Tech

Today’s young adults grew up in a time when their childhoods were documented with smartphone cameras instead of dedicated digital or film cameras. It’s not surprising that, perhaps as a reaction to the ubiquity of the phone, some young creative photographers are leaving their handsets in their pockets in favor of compact point-and-shoot digital cameras—the very type that camera manufacturers are actively discontinuing.

Much of the buzz among this creative class has centered around premium, chic models like the Fujifilm X100 and Ricoh GR, or for the self-anointed “digicam girlies” on TikTok, zoom point-and-shoots like the Canon PowerShot G7 and Sony RX100 models, which can be great for selfies.

But other shutterbugs are reaching back into the past 20 years or more to add a vintage “Y2K aesthetic” to their work. The MySpace look is strong with a lot of photographers shooting with authentic early-2000s “digicams,” aiming their cameras—flashes a-blazing—at their friends and capturing washed-out, low-resolution, grainy photos that look a whole lot like 2003.

“It’s so wild to me cause I’m an elder millennial,” says Ali O’Keefe, who runs the photography channel Two Months One Camera on YouTube. “My childhood is captured on film … but for [young people], theirs were probably all captured on, like, Canon SD1000s,” she says, referencing a popular mid-aughts point-and-shoot.

It’s not just the retro sensibility they’re after, but also a bit of cool cred. Everyone from Ayo Edibiri to Kendall Jenner is helping fuel digicam fever by publicly taking snaps with a vintage pocket camera.

The rise of the vintage digicam marks at least the second major nostalgia boom in the photography space. More than 15 years ago, a film resurgence brought thousands of cameras from the 1970s and ’80s out of closets and into handbags and backpacks. Companies like Impossible Project and Film Ferrania started up production of Polaroid-compatible and 35-mm film, respectively, firing up manufacturing equipment that otherwise would have been headed to the scrap heap. Traditional film companies like Kodak and Ilford have seen sales skyrocket. Unfortunately, the price of film stock also increased significantly, with film processing also getting more costly. (Getting a roll developed and digitally scanned now typically costs between $15 and $20.)

For those seeking to experiment with their photography, there’s an appeal to using a cheap, old digital model they can shoot with until it stops working. The results are often imperfect, but since the camera is digital, a photographer can mess around and get instant gratification. And for everyone in the vintage digital movement, the fact that the images from these old digicams are worse than those from a smartphone is a feature, not a bug.

What’s a digicam?

One of the biggest points of contention among enthusiasts is the definition of “digicam.” For some, any old digital camera falls under the banner, while other photographers have limited the term’s scope to a specific vintage or type. Sofia Lee, photographer and co-founder of the online community digicam.love, has narrowed her definition over time.

“There’s a separation between what I define as a tool that I will be using in my artistic practice versus what the community at large would consider to be culturally acceptable, like at a meetup,” Lee stated. “I started off looking at any digital camera I could get my hands on. But increasingly I’m focused more on the early 2000s. And actually, I actually keep getting earlier and earlier … I would say from 2000 to 2003 or 2004 maybe.”

Lee has found that she’s best served by funky old point-and-shoot cameras, and doesn’t use old digital single-lens reflex cameras, which can deliver higher quality images comparable to today’s equipment. Lee says DSLR images are “too clean, too crisp, too nice” for her work. “When I’m picking a camera, I’m looking for a certain kind of noise, a certain kind of character to them that can’t be reproduced through filters or editing, or some other process,” Lee says. Her all-time favorite model is a forgotten camera from 2001, the Kyocera Finecam S3. A contemporary review gave the model a failing grade, citing its reliance on the then-uncommon SD memory card format, along with its propensity to turn out soft photos lacking in detail.

“It’s easier to say what isn’t a digicam, like DSLRs or cameras with interchangeable lenses,” says Zuzanna Neupauer, a digicam user and member of digicam.love. But the definition gets even narrower from there. “I personally won’t use any new models, and I restrict myself to digicams made before 2010,” Neupauer says.

Not everyone is as partisan. Popular creators Ali O’Keefe and James Warner both cover interchangeable lens cameras from the 2000s extensively on their YouTube channels, focusing on vintage digital equipment, relishing in devices with quirky designs or those that represent evolutionary dead-ends. Everything from Sigma’s boxy cameras with exotic sensors to Olympus’ weird, early DSLRs based on a short-lived lens system get attention in their videos. It’s clear that although many vintage enthusiasts prefer the simple, compact nature of a point-and-shoot camera, the overall digicam trend has increased interest in digital imaging’s many forms.

