Sometimes, in the everyday hustle and bustle of life, I sometimes overlook just how amazing the last twenty or so years have really been. This weekend, for instance, we undertook a (very often put-off but very important) project to electronically catalog all of our important assets, personal documents (passports, social security cards, etc.), and bank access info. I built a simple FileMaker Pro database off a standard template, and then started populating it with data—including images of various things. Once it’s done, we’re going to burn it to a CD, print out the contents, and take both the CD and the printout to a safety deposit box.
In the midst of all this, I was digging through the shelves, looking for potentially hidden assets, when I came upon an old camera of mine. No, not an old digital camera. An old consumer ‘point and shoot’ 35mm camera, the Pentax Zoom 105-R, which I bought in the fall of 1993. Back in the day, this was a really decent consumer 35mm camera, and relatively portable for its time. I seem to recall purchasing it for, among other things, it’s relatively small size.
But it was while snapping a photo of the old camera with my Canon PowerShot SD400 that I realized just how far cameras have come in the last 12 years:
To add some detail to the obvious differences in the above image, consider the sizes of the two cameras:
| Pentax Zoom R-105 | Canon PowerShot SD400 | |
| Width | 5.6” | 3.4” |
| Height | 3.2” | 2.1” |
| Depth | 2.6” | 0.8” |
| Weight (no batt.) | 16.9oz | 4.6oz |
Zowie! Lifting the old camera, with batteries in place, I’d estimate it’s about 1.5 pounds. With battery in the new camera, it’s maybe one-half pound. How the heck did I ever lug that old thing anywhere? And the new camera packs a ton of features into that small space—3x optical zoom, a 640x480 movie mode with great image quality, USB2 for high-speed picture transfer, special effects, and much, much more. Amazing. OK, here’s one more shot that illustrates the incredible shrinking camera quite well—and click the image for a much larger version:
In closing, thanks to our emergency preparedness exercise this weekend, I had the chance to see exactly how far we’ve come in camera technology in an amazingly short number of years—in less than 12 years, digital cameras went from something just barely out of R&D to something so commonplace that they’re now found in your phone. So to the brilliant engineers and designers who have made it possible, I say thank you…and my shoulder thanks you as well for the reduced wear-and-tear! We truly do live in some amazing times.
I was telling my sister yesterday how our expectations of pictures have changed. On Thanksgiving, I took 26 pictures of the events and passed sent them out to the family. People were surprised that I "only took 26 pictures that whole day."
Ten years ago, that would have been a full roll of film and people would have been surprised that I used the "whole roll."
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The same story happened to computers;))
and other equipment.
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