro mode that I use a lot for little things I see along the way.

My most recent addition and new fave is a Panasonic Lumix LX3 (2008), with a lovely 10 mpx CCD sensor. Very well-built with a metal body, a sharp and fast (f/2) "Leica" lens, and lots of external controls. If only it had a viewfinder!

Speaking of dogwalks, here are a few Canon SD1100 IS shots from earlier this afternoon






Here's one of Jeannie, taken last week with the Lumix LX3:

---

Last edited by paulh; 03-24-2019 at 09:32 AM.

[dieselpunk]

I'm shocked that the word "Mavica" hasn't been uttered here yet. I really wanted one of those, but thankfully I was a student and couldn't afford one.

The Sony Mavica which saved photos on 3.5" floppy disks was the first digital camera I used. The lab I worked in during grad school owned one so I got to use it for field work. It's crazy to think about saving pictures to a 1.44MB disk. Needless to say there wasn't high speed shooting.

Polaroid PDC-640

The first digital camera I owned was a Polaroid PDC-640 which I got as a gift. Apparently this was a thing in 1998.


Up to that point, I was using a Pentax PC-313 film point and shoot camera as someone with no knowledge of photography. Sadly, the PDC-640 only worked satisfactorily in ideal lighting conditions (i.e. outdoors) or it produced horribly noisy results. It wasn't a great introduction to digital photography. I e-bayed it back in the early 2000s for $35.

Canon Powershot A80

When my PC-313 died and I decided film was too much of a hassle for a casual like myself, I bought the Canon Powershot A80

I really liked this camera. It had a small but nifty fold out preview screen which I still miss on my K-r. But importantly, it had a viewfinder too. It made fantastic images compared to the digital cameras I used before and it recorded my life events for a good 7-8 years as my primary camera. I used it until the lcd screen started getting strange jittery lines then outright died. Funny thing is I carried the A80 around in my Pentax PC-313 pouch for many years as that belt pouch outlived the camera!

Canon Powershot SD870IS (honourable mention)

I bought this for my wife as an upgrade to her old Canon Powershot S10. I would take pictures with it occasionally when I didn't have my camera. Also impressive at the time. It's the only other digital camera in the house that probably still works. It's been unused for many years though and I don't know what happened to the battery, but the more I think about it the more I think I'm going to look into resurrecting it as a casual camera.

Pentax K-r
Yes, by the rules of this post it's not "vintage", but my story ends here anyway as I took the leap to a DSLR when my A80 died. Still using it! Given my positive experiences with Canon I'm surprised I didn't go with that system when I went up to DSLR. I think it's because growing up my father had a Pentax film SLR in the 1970s and I always ended up associating Pentax with "real" cameras.

[3by2]

I've still got a Powershot s30, 3 Mp. I use it less and less because the batteries don't last long and it no longer retains any settings but it's still quite a handy size and produces reasonable results. The trouble is, so does my phone and I always have that, so there's less and less point in ever carrying it. I even replaced it once after I hoofed it a fair distance when it fell out my pocket when running. I did try and repair it and nearly succeeded, but.....

[reh321]

Thanks for all the responses thus far, folks. I'm a little surprised there weren't more, as I'm sure we have a lot more folks here shooting older gear, but maybe they're just busy taking photos (and that can only be a good thing! ).

I bought my first proper digital camera - a 2MP Olympus C-120 "compact" - back in 2002 or 2003, I think. Since then I've owned numerous compact, bridge, DSLR and mirrorless cameras. I still own quite a few of the older ones, though I only occasionally use any of them, mostly for nostalgia

Wow!!

I got my first digital camera summer of 2005, when my mother purchased a 5mp Nikon P&S for me because she was horrified that I was still using film. I used it periodically for a year .... then while visiting my parents {we slept in their basement} I carelessly left my pants on the floor, camera in the pocket, and when electricity went out in the middle of the night, the basement flooded because the sump pump was useless. The next Spring I replaced it with a Canon compact camera, but within a few months I decided it wasn't flexible enough for me, and gave it to our daughter. So I got off to a late start, and neither of my first two digital cameras is still around.

[Basie]

My first digital camera after the K1000 en Ricoh KR10 was the Sony DSC-V1. A small sensor but very capable camera with a shutter lag of 3/4 of a second and using the propriety Sony memory cards. It's low light performance was not good at all. I bought it in 2003 and took it along on trip to France with the family the next year

[Turbotak]

My first digital camera after the K1000 en Ricoh KR10 was the Sony DSC-V1. A small sensor but very capable camera with a shutter lag of 3/4 of a second and using the propriety Sony memory cards. It's low light performance was not good at all. I bought it in 2003 and took it along on trip to France with the family the next year

I love the DSC-V(x) line! They fit nicely in the hand and have a lot of functionality.

[BigMackCam]

Interestingly, I just bagged an auction on eBay for a "New / Unused" (by which, I take to mean lightly used and/or well looked after) Pentax EI-C90, supposedly mint / complete / boxed with all CDs, documents and cables (and the photos would seem to confirm this). The seller accepted my offer with my express conditions that the item is in full working order, all recorded via eBay messaging, so I have easy come-back if it's not broadly as described.

1996 vintage, 768 x 560 resolution, PCMCIA flash storage. It was Pentax's first consumer digital camera. What's not to like?

