I just realized something I hadn't really thought about before: back in film days, there were no pocket- or even compact-cameras with zoom!Funny how I got used to that without really thinking about it. Probably because it happened gradually in terms of quality. Around the millenium they could zoom, but the image quality was... let's call it Usable For Some Values Of Use. (And this Nikon 950 and its 2MP images were real dang good for the time.)
Our friend Bert made me think about it when he mentioned how today's good zooms were explained one day his compact camera broke, and he saw how much smaller the sensor was than the lens. The sensors in most compact cameras are around the size of a pinky nail!
In other words, a compact camera with built-in zoom only came around when they became capable of making tiny sensor in good quality. And they became really good cameras when those sensors became really good, let's call it the mid-noughties.
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In fact I'm wondering when anybody will really challenge the RX100. It's still standing in a class of its own after a year.
5 comments:
Sorry, but that's nonsense.
Have you really forgotten the late nineties / early naughties when it became hard to find a compact camera with a fixed focal length lens of decent quality and speed? It seemed like all the manufacturers were competing for the longest zoom in a compact, boasting specs like "4.5-12.0/48-200 mm" (you can tell how they managed to keep that thing compact?)
Huh, OK. I guess that was a period where I was not looking at cameras much. Thanks.
A 200mm 12.0 film camera will be real useful on dull days.
If they were *called* "compacts" though, that must have been more of tradition. They can't have been much smaller than a small SLR.
Well, the race for the longest zoom clearly was misguided. And the aperture at the long end always was the Achilles heel of these cameras.
Of course even fixed lens compacts never were as small as the camera module in your phone, even say an Olympus XA or µ(mju:) II would be a stretch for a shirt pocket.
A Pentax Espio 115 with 38-115 mm f/3.9-10.5 zoom was the smallest of its time at 111 x 61 x 40.5mm and 215 g (without the CR-2 battery).
Btw., the first zoom compact from 1986 was a Pentax as well - as was the 200 mm monster.
"even say an Olympus XA or µ(mju:) II would be a stretch for a shirt pocket."
Weeell, my fave, the Konica Big Mini, or a Minox 35, both could fit in shirt pockets. At least *my* shirt pockets.
In fact it's those camera which made me impatient with how digital cameras were so big for their sensor size. Even now the sensor needs to be a quarter of the size. I guess the electronics and battery take up more space than I realize.
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