Eno never misses does he?

Except ADAT.

Nobody is nostalgic for ADAT.

20 years ago HBO made the tv show Rome. They filmed it on analog film. I’ve recently been watching it for the first time and it’s absolutely amazing how well it looks compared to shows shot on digital from the same time. It looks good even compared to modern cinema and because it’s film they could do 4k captures.

For a recent movie, Strange Darling was filmed in analog. Great movie and looks unparalleled.

Dune was filmed on digital, transferred to analog, and the scanned back to digital for distribution.

I guess my point is, that there is some magic in analog. Whether the inherent limitations of the form, or by introduced randomness of the chemical process, or by placebo assumption of “realness”.

We live in an age of Netflix enforcing all shows to look exactly the same and even adding de-aging filters to actors. The gulf between the perceived reality of analog film and digital has never been larger. So yeah, analog excites me.

This is a big thing for early synthesizers. Many of them tried quite hard to accurate emulate real instruments - pianos, horns, strings - but inevitably failed due to limitations of their time. But many of them became classics in their own rights, to the point that later synths emulated them. And now, of course, you can get software versions of the same synths which do an incredible job of reproducing every last detail of a hardware instrument that did a bad job of emulating an analog one!

An account called Natspone plays with this idea in shortform vertical videos, I find it incredibly bizarre and unsettling. I should forewarn - you're probably not going to enjoy the style at all.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C3HtsLXOgui/?hl=en

What did he mean by CD distortion?

I'm also not super clear on how digital video would have jitter in a way that analog video wouldn't?

I totally agree with his overall sentiment, I'm just a bit confused on the specific examples.

In 30 years, people will be nostalgic for TikTok.

Some people might even be nostalgic for Bing. (People are nostalgic for Clippy after all.)

In other words.... you are not nostalgic for the thing itself. (The thing kind of sucks.) You are nostalgic for your childhood.

Absolutely. Like those terrible filters that are supposed to make video look like it was recorded on VHS. They always make the results far worse than VHS actually was in practice.

People are now corrupting mpeg video intentionally. They call it "datamoshing". And of course there is glitch art, and the "vhs look" filter being (over) used everywhere.

Assuming you're not talking about lens effects (which definitely has a huge effect), you might be reacting to the use of tone mapping in iPhone photos, which tends to make things look "flat". There's a slider called "Brilliance" in the iPhone photos app that you can play around with to get a sense of how this type of processing tends to flatten images. I'm not sure how or whether it's possible to disable this in the default camera app.

Every digital camera I've ever owned takes "better" pictures than my iPhone 15 Pro. The iPhone is fantastic for taking a few snaps to remember a trip or event, or recording an ephemeral "story", but when I am actually trying to take photos there's no comparison to my ~10 year old digital camera.

It's partly about sensor size and tech., partly down the the limitations of tiny smartphone lenses, and partly down to what's added (or should that be taken away) by the "computational photography" software in modern smartphones.

> It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.

Can you post a representative mountain photo from each camera? I'm very curious what generates this feeling for you.

> It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.

Might be due to a combination of sensor size, focal length on the older camera, and the distance to the subject.

You should teach them to also move into better positions and think about light and shadows when they take phone pictures.

A big difference between smartphones and cameras is the focal lengths. On an iphone, a 48mm focal length is considered tele, and the main cam is 24mm. That will surely take away the perspective from the Rocky mountains, if not your nose.

It's partly the ccd sensor, it's unfortunate we moved on past these as no modern digital camera can quite match the best of those color-wise imo

the pictures were, subjectively at least, better.

I'm in love with this phrasing.

Welcome to modern "journalism" on the web. The medium (HTML) easily allows including as many high-quality images as you want in an article, but the writers are too damn lazy to bother including any.

It's similar to this whole discussion about CD vs. vinyl in one of the threads here: CD is technically a far superior medium, but the mastering engineers are too damn lazy to use it properly, and instead compress everything to hell ("brickwalling") and eliminate all dynamic range, whereas the vinyl mastering engineers apparently put a lot more effort into their work, so vinyl ends up sounding better.

