Comment by hettygreen
3 years ago
This is just make hipsters get into old point and shoot digital cameras... good thing I kept my Canon A540.
All the subtle trickery manipulation that the smart phone's doing to reality is concerning. Smoothing people's faces, making their eyes pop, enhancing the shit out of the colours, and now plopping fake objects overtop of the real ones.
Future concerns of this technology should range from a low-key disconnect from reality, to the complete inability to photograph certain objects or locations.
Imagine dusting off a 30 year old digital camera, finding some AA batteries to put in it, snap a selfie and then realizing just how ugly we all are and how washed out the polluted world actually looks without a bunch of narcissism-pandering enhancements.
Not sure about hipsters, but it's apparently somewhat of a trend with young people.
"The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera
Young people are opting for point-and-shoots and blurry photos."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/technology/digital-camera...
They are realizing that these things are all toys and fashion so you might as well save money and just buy old stuff and above all take photos.
I think it's great. It's the exact opposite of the person who spends all their time gear shopping and never using the gear.
I can highly recommend older Nikon DSLRs and older AF-D or manual focus AI-s lenses. Youbhet full frame bodies, the awesome D700 for example, and a very decent set of lenses rivaling the holly trinary for around the same price you pay for a Z50 with a kit lens. Nothing wrong with a Z50, it is a great camera. But the old, used gear is just such better value IMHO. Ai-s lenses are getting more expensive so since a couple of years so.
The remaining budget can go into going to nice places to shoot nice photos, and to print them nicely and large enough to put on your wall choice.
I picked Nikon, but I assume Canon works as well.
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I'm 40 and did the same thing, bought a cheap analog camera with black and white film to shoot fun photos on my birthday party :) The film is still at the lab, but I guess it's worth the wait.
I love my Canon AE-1 but dang it's expensive to actually use.
The G9x Mark II, Sony RX100, Panasonic LUMIX and similar 1" sensor cameras are awesome though and I don't think they've gotten too crazy with computational photography. I imagine some color processing modes might be doing a bit of work though.
> Smoothing people's faces, making their eyes pop, enhancing the shit out of the colours,
Our brains do far worse stuff with our memories. Not sure how relevant 'high fidelity' is to people who mostly use phones for memories
That’s what photos used to be good for. They don’t fudge stuff like our brains.
What about and white photos though?
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I regularly take photos of text etc because I am not going to remember it. If a photo of a config password is AI fucked into showing the wrong digits, there’s a real problem.
“Future concerns of this technology should range from a low-key disconnect from reality…”
This phrase could cast a broadening net with each year’s new tech.