7MP .... money bags over here
My first point-and-shoot camera was a 2MP Fujifilm that I paid about $300 for.
My first digital camera was a Sony Mavica that used a 3.5” floppy disk for storage. 
shot 0.3 MP and could store ~10-15 images per disk
Wow ... never knew these existed. But you would have a better resolution and quality if you just took the time to draw the image with paper and a pencil.
Same! I really don't want to tell you what I paid for it, it was a ridiculous amount. But, it did pay for itself when my son was born and while he was in the nursery (a bit jaundiced) I could take pics and bring them to show my wife that he was OK. Plus send pics to the grandparents on another continent.
So in the end it was worth it.
My dad was a professor of photojournalism at the time, so he had a bit of a budget to buy fun toys to experiment with.
That camera didn’t make it into the mainstream curriculum, but he did eventually flip the whole department over to DSLRs and had a fleet of cameras to loan out to students
They were amazing for us in the kitchens to plate up & have a demo for the cooks the same day. Game changer for modern chefs. So fun.
That’s an awesome use! Particularly in the late 90s/early 00s
Absolutely, then imagine us putting those photos on page with a description of the dish, in the same order as the catering menu so people can see the dish and order accordingly.
Early 2000's I learned enough digital photography, manipulation & excel to serve me the next 24 years...lol
I have love for the FD Mavica. I have a Sony CD Mavica and have been using it quite a bit lately. It actually takes very nice photos for what it is.
I was going to post a photo of the camera but my account is too new.
Your friendly reminder that the Mars rover main cameras are only 2MP. They probably have better quality sensors though.
My first digital camera was a 1.3 MP generic no-name with a fixed-focus lens. But I was like 12 and my parents weren't about to drop hundreds on me. Plus it was the year 2000, so anything over a megapixel was amazing.
My camera before that was a Game Boy Camera. It was so bad that you could only really take selfies with it. Anything else was unrecognizable 8-bit pixel-puke. Plus the cartridge held less than 30 pictures and the prints faded within a couple of years, making it impossible to preserve any shots you took with it.
Point and shoot like this is still around, I own a modern Sony one. It fits in my pocket for travel and replaces my huge Canon DSLR and Sigma lens that I have in storage while I’m moving to another state.
The little camera is very practical and can zoom 100x more than my phone and has image stability that blows my mind at its 4k video at full zoom handheld shots.
I've got a ZV1, useful little gadget
Cybershot for the win!!
Sometimes snatch these for $10 at the thrift.
tl;dr: I'd buy the one pictured in a second.
At 7mp that's pretty good.
My first one was 1.2 mp, 2 years later my phone had a 1mp. Fortunately I didn't pay much for the camera.
Better and larger sensor, producing less noise, meaning less need for noise reduction post-processing that makes smartphone photographs horribly muddy. The first digital camera my family ever owned (2MP, 8x zoom, still functional 20 years later) takes better pictures than my new phone.
These are selling for hundreds of dollars not just because of nostalgia but also practicality. You're not allowed to bring connected devices into secure facilities but you may need to document things with photographs.
I would also like to have a point-and-shoot camera where the sensor would be much larger than the ones of the majority of phones.
Seems too niche of a market, but would be nice
Ricoh GR III
Fuji X100V
Yes, I had those on my radar for a bit, but the 1000 bucks is probably a bit too much for me
There's the Fuji mentioned in the other comment, which is pretty much exactly what you describe. But also depending on your budget, there's a whole market of crop-sensor/APS-C cameras in more or less that form factor with a lot more flexibility. Then of course there's the Leica stuff, but that's more money than problems territory.
There’s an Australian company basically reconditioning old canon powershots with new batteries and memory card connections: https://lola.camera/
Point and shoot.
Good ol SX-70 film. Definitely recommend the SLR SX-70s though, way more fun to use and easier to store.
I've lately been seeing a lot of gen alpha using old school digital cameras. I don't know if it's a retro fad or what.
Aha! So it is a kind of retro thing.
Been there done that
Idk it's a fun toy for when you're in the woods or wherever with someone
It's like we're making a foto instead of using the phones
Back when even the crap cameras for normies had decent optics on them. Smart phones...try.
Smartphones still take better photos but they compensate for the optics with software. If you stick that large of a lens into a smartphone, the battery would be too small. Not ti mention the extra moving parts required for retractable lens.
The Nokia 1020 would like to have a word
I don't have a problem with phones having simple optics. What I think I'd like to reject is the notion that the one device is your cell phone, media player, web browser, camera, flashlight, fleshlight flishlight, floshlight and flushlight, all in one quarter inch thick slab of mostly touch screen.
Let me go back to having a 4 inch smart phone that can do some of that stuff, like I didn't mind my Galaxy S4 Mini's camera, it worked fine. If I'm going to be serious about photography I want a device that is mostly a camera with a good sensor and decent optics. If I'm gonna have a flashlight I want it to fit in my hand and have a properly bright LED with decent optics, if I'm gonna have a fleshlight I want a proper aperture with interesting texturing on the inside and decent optics. My S10e is the worst floshlight I've ever had. I might as well use my foot.
I still use one, when I need to take a picture of my phone, for reasons! A few other things, too, but not much.
Smartphones suck at taking a picture when you click the goddamn button. The half-decent ones also have burst-first, which is just fantastic, and should be the default for smartphones as well.
The downside is the menus. Setting up a timer is agony. There's two d-pads and a dial and six buttons, none of which are labeled in anything but inscrutable hyper-stylized pictographs, and I swear to god their functionality is randomized every time you access them. It's like a shite SCP that feeds on human frustration.
I still have one of these. They had an issue where the lense would get stuck and the solution was to drop the camera on the carpet from around 3 feet up. That dislodged it and it started zooming again.
my wife's sister gave her her old digital photography camera from around 2005ish. she was really excited but that was tempered by the realization that her iphone takes nicer pictures. crazy how far digital camera tech has come in so few years!
I had this one.
I somehow ended up with a fujifilm that had a slot that took an SD card but would scratch it up and corrupt it within a few times using it, or you could use an xd card instead. What's an xd card I hear you ask? Oh, only tech that existed for approximately 5 years and died the same year I bought the camera.
I've made stupider tech purchases but I'm having trouble recalling one at the moment. Perhaps the iphone 3gs was nearly as bad.
The Canon point and shoots used to take really beautiful pictures.
I dug out my old one, probably five or six years ago, to compare to whatever phone I had in my pocket. I remembered the excellent pictures and figured the lenses might make a difference.
It was obnoxious how much better my phone was. I don't really get why, but it was night and day.
I’ve got a few boxes of Betamax if you’d like to invest. Or some HD DVDs
I have an Olympus Tough, which I bought because it's waterproof and I can take it out on the water without worrying. What I use it for a lot though is its macro settings, amazing levels of magnification. And both: took some great close-ups of tadpoles in a pond.
I still have mine!
nostalgia noun nos·tal·gia nä-ˈstal-jə nə-, also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl- 1: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition also : something that evokes nostalgia
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