The film secret sauce is usually varying temperature/hue in different regions/brightnesses of the image. The 2005 digital example exhibits this via red/magenta being excessive in the shadows, but falling off in brighter areas

People love fancy names when getting scammed ;)

I still take photos on a 5D Mark II because I don’t see a big reason to upgrade. The photos look great and I’m familiar with the layout. I know there are plenty of improvements to be had in newer and better models, but I’ve managed to work around its flaws and still take good photos. It being old helps me feel comfortable taking riskier shots, too.

What you are looking for is a Ricoh GR III or IIIx [0] (same camera, different fixed lens focal length). It's super pocketable, and you can turn the screen off completely, although it doesn't have a viewfinder, so with the screen off you can't really know what you are framing - it could be fun to try and guess after getting the hang of it. Image quality would be much better even than the latest flagship phones. Finally, you can browse the images on the camera afterwards and wirelessly transmit the ones you want to edit/post to your phone/tablet/computer. You can also have presets for color filters and highlight/shadow tones, so you don't really need to edit in post if you prefer. It's truly a great little camera, and the price is not that bad (usually around $1000, but can be found for less, or you could go with the previous model, GR II).

[0] https://www.ricoh-imaging.co.jp/english/products/gr-3/

You can get a lot of good deals on basic/entry-level DSLR cameras such as the Nikon D3500 on ebay and such.

> For her birthday, my daughter received a toy digital camera that instanly printed photos on thermal receipt paper.

I got one of those recently. Immensely gratifying to have the photo printed immediately (even if all the tourists in London look at you funny.) Wish the camera was a little better but then again it's probably not worth it given you're printing relatively lo-res B&W dithered output...

I honestly like my photos more from my iPhone 3 than my current iPhone SE. The photos were blurry, noisy, and crunchy while my current photos are just flat and without character. It's not nostalgia for me, it's the photos looking too good and a bit plastic.

That's a three-sensor camera which is quite special IMO.

I agree with all that.

But smartphone cameras are not progress on all fronts. They are small and seem to be optimized to take pictures that look impressive.

I sometimes have a slideshow with family pictures running on a large monitor. Sometimes I stop and look at a picture that somehow just look much nicer that the rest when you spend some time looking at it. If I then check the metadata, it almost always turns out to be one of few pictures I took with my old DSLR camera or a newer compact camera.

Of course those cameras are much bigger and has bigger lenses and should be able to make better pictures. But the best camera is the one you brought with you. Which is why so few of the pictures are made with a smartphone.

But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular.

I was at an event recently, with a bunch of teenagers (one of which was mine) and I passed around a couple of those Fuji Instax cameras.

They loved them. They liked writing notes on the border. The photos aren't nearly as good as even the most basic smartphone camera, but there was something genuine about them.

For all the advances we've made in technology over the years, people are still thoroughly analog. And while digicams are not analog in any way, there is something about them that scratches that itch. Maybe it's as simple as hitting an actual button to make it go.

For all the amazing high-tech in today's smartphones, you still feel like a monkey at the monolith as you paw at it.

It's not "old stuff is better" as much as "I'm better than you."

For a long time, that was by having sharper, higher-quality pictures. Your friend had some Kodak Instamatic and you had a Hasselblad and you could assert your dominance over them.

But nowadays, the phones in everyone's pocket take such outstandingly sharp pictures that there isn't really meaningful room for improvement. So, people now differentiate themselves by getting vintage digital cameras which are hard to find, cost extra money, break frequently, etc., so that they can demonstrate their uniqueness.

It’s not about being ‘better’. Older tech is just more fun! There are more moving parts, more differences between models, more to enjoy repairing, maintaining, hacking, comprehending! Modern tech is now so mature that it’s obfuscated to the point of being magic.

I don’t think it has much to do with ‘ethics’ at all — at least not for me.

