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Comment by amdavidson | Hacker News Reader

The difference between 10 and 20 years ago is a bit of a stretch.

I won't argue with you on the first number. 10 years ago good photographers took beautiful images with the Canon 1Ds Mk III or the Nikon D300.

However, 20 years ago you were stuck with modified film bodies like the Kodak DCS520, shooting 2 megapixel images of questionable quality[0] for the bargain price of $15,000[1]

It is only fairly recently that any digital camera off the shelf is capable of producing "good" images with a good photographer, and we're now getting to the point where computational photography and incredible smartphone sensors will produce good images with a total novice at the helm. That's what makes this all so exciting.

0: https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/kodakdcs520/7 1: https://www.shutterbug.com/content/classic-digital-camerasbr...

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>> 20 years ago is a bit of a stretch

20 years ago, in 1997, I bought my first -consumer- digital camera, an Epson Photo PC500. It had a resolution of 640x480. If I'm not mistaken, I think I paid around 700 CAD at the time. And the photos weren't even as good as "questionable quality". So I would go even further and say 20 years ago is a huge stretch.

Yes, you're right, I felt the 20 years was a little bit of a stretch, but it sounded better.

I do think at least 17 years is legit, though, back to release of Canon EOS D30 in 2000. D30 was only 3.3MP, but was used by a lot of professional photographers and made some great images (I still have one, taken by a photographer friend, that is one of my favorite pictures ever). I think it was priced around $3k.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS_D30

You can read review by Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape, who called the D30 an "inflection point" and said it "changes the playing field forever". He took plenty of pictures with D30 and had multiple exhibits with gallery-size prints:

https://luminous-landscape.com/d30/

I'm pretty sure good photographers made great images with lesser digital cameras before that, but D30 was the camera that started people thinking that digital could really be as good as or better than film.

Ha, I actually didn't touch this part of the comment but yeah - 20 years ago, no. As part of my job at the time I had access to the very first sony mavica floppy disk digital camera, and a contemporary kodak I don't recall the model number of. Oh my god they were bad. They, in no way, shape or form, competed with film in quality. They were crap.

I'm not saying you can't see what the picture is of. Sure, you can. But nothing about it is pretty. Think about the lowest budget, crappiest webcam you can imagine - that's it.

"equipment is secondary" - buddy with that hardware you're taking "glitch in the matrix" digital dystopia pictures and basically nothing else. And hey I like that. But don't pretend it just needed a skilled hand. There were fundamental flaws and every photographer I knew back then swore they'd never forsake film, and who could blame them?

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