Digital archeology

The digital photography revolution that occurred around the turn of the century saw a Cambrian explosion of different types and designs of cameras. Sony experimented with swiveling two-handers that could be science fiction zap guns, and had cameras that wrote JPEGs to floppy disks and CDs. Minolta created modular cameras that could be decoupled, the optics tethered to the LCD body with a cord, like photographic nunchaku. “There are a lot of brands that are much less well known,” says Lee. “And in the early 2000s in particular, it was really like the Wild West.”

Today’s enthusiasts spelunking into the digital past are encountering challenges related to the passage of time, with some brands no longer offering firmware updates, drivers, or PDF copies of manuals for these old models. In many cases, product news and reviews sites are the only reminder that some cameras ever existed. But many of those sites have fallen off the internet entirely.

“Steve’s Digicams went offline,” says O’Keefe in reference to the popular camera news website that went offline after the founder, Steve Sanders, died in 2017. “It was tragic because it had so much information.”

“Our interests naturally align with archaeology,” says Sofia Lee. “A lot of us were around when the cameras were made. But there were a number of events in the history of digicams where an entire line of cameras just massively died off. That’s something that we are constantly confronted with.”

Hocus focus

YouTubers like Warner and O’Keefe helped raise interest in cameras with Charged-Coupled Device technology, an older type of imaging sensor that fell out of use around 2010. CCD-based cameras have developed a cult following, and certain models have retained their value surprisingly well for their age. Fans liken the results of CCD captures to shooting film without the associated hassle or cost. While the digicam faithful have shown that older cameras can yield pleasing results, there’s no guaranteed “CCD magic” sprinkled on those photos.

“[I] think I’ve maybe unfortunately been one of the ones to make it sound like CCD sensors in and of themselves are making the colors different,” says Warner, who makes classic digital camera videos on his channel Snappiness.

“CCDs differ from [newer] CMOS sensors in the layout of their electronics but at heart they’re both made up of photosensitive squares of silicon behind a series of color filters from which color information about the scene can be derived,” says Richard Butler, managing editor at DPReview. (Disclosure: I worked at DPReview as a part-time editor in 2022 and 2023.) DPReview, in its 25th year, is a valuable library of information about old digital cameras, and an asset to vintage digital obsessives.

“I find it hard to think of CCD images as filmlike, but it’s fair to say that the images of cameras from that time may have had a distinct aesthetic,” Butler says. “As soon as you have an aesthetic with which an era was captured, there’s a nostalgia about that look. It’s fair to say that early digital cameras inadvertently defined the appearance of contemporary photos.”

There’s one area where old CCD sensors can show a difference: They don’t capture as much light and dark information as other types of sensors, and therefore the resulting images can have less detail in the shadows and highlights. A careful photographer can get contrasty, vibrant images with a different, yet still digital, vibe. Digicam photographer Jermo Swaab says he prefers “contrasty scenes and crushed blacks … I yearn for images that look like a memory or retro-futuristic dream.”

Modern photographs, by default, are super sharp, artificially vibrant, with high dynamic range that makes the image pop off the screen. In order to get the most out of a tiny sensor and lens, smartphones put shots through a computationally intense pipeline of automated editing, quickly combining multiple captures to extract every fine detail possible, and eradicate pesky noise. Digital cameras shoot a single image at a time by default. Especially with older, lower resolution digital cameras, this can give images a noisier, dreamier appearance that digicam fans love.

“If you take a picture with your smartphone, it’s automatically HDR. And we’re just used to that today but that’s not at all how cameras have worked in the past,” Warner says. Ali O’Keefe agrees, saying that “especially as we lean more and more into AI where everything is super polished to the point of hyperreal, digicams are crappy, and the artifacts and the noise and the lens imperfections give you something that is not replicable.”

Lee also is chasing unique, noisy photos from compact cameras with small sensors: “I actually always shoot at max ISO, which is the opposite of how I think people shot their cameras back in the day. I’m curious about finding the undesirable aspects of it and [getting] aesthetic inspiration from the undesirable aspects of a camera.”

Her favorite Kyocera camera is known for its high-quality build and noisy pics. She describes it as ”all metal, like a briefcase,” of the sort that Arnold Schwarzenegger carries in Total Recall. “These cameras are considered legendary in the experimental scene,” she says of the Kyocera. “The unique thing about the Finecam S3 is that it produces a diagonal noise pattern.”

A time to buy, a time to sell

The gold rush for vintage digital gear has, unsurprisingly, led to rising prices on the resale market. What was once a niche for oddballs and collectors has become a potential goldmine, driven by all that social media hype.

“The joke is that when someone makes a video about a camera, the price jumps,” says Warner. “I’ve actually tracked that using eBay’s TerraPeak sale monitoring tool where you can see the history of up to two years of sales for a certain search query. There’s definitely strong correlation to a [YouTube] video’s release and the price of that item going up on eBay in certain situations.”