Cameras imbue a grain onto what they shoot, both in the physical sense of grain in analogue cameras and the digital grain of the iPhone camera (The technical high quality but AI smearyness and color grade of modern iPhones is it's own grain) and that iPhone grain is now the aesthetic of almost all social media content so anything filmed in it has the same feeling as every janky social media video shot with it.

If you're creating art and easy route to differentiate and not feel like everything else in the timeline is to use an entirely different "grain" and you'll stand out from the mass.

It's not as simple as "old stuff better" it's more "other stuff feels different".

On the other hand it helps preserve history so I'm not sure I care the intentions are not pure. I know I got on this bandwagon with a simple analog camera over ten years ago and now I'm drowning in 1800s and 1900s electrical engineering books and newspapers.

I don't know take valve amps for example, the subjective qualities the clearly imperfect technology produces can be quite pleasant. Yes you could just as well simulate such an amplifier in software because there's no 'magic' to why it sounds that way, but there's something aesthetically pleasing about warm glowing glass.

I'm no photographer but I feel there's something similar going on here.

Old stuff feels better because people are familiar with it. People grew up with them and if anything their expectations are set by those very things.

What is bizarre? Ethical, characterful and expressive they certainly can be, right? I also haven't seen anyone pretending it's not consumerism. People are just trying to have some fun.

It’s super weird to find out that my old camera sitting in a drawer, the cheap one everybody had, is now an object of desire for people who weren’t even born yet when it was manufactured. However silly I think the motivations are though, I’ll get behind any trend that extends the useful life of our electronics.

Before 2008 or so a 35mm SLR has higher quality photos for the price if you weren’t taking that many photos and you could still process film all over, with good quality scans if you had the right place. When DSLRs hit 10+ MP and dropped to $700 or so that changed things a bit.

My X100 still has better photos than my iPhone 12. I have an iPhone 16 Pro and I think it’s better as a camera than the X100 but I still prefer the X100 when I want a shot and I will put the time into it. That is 13 years old. I also have a canon S95 and it was still more useful for photos than my iPhone 12 was.

There is something real to it. It's not just nostalgia or a fad. Go and look at product manuals from the 70s through 90s. They're awesome and detailed with diagrams and even exposition discussing the general genre of product. For example, synth manuals would actually teach you about synthesis while also covering the synthesizer in question in great detail. Nowadays, you are lucky to get a little placard of quick tips.

The fact that manuals were produced with such care when it was really hard to do so is insight into how much thought was given to the entire product. It's not necessarily that the products are technically superior. It's that honest hard work was put into the products. You walked into a store and purchased it from a person. It couldn't be easier to produce product manuals these days with modern software, and yet it's never done. Today's consumer landscape is about disposability and scale. You have companies like Apple that intentionally remove features so that they can sell you them separately, like the dongle mess. Apple lied to their customers for the reasons they were removed and now sell them parts that costs sub-cents for dozens and hundreds of dollars.

There is something real about all of this that modern people yearn for. I remember having to buy technology as a kid. You talked to people, asked them questions, and they new things about the product. It wasn't about just pushing a virtual button.

That's probably some of it, but I recently took up film photography again.

A few aspects of shooting film appeal to me... the imperfection (memories aren't perfect, the photos shouldn't be either - but I'm also a huge Impressionism fan, so maybe that's it). The delayed gratification - in a world where most things are "instant", waiting a few weeks+ to get results changes the way I mentally process the images and associated memories. And the higher cost per shot forces me to be a bit more planful about shots.

Of course, that said, I get the photos scanned (not prints), and view them in the same apps as pure digitals. So maybe I'm just weird or a hipster.

I did ask for a Polaroid for Christmas - full analog baby! The Go model is dirt cheap (for a camera), maybe it'll be great, maybe I'll use it a few times and stick it in a drawer.

> It's quite strange. It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use - but trying to pretend it isn't.

Reality is strange. Like how Apple owners somehow think they own a product that expresses individualism and artistic freedom where it really is a mass-produced product that looks the same as everybody else's, and more so than any other brand with less choice, while almost every aspect of customization is heavily controlled by the company ...

