Digital Camera Technology Went From Earth Orbit To Moon Walk In Two Decades

When the first digital camera came my way I thought I’d found the ultimate toy and tool in the same package. It was a Sony that used 3.5 inch floppy disks to record on. If I kept the resolution normal I could get 60-75 pictures on a disk. Crank it up to HD, that meant high density back then and I could get 30 really great blow up and print quality pictures.

With an “A” drive to kick start and spin plus the focus motor and LCD display the battery needed recharging by the third floppy disk and a new battery was needed after about a year of constant use. My Pentium computer (it was a Pentium 1 but I didn’t know it at the time as the PII was only talked about then) 90 MHz PC and some free shareware program and I could put on a slide show that was a real crowd pleaser.

Somewhere in the basement all that equipment is together in a big cardboard box along with a photo printer from that era which when I think about it wasn’t that long ago in techno years! Digital camera technology has certainly stopped at no boundary that I’ve seen. For less than the price of that old digital camera, one of their industry cousins, Panasonic, can sell me one of their Lumix models that will store a thousand photos without bulging, has a lens range from it seems about 0 to infinity and will even take hour long full motion video recordings in HD (the High Definition kind) with stereo sound.