“It is kind of amazing how hard it is to find things now,” laments says O’Keefe. “I used to be able to buy [Panasonic] LX3s, one of my favorite point and shoots of all time, a dime a dozen. Now they’re like 200 bucks if you can find a working one.”

O’Keefe says she frequently interacts with social media users who went online looking for their dream camera only to have gotten scammed. “A person who messaged me this morning was just devastated,” she says. “Scams are rampant now because they’ve picked up on this market being sort of a zeitgeist thing.” She recommends sticking with sellers on platforms that have clear protections in place for dealing with scams and fraud, like eBay. “I have never had an issue getting refunded when the item didn’t work.”

Even when dealing with a trustworthy seller, vintage digital camera collecting is not for the faint of heart. “If I’m interested in a camera, I make sure that the batteries are still made because some are no longer in production,” says O’Keefe. She warns that even if a used camera comes with its original batteries, those cells will most likely not hold a charge.

When there are no new batteries to be had, Sofia Lee and her cohort have resuscitated vintage cameras using modern tech: “With our Kyoceras, one of the biggest issues is the batteries are no longer in production and they all die really quickly. What we ended up doing is using 5V DC cables that connect them to USB, then we shoot them tethered to a power bank. So if you see someone shooting with a Kyocera, they’re almost always holding the power bank and a digicam in their other hand.”

And then there’s the question of where to store all those JPEGs. “A lot of people don’t think about memory card format, so that can get tricky,” cautions Warner. Many vintage cameras use the CompactFlash format, and those are still widely supported. But just as many digicams use deprecated storage formats like Olympus’s xD or Sony’s MemoryStick. ”They don’t make those cards anymore,” Warner says. “Some of them have adapters you can use but some [cameras] don’t work with the adapters.”

Even if the batteries and memory cards get sorted out, Sofia Lee underscores that every piece of vintage equipment has an expiration date. “There is this looming threat, when it comes to digicams—this is a finite resource.” Like with any other vintage tech, over time, capacitors go bad, gears break, sensors corrode, and, in some circumstances, rubber grips devulcanize back into a sticky goo.

Lee’s beloved Kyoceras are one such victim of the ravages of time. “I’ve had 15 copies pass through my hands. Around 11 of them were dead on arrival, and three died within a year. That means I have one left right now. It’s basically a special occasions-only camera, because I just never know when it’s going to die.”

These photographers have learned that it’s sometimes better to move on from a potential ticking time bomb, especially if the device is still in demand. O’Keefe points to the Epson R-D1 as an example. This digital rangefinder from printer-maker Epson, with gauges on the top made by Epson’s watchmaking arm Seiko, was originally sold as a Leica alternative, but now it fetches Leica-like premium prices. “I actually sold mine a year and a half ago,” she says. “I loved it, it was beautiful. But there’s a point for me, where I can see that this thing is certainly going to die, probably in the next five years. So I did sell that one, but it is such an awesome experience to shoot. Cause what other digital camera has a lever that actually winds the shutter?”

#NoBadCameras

For a group of people with a recent influx of newbies, the digicam community seems to be adjusting well. Sofia Lee says the growing popularity of digicams is an opportunity to meet new collaborators in a field where it used to be hard to connect with like-minded folks. “I love that there are more people interested in this, because when I was first getting into it I was considered totally crazy,” she says.

Despite the definition of digicam morphing to include a wider array of cameras, Lee seems to be accepting of all comers. “I’m rather permissive in allowing people to explore what they consider is right,” says Lee. While not every camera is “right” for every photographer, many of them agree on one thing: Resurrecting used equipment is a win for the planet, and a way to resist the constant upgrade churn of consumer technology.

“It’s interesting to look at what is considered obsolete,” Lee says. “From a carbon standpoint, the biggest footprint is at the moment of manufacture, which means that every piece of technology has this unfulfilled potential.” O’Keefe agrees: “I love it from an environmental perspective. Do we really need to drive waste [by releasing] a new camera every few months?”

For James Warner, part of the appeal is using lower-cost equipment that more people can afford. And with that lower cost of entry comes easier access to the larger creator community. “With some clubs you’re not invited if you don’t have the nice stuff,” he says. “But they feel welcome and like they can participate in photography on a budget.”

O’Keefe has even coined the hashtag #NoBadCameras. She believes all digicams have unique characteristics, and that if a curious photographer just takes the time to get to know the device, it can deliver good results. “Don’t be precious about it,” she says. “Just pick something up, shoot it, and have fun.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.