Old stuff is harder to use and you have to put in more effort to get good results out of it, so the act of creation using old tech feels more meaningful

While I gladly embrace the shift to solid state, I find the mechanical engineering in old electronic devices, cameras in particular, quite fascinating.

My wife and I were just watching a YouTube video about the history of the Mattel Intellivision gaming console. If you've never seen one, the thing had wooden panels. It was definitely inspired by an era where your appliances were meant to match your furniture. I remember, as a child of the 80s, seeing televisions that were cased in wood as well.

I would argue that these types of designs made an anti-consumerist statement which is why you don't see them anymore. An appliance that tries to look like furniture doesn't need to do that, it is a non-essential feature of the appliance that the manufacturer chooses to include. And it makes a statement: "I'm part of your home. Care for me. Display me. Treasure me. Enjoy me ... and don't throw me out because I'm not disposable plastic."

The dedicated camera vs smartphone topic doesn't necessarily align with the concept of appliances as furniture, but it does strike me as being the difference between a specialized tool and a multi-tool.

Everyone owns a smartphone. There's nothing special about that. And while taking a good photo arguably requires some degree of skill regardless of your tool, smartphones represent the average consumer; the lowest common denominator. Anyone can, and does, snap pictures with a smartphone.

A dedicated camera, on the other hand, represents a conscious decision to take photography more seriously. To want to focus only on that, free of other distractions. To climb whatever learning curve stands in the way.

Then, consider, that there are people who appreciate history and have no illusions about whether or not a particular historical time period was "better" or not. I follow a historic costumer on YouTube, from whom I learned how to sew by hand and how many historic clothing was constructed. Do I think that living in the Victorian era would be better on the whole? No. I value modern medicine and social advancements that have been made since that time. But do I love the Victorian aesthetic and value the knowledge of how to do things without modern machinery? You betcha. I feel like a more rounded person and, despite coming from a hobby, I have life skills that I didn't have before, like being able to fit, hem, repair and even produce some of my own clothing.

Trends and fashion changes, and the phenomenon of "older is better" is human nature that has always existed. It is easy to find artefacts of the past that are less common, or gone entirely, that you consider to be better than the trends of the present.

This doesn't mean things are worse on the whole now, nor does it mean that those artefacts aren't valid examples of things of value that are no longer produced. I guess it's part and parcel of change.

Old stuff is better understood. Parts and information are often more available, and the failure modes etc are well known. New stuff is more in the "unknown unknowns" territory.

There's a reason brand new tech isn't favoured for safety-critical systems.

It focus on nostalgia and repairing of old things (because they don't make them anymore, so you have to), rather than buying the latest Apple shit, so there is a distinction from modern disposable consumption patterns.

Like walkmans! Beyond the portability - which on modern hardware is better in every way - the qualities were all worse than comparables at the time. Why anyone would want to relive cassettes and batteries is beyond me.

The friction that they have in their use, means you have to be more intentional when you use them - you put in more effort and it feels more special.

> "Old stuff is better" tendency which sees vintage tech as somehow more credible, ethical, characterful, expressive, and individual than modern tech

Well stuff produced at 1/10000th the number of units sold of, say, a modern iPhone or Android phone is obviously more "individual". I mean: I see a dude driving an AC Cobra vs one driving a mass produced chinese EV... They're both cars but that's about it. That'd be Hank Moody driving an old beaten up Porsche 911 Carrera in Californication. I mean: for one reason or another, Hank Moody is driving an old beaten up Porsche and not a Hyundai. And the series shows him as liking his car and liking to drive his car.

Where's the lack of use in someone daily driving an AC Cobra or an old Porsche? Where's the lack of use in someone using an old camera to take pictures?

> It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use

Someone takes his old camera, goes out at night, snaps a picture of the sunset, and goes back home. Where's the ownership of display?

I don't post picture or my cars online. I take one out at night and go for a drive on desert roads. Where's the ownership of display? On HN?

Sure, everything is still an object. But then everything is consumerism, unless you make your clothes yourself (funnily enough my mother-in-law knits clothes).

