Agfa Isola 120 6×6 format…..my favorite is the OM10 on the right , I bought it back when I was 17 ! I have another ten or so lenses .

Why are all the photos of cameras in this post so bad?

Why are all the photos of cameras in this post so bad?

because they are taken in digital ! (mine by phone)

Why are all the photos of cameras in this post so bad?

Taken with dijical, innit??!!

(does little dance)

The victory of convenience over quality.

Taken with dijical, innit??!!

No, it just goes to show that the luddites can’t use modern cameras.

I was using a ‘modern’ dijical cam last night, to teach with. I had to borrow one, as I’d forgotten mine. Bloody thing was a nightmare; all sorts of auto features, a million buttons, and things popping up on the screen, distracting me from actually taking the picture. I don’t want ‘face recognition’, I know what a **** face looks like, ffs. Loads of completely useless features, designed to help someone with no skill at photography, take a ‘better’ picture.

At least, with film, I knew I’d ‘taken’ the picture, not the camera…

Oh and the manual for this particular cam: £15 extra.

Spend spend spend…

Rudeboy…….that’s kinda the point with digital cameras though – particularly the compacts.

Who do the companies want to sell to? – the mass market. What do the mass market want? Cameras that take the thinking out of photography, cameras that offer more bang for their buck and if one manufactuer provides face recognition, they all do. If Sony stick a 48Mp sensor in their camera, then they all do even if it means sacrificing quality for noise. As I have said before in this thread, my lowly 4Mp Dimage Z3 takes much better pictures than many newer digital cameras (particularly Panasonic Lumix), as it controls noise fairly well and has image stabilisation. Try explaining that to someone who wants the cheapest camera with as many bells and whistles on.

You can’t blame digital photography for that – blame the marketing boys at all the manufacturers.
If film had been able to provide all the bells, whistles, beeps and user-aids, it would have.

designed to help someone with no skill at photography, take a ‘better’ picture.

Well yes – that’s rather the point of all these auto-modes and focussing aids.
Snappers want something they can just point-and-shoot to get a nice picture of Auntie Ethel.

As a Real Photographer™ you wouldn’t use these modes. Fair enough.

Back in the day I had plenty of film compacts that had "Scene Modes" on them and the like, so I don’t think you can pretend this is just a digital thing.

As I said earlier, if they were still making film compacts then you can bet your life they’d have face-recognition, smile detection and all that rubbish on them too.

A few film pictures

I used the scene mode on this too. Great fun.

that Holga puts out some nice tones, I watched a programme last night with a fella trying to (and failing imho) to recreate some of the "greats" work, David Bailey was even on the show, it did seem that the images they were taking (both film and digi, side by side in a few cases) that the film pictures tended to capture the "life" of the scene where as the digi shots whilst very rich in detail seemed a little clinical and stark.

does that stand up do you think?

where as the digi shots whilst very rich in detail seemed a little clinical and stark

fatuous flannel :o)

Could I just point out that most of the "rubbish" on cameras has nothing to do with them being digital or film. You can build autofocus, exposure, scene modes, face recognition etc. into a film camera or a digital camera. Film versus digital isn’t really an issue at all. Apart from burst shooting and changing ISO at any time most of the other developments would have happened on film cameras anyway and we’d still be bemoaning the loss of skills. We are now constantly bombarded by images so it should come as no surprise that so very few stand out. 99.99% look, after all like something else we’ve seen before.As for digital looking stark well go and look at an original Ansel Adams print and then look at a modern print from film. The difference is a hundred fold the difference between modern film and digital. The depth and quality from a plate camera when both film and paper contained vastly more silver than current film / paper is breathtaking.