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And what was it? Also, when did most people around you (non-photographers) get one?
Mine was a Polaroid PDC-640, purchased by my parents for me for Christmas of 2000. It came with an 8 MB SmartMedia card and took pictures with a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 (.32 mp), but to save space I often took them at 320 x 240 (.076 mp). It was priced at about $200. As far as I know, I was the first in my then-middle school class to have a digital camera - and it was very impressive to them, especially the live (although if you moved the camera very quickly there was about a 1s lag) LCD display and ability to see pictures right after you took them. Obviously not much now!
Almost all of my peers on my Costa Rica trip had their own digital camera. I would say that most younger people around here got their own in 2003-2005.
Some pictures from then - unfortunately I lost all of them from the first five months I had the camera:
I voted 2003, but now that I think about it it could have 2002. Regardless, it was an Olympus C4000 Zoom and cost about $400. It really wasn't a bad camera, all things considered. I gave it to my mom after I got my Digital Rebel in 2004, and she used it for several years until the lens finally broke. It had manual controls, but I always just used the auto setting (without the flash). When I got my Rebel I learned much more about cameras in general and started using more manual settings.
Mine was a P&S from AOL; AOL Photocam to be exact with whopping a 640 X 480, bought it a couple of years after we purchased our first PC. Kept it until '06.
I got my first digital camera on May of 2006 and it was a Casio EX-ZILIM (or something like that, lol). It was great until I got the itch for a D-SLR and that's when I saw the Nikon light! It has been a sweet ride ever since!
Mid-1990s. It was the Epson Photo PC camera with a "revolutionary" resolution of 640 x 480 at the time. No zoom. No LCD monitor on the back. No memory card slot - 2 megabytes of internal memory. Just a huge brick sized camera with a serial port for importing pics to your computer (using the software that came on a floppy disk). Strangely enough as primitive as these 1st generation cameras were however, this one had a filter thread on the front so you could screw filters in front of the lens. Laughable now, but at the time everyone thought it was so incredible that you could "electronically take a photo and put it on your computer".
A couple of years later, I upgraded to an Olympus D-460 camera that had a LCD screen, 3X zoom and whopping 1.3 megapixel resolution, taking Smart Media memory cards for memory. It was actually an excellent camera and at that time, was one of the biggest selling cameras along with the 2MP version of it (D-490).
Late 1990s, upgraded to my first "serious" camera - the Olympus 2100uz. Whopper of 2 megapixel resolution, 10X zoom with image stabilization, Smart Media cards again, and the introduction of movies in a camera (320x240 size). Even once these things later became outdated they still had a cult following that tried to find them on Ebay for years - mine actually still works.
Back during the later 1990s, Olympus pretty much ruled in terms of coming out with really great cameras. The makers hadn't started their mad dashes yet to crank out a dozen new models or more per year, so they took time back then to develop and TEST their cameras before market, so in general you had better quality stuff that took better images than the stuff that came out later when super mass productions started. My Oly 2100 took better 2MP pics than camera that came out later that had up to 5MP resolutions. Olympus had a number of dark years that followed with dull models, but it's good to see them bouncing back with the weather proof and PEN models, now.
It was 2003 and it was a Nikon Coolpix 5700. I had no idea what I was doing with it. It had 8x zoom and 5 megapixels and I was told it was all the camera I'd ever need.
I voted 2002 but did not purchase my first digital camera until Fall 2003. My first digital camera was a 2.1MP HP. My first purchased camera, Sony F828, continues to amaze me. About nine years later, it still manages to find room in my camera bag so much so that I am still considering getting it an external flash. It also kept me from considering a DSLR for several years.
If not for limited high ISO performance, the F828 can still easily hold its own against the latest. The superb Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar lens made that easier, with a versatile 28-200mm focal length range (35mm equivalent) and large aperture (f/2.0-f/2.8). This lens is exceptionally sharp, especially for a zoom, and has an excellent bokeh too. Combined with a small but powerful 8MP CCD sensor, the color came out just right, including the skin tones (even better, with the custom WB feature). Coming from early days of RAW, I almost never used it… the files were large, recording time not so practical (a far cry from now, when I can shoot full size JPEG+RAW at 10 fps with my Sony A55). A few samples from this camera (old and relatively new):
Color and sharpness, taken from open window of a train moving at 60-70mph:
More of the colors and sharpness, on a tripod...
Pretty good dynamic range, especially for a digital camera of its time...
Smooth bokeh, sharp subject, and ability to get close (at wide angle, and this one from comforting distance):
With visible light cut off filter (I use Tiffen 87), couple of ND filters, CPL (to further reduce visible light) and the flip of a switch, it converts to an infra-red camera:
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