Assuming it all works as advertised, I still don't think I'll be using it much... But a fun addition nonetheless

[photoptimist]

Interestingly, I just bagged an auction on eBay for a "New / Unused" (by which, I take to mean lightly used and/or well looked after) Pentax EI-C90, supposedly mint / complete / boxed with all CDs, documents and cables (and the photos would seem to confirm this). The seller accepted my offer with my express conditions that the item is in full working order, all recorded via eBay messaging, so I have easy come-back if it's not broadly as described.

1996 vintage, 768 x 560 resolution, PCMCIA flash storage. It was Pentax's first consumer digital camera. What's not to like?

Assuming it all works as advertised, I still don't think I'll be using it much... But a fun addition nonetheless

Nice!

( Pentax El-C90 - Pentax Compact Digital Cameras - Pentax Camera Reviews and Specifications and Pentax EI-C90 offer short descriptions of this very novel device -- a detachable display! )

(But I thought you were turning Pro now that you have a Professional DSLR. )

[BigMackCam]

Nice!

( Pentax El-C90 - Pentax Compact Digital Cameras - Pentax Camera Reviews and Specifications and Pentax EI-C90 offer short descriptions of this very novel device -- a detachable display! )

(But I thought you were turning Pro now that you have a Professional DSLR. )

One of our members offered me one about a year back, but the price was too rich for me. This one I've bought still wasn't dirt cheap - I could have bought a very good *ist DL or Samsung GX-1L for not much more - but it's arguably collectable in its complete state and mint condition. That said, I'm not sure how many folks would buy such a thing. I may have overpaid, but it wasn't a lot of money for the potential fun factor

As for my new "professional DSLR", I will leave it to you and our other esteemed members to judge the fruits of that particular investment. Realistically, I couldn't possibly compare the image quality of a 1996 768x560p camera to this 2019 model... ... ... could I?

[photoptimist]

One of our members offered me one about a year back, but the price was too rich for me. This one I've bought still wasn't dirt cheap - I could have bought a very good *ist DL or Samsung GX-1L for not much more - but it's arguably collectable in its complete state and mint condition. That said, I'm not sure how many folks would buy such a thing. I may have overpaid, but it wasn't a lot of money for the potential fun factor

Fun factor accounts of a lot in my book. And if it gives you that spark of joy every time you think of it or see it in your collection, then it's worth every farthing, penny, shilling, or guinea that you paid for it.

As for my new "professional DSLR", I will leave it to you and our other esteemed members to judge the fruits of that particular investment. Realistically, I couldn't possibly compare the image quality of a 1996 768x560p camera to this 2019 model... ... ... could I?

Yes, I can see the challenge. It might be hard to tell the images from those two cameras apart.

[reh321]

Canon Powershot SD870IS (honourable mention)

I bought this for my wife as an upgrade to her old Canon Powershot S10. I would take pictures with it occasionally when I didn't have my camera. Also impressive at the time. It's the only other digital camera in the house that probably still works. It's been unused for many years though and I don't know what happened to the battery, but the more I think about it the more I think I'm going to look into resurrecting it as a casual camera

Reading this reminds me that I had a Canon Powershot SD1000, which served as my pocket camera {after the drowned Nikon} for some time; despite its name, it was actually a step or two below the SD8nn's I believe - according to my Internet research it succeeded the SD600, but its name came from the fact that it celebrated the 10-year anniversary of Canon's "Elph" line. It had a 7.1mp 1/2.5" sensor and no IS. I can't find it right now - but it must be hiding somewhere because I don't remember ever throwing it away. Functionally, it was replaced by a combination of my smart phone and the Pentax Q-7. My biggest issue with it was that it's tiny sensor has much less Dynamic Range and Color Depth than the Q-7 with its slightly larger sensor; this showed up most dramatically to me one time when a friend used it to take a photo of a group of us on an outing .... it really struggled with Caucasian skin in sunlight with darkish trees in the background.


added: I got it on Black Friday, 2007. I was still using it December 2014, when my wife and I went to a Madrigal Dinner together. She complained that the color was wrong in the photos I took - turned out that the Elph's WB was "fixing" the colors, and I couldn't find any way of turning that off. A few weeks later I purchased the Q-7, which has a "candle light" scene and does produce raw files, and my wife has been much happier with the colors of photos from subsequent annual trips to the Madrigal Dinner.

[TaoMaas]

I was looking through the pics in one of my albums on here and I noticed this one was taken with my Sony DSC-F707, too. All this time I'd thought it was taken with my K10D.

[kwb]

I bought Olympus Camedia C900Z (D-400 Zoom in some markets) in 1998. It was OK, 1.2Mp felt like plenty back then, I took many snapshots, a few of them were nice, and I was happy in general.

That was until one day when the camera ate all data on the memory card at the worst timing possible. Very first few days' worth of pictures of my then-newborn were all lost! I've never bought another Olympus digital since then even though I later found that it was not really Olympus itself but rather the SmartMedia (do you remember those?) that was most probably at fault.

Despite that, I continued to use that Olympus for some time and managed to get some nice shots. After 19 years, sometimes I feel as if I'm maybe, sort of, ready to forgive Olympus. But sometimes not.

[Basie]

I love the DSC-V(x) line! They fit nicely in the hand and have a lot of functionality

The DSC V1 managed to cure me from me my skepticism about digital and paved the way for starting in DSLR. This model had quite advanced manual shooting capabilities

Cross posted from street thread

[BigMackCam]

These old Sony shots are pretty impressive, given the age. I mean, sure, you can see detail / noise reduction / sharpening effects if you look for them, but the photos look rather good... even now