Apple QuickTake

I beg to differ. They were awful. The image quality was diabolical --especially on skintones which, let's face it is what most point & shoot cameras will be aimed at. The resolution was risible [324 x 240] and the ergonomics equally bad. The thing was like the bastard offspring of one of those ViewMaster toys.

As if all of that wasn't bad enough; the Quicktakes used a weird proprietary format [some kind of version of PICT, I seem to recall] that even Apple stopped supporting after a few years.

If I sound bitter and twisted it's because, centuries ago, I went on a once in a lifetime trip to Australia and, technology freak that I am, foolishly took a [then] cutting edge QuickTake camera with me, instead of my SLR. In my archives, I now have a folder full of minuscule 320x240 PICT files which I can only open by using something like GraphicConverter [0] and even that can only make sense of about half of them. And, when I do manage to open some of them, the image quality is piss-poor.

[0] https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter/

Yeah, I think some of Apple’s “worst” products were actually very good devices that suffered from three fatal characteristics: too large, too expensive, and too soon. I loved those QuickTakes, but they were kind of bulky, and prohibitively expensive for something that took only a few low-quality photos at a time when most people didn’t see a reason to get a digital camera instead of a standard one.

Same for the Newton. I see that included on “Apple’s worst products” lists from time to time, but it was actually a really solid machine. Again, it was too large, too expensive, and too soon. (The concept was vindicated when Palm basically created the everyman’s Newton that I think Apple should have made in the first place.)