Cameras in my closet

I looked in my closet a few days back and saw five cameras lying around. I thought why not write a post about them.

Over the past 12 years, I bought a new camera whenever I felt the need to keep up with the latest technology.

My first camera was a Canon Prima Zoom Shot, a film camera, with a 38 to 60mm in-built zoom. I bought this camera in Bangalore from GK Vale in 1996 for Rs.7000, just before I left for UK on secondment from Kvaerner John Brown. This camera was not great, but was adequate. The following photo on the right explains what I mean - good but not having adequate detail.

However, with this camera I clicked some of my most memorable photos both in India (Bangalore, Tirupati, Srirangapatnam, Mysore, Rangantittu, Madikeri, Tala Cauvery, Shiva Samudra), and Abroad (London and Houston).

My second camera was a Samsung ECX1, a film camera, with a 38 to 140mm in-built zoom. I bought this camera in 1997 for circa $280, whilst I was in the US on secondment from Kvaerner Process. This camera was very good and I used it until a couple of years back, at which point the digital camera technology became so advanced that there was no benefit in holding on to an old manual 35mm film camera. Furthermore, storing films was a problem. For a time, I scanned the negatives and try to digitise my photographs. The task was arduous as the negatives tended to develop scratches and degrade over time. A digital negative scanner is limited in its potential to come up with near digital quality photos free of any blemishes. So I am done with my Samsung ECX1.

I got a first whiff of the digital camera technology through a colleague of mine whilst I was in Muscat. He had a Fuji DX-10 a 800 pixel digital camera (a dinosaur in terms of today's technology). He wanted to upgrade to a higher spec one and thus wanted to sell this camera. I bought it for 60 Omani Rials. Looking back it wasn't a great buy, because the pixel count was just good enough for 4" x 6" print size photographs.

Whilst I was at my friend's house in 2002, which was when I newly moved to the UK he showed me his photo collection taken with a Canon Powershot A70. These photos were crystal clear and the detail was unquestionably the best I have seen in my life. This is when I bought a new Canon Powershot A70 for circa £260 from Amazon. It had 3.2 mega pixels with a 3x optical zoom. This camera lasted for three years, before its LCD display gave up on me. I had to return it to the Canon dealer, who was kind enough to replace it free of charge with a Canon Powershot A520. This has 4 mega pixels with a 4x optical zoom. Both these cameras helped me immensely in building up my digital photo collection. My wife and my children have taken a liking to photography and they have taken quite a few photographs with Canon A520. A few selected shots from both these cameras from locations in Switzerland, Keukenhoff, Algarve, North Wales, Barcelona, Tarragona and Paris.

My latest camera is a digital SLR camera. It is a Nikon D50 and I bought it from Costco for about £500 in December 2006. The camera came with a body and a twin lens kit (18-55mm and 55-200mm Nikkor lens). A few selected photographs with my Nikon D50. These days I use Nikon on most occasions.

Footnote:
(1) I used Panasonic PV-GS400 (a camcorder with a built-in camera, which takes decent photos) for the snapshot of all the cameras and the individual camera photos.

(2) I bought my Nikon D50 after reading about it 0n Steve Digicam.