Regarding ethics: I think something can be said about older tech. For example an old "dumb" 1080p projector both gives that "movie theather" feeling (mine had a gigantic diagonal no TV could match) and it's neither listening to everything you say nor sending your data to the motherload nor constantly updating apps for seemingly no reason nor can it be bricked remotely. Nor can it be hacked.

I mean: there's at least something in vintage tech I think.

P.S: I'm currently in the process of buying a "vintage" HP Z series workstation that I'll use a small server but that's because I want shitload of cheap ECC and huge, big, cheap SAS drives... And it's going to get lots of love and use. I may blog about it if I want to display ownership though.

Not really. Different cameras, both old and new, draw differently. It's not a question of "good" or "bad". Sometimes I want a nice, sharp image, sometimes I want the scratchy, somewhat random image I get from a Holga.

You pick the tool that gives the artistic effect you WANT.

It's not bizarre at all, if you assume a consumerist or marginal+consumer sovereign economy then after years of phone releases making cuts to whatever buzzword some group cares about eventually anything they buy will be worth less than whatever they already own, after that all it takes is someone pointing them to a old device.

Are you just saying it's bizarre that we live in a consumerist economy? Or are you saying that you think we live in a capitalist economy with people brainwash by capitalists into a consumerist culture? Or are you just acting like a naive purist who thinks that art isn't economically motivated?

I think the new stuff is getting worse. Enshittification and such. Digital cameras don't show you ads.

In a lot of cases, older stuff is actually better by many objective criteria.

I love old tools, both hand tools and power tools.

There are many criteria by which you could judge the older tools, made in the USA, Canada, or UK, and say they are objectively better than even the highest-end tools I could buy today at Home Depot.

Thicker metal, designs which are more repairable with swappable parts, they were obviously designed to be more durable. I have a roofing square I use on the job site which is over 100 years old, and it's better than one I could buy at the store. I use a chop saw which was made in Japan in the 80's and it is going to outlast any equivalent chop saw I could buy at the store today. You can tell immediately by just using the thing that it is more durable and higher quality.

Yes, older tools lack some modern improvements like lasers or safety stops, but when it comes to reliability and durability you can't buy a brand new tool with the same quality of old tools for any price.

I don't know if the same is actually true for digicams or whatever, but things like record players or typewriters have similar qualities to what I'm talking about with tools.

"Young Adult" is a weird term -- think of the book/movie genre called "young adult" or "YA" -- it isn't actually literally for people in their twenties but for children. It's like calling people like me in their 50s "middle aged" -- most of us aren't going to make it to 100.

Exactly. Kodak stopped selling film cameras in 2004.

Peak film sales was in 2001!

Film sales in 2006 was the same as in 1994 ...

After 2006, the decline was drastic¹.

But the long tail of childhood memories stored on film and cheap digicams stretches far into the smartphone era. Remember, not everyone had a smartphone or even a good way to transfer the images out of there. Also, smartphone cameras were really bad in the beginning.

1: https://petapixel.com/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm-thrived-a-...

> I get that this is a ridiculous nit-pick to kick off a comment, but how do they define "young adult?" Because I'm not sure that that statement is actually true just yet.

Additionally, before the explosion of digital camera sales in the early 00s, many childhood memories simply went unrecorded.

Growing up my family had a couple film cameras that rarely got used. They might come out for holidays and a handful of events but they spent a lot of time in the closet.

Even when they were used a roll of film only got two dozen photos that weren't cheap to develop. We'd get maybe one or two photos per roll that had decent focus and lighting.

There's a Cambrian explosion of photos I have from my first digital camera onwards. There's so many events and several people I'd love to have pictures of today that don't exist because no camera was handy at the time. Today I can capture pretty much anything I want to remember.

The first generation iPhone will enter "adulthood" on Janury 9th, 2025.

Yeah, I wondered that, too. That line might be referring to the handful of people whose parents were tech enthusiasts who went to midnight launches of the first iPhones and were born at roughly the same time. A very small group.

We can all use chatgpt what is the point of this copy/paste exercise?