Were the cameras of the past better than the new ones?

[ruslan]

Engineering plastics have stable dimensions, are self-lubricating, and nearly dent-proof.

But the modern 70-200/2.8 Nikkors, 300/2.8 Nikkors are being still made of magnesium alloy. The Nikkor 105/2 DC is still being made of metal. Plastic might be dent proof if it is very thick in section and the item is very light (Swatch Scuba Watches). My K-50 has a very thick bottom section (about 7-8 mm of plastic) - if it were hardened steel it would resist a bullet penetration!

But I assume that in 1980s there were a lot of garbage cameras (Yashica 109 MP is one of them and I was an unhappy owner). So are entry level Canons and Minoltas (x-370), Pentax P-30t etc.

[ruslan]

Still there is something reassuring about the durability of all-metal Leica and Voigtlander lenses.

And 1970s all metal lenses too. I was the 4th owner of Nikkor 50/1.4 Ai on my Olympus and it made terrific shots. The paint came off but it worked. Actually modern manual Zeiss lenses are built to satisfy even higher demands. So that's why I look at Zeiss, Voight. and Iberit (more affordable no electronics) metal f 2.4 lenses. As for plastic again there are good dense plastic cameras and squeaky cheaply made cameras. And I remember Canon A-1 which was plastic and had a very toy plasticky feel. They go plastic to cut manufacture cost. Molding is cheaper than machining metal.

Edited July 18, 2019 by ruslan

[jasonluttrell]

The Nikon FE has all the features I need. It is nice being able to shoot at ISO 1600 on my d810 though. Spot metering also save me a lot of time.

Film is fun though.

[ruslan]

The Nikon FE

Terrific camera.

[Nick D.]

"Were the cameras of the past better than the new ones?", - short answer, no.

[Nick D.]

On second thought, they still going:)

[Gary Naka]

On second thought, they still going:)

[ATTACH=full]1303816[/ATTACH]

 

But find a box of flash bulbs. It was tough swapping bulbs, short of dropping the used one on the ground, so that you did not have to touch the HOT glass.

[Gary Naka]

The Minolta Dynax 9 had 1/12000 sec and eye start., the EOS 3 had eye control, the Om-3Ti and the Contax S2 were built from titanium alloy, Df is 50% plastic, modern semi-pro cameras like D750 don't even have 1/8000 whereas old semi-pro cameras like my F90 had it. F90 had an eyepiece curtain. LCD with a window in a prism was a great idea and I liked the look of it. A lot of cameras had mechanical spare shutter like F3 and detachable prism like F4. Shooting film I used to get evenly exposed film, now I get over- and underexposed images often. Were they better then? I don't speak about top class cameras like EOS-1 line, mostly about consumer ones. Any thoughts?

 

If you are not speaking about "top class/pro" cameras, why mention the F3 and F4, which were PRO cameras?

 

BTW, did you think about how much space 50 rolls of film will take in your luggage? 50 rolls x 36 exposures = 1750 frames.

Compare that to the size of an SD card.

 

Your old camera is actually newer than what I used.

If your battery died on you and you did not have a spare battery, your camera was useless, unless it had the backup mechanical shutter. And that was only at ONE shutter speed, as I remember.

My older cameras could run without a battery. We just shot using the sunny-16 rule. So my even older film camera was better than yours.

 

WHY would you need a 1/8000 shutter speed with film?

Are you shooting with ISO 3200 film during the day?

Tri-X had an ASA of only 400, and many of us were shooting Plus-X (126), Kodachrome-X or Ektachrome-X (64) or Kodachome-II (25).

High-Speed Ektachome pushed to ASA 320 was the FASTEST color film we had.

 

I grew up with film cameras from the 1960s.

I KNOW how to use a manual focus lens, but as my standard I would NOT willingly go back to manual focus lenses. AF is soooo much easier and faster.

In sports, when I switch subjects FAST, I could never manually refocus as fast and accurately as my AF does.

 

My "consumer" grade dSLR will do 6 frames per second.

Back in my film day, that required an expensive motor drive be attached to the camera. And only the pro level cameras had motor drives.

The consumer cameras could should only as fast as your thumb could advance the film advance lever. So it was not "frames per second," it was "seconds per frame."

So there was no "burst" shooting to capture a fast event like a jump ball in basketball, you had ONE shot.

 

My cameras were all manual; no PSA exposure modes.

 

Electronic flash was all manual. There was NO auto flash until years later or TTL flash until many years later.

Some of us were still using flash bulbs, because the electronic flashes were expensive, and the affordable one had LOW power.

 

The P&S camera of the day was the Kodak Instamatic.

The flash was a "flash bulb."

And you don't know what a hassle it was to shoot with a flash bulb.

 

There are stuff today that was science fiction back in my film days. And some were so crazy that it was beyond science fiction.

• Image stabilization.
   
  
• Autofocus
   
  
• Auto exposure in a SLR.
   
  
• A consumer zoom of 10:1 and greater zoom ratio with decent IQ, The Nikon 18-200 is an 11:1 zoom, and the Tamron 18-400 is a 22:1 zoom.
  
  • Interestingly most Pro zooms are still limited to about 3:1 zoom ratio.
    

  [*]Putting 2000+ images onto a storage media about the size of a postage stamp.

  • That is 55+ rolls of 36 exposure 35mm film.
    

  [*]The ability to shoot COLOR at an ASA/ISO level above 400. HS Ektachome was pushed to 320.

  • My D7200 can shoot at 25600.
    

  [*]The ability to change ISO level from shot to shot.

  • In the film days, that was a change to another camera with another film loaded.
    

No, I would not willingly go back to my film cameras as my standard camera.

Edited July 20, 2019 by Gary Naka

[ruslan]

WHY would you need a 1/8000 shutter speed with film?

Never with film because I used ISO 100 and 200 films only. But for digital, 1/8000 is a must of course. Lenses are sharp wide open now and usable at f1.4 in sunny daylight. Then super-fast motion. We have very high pixel counts now and to freeze a super fast motion at pixel level we need 1/8000.

 

nterestingly most Pro zooms are still limited to about 3:1 zoom ratio.

They are just fast and use glass, whereas cheapo super-duper zooms are plastic both outside and inside.

 

But I was just asking for the opinion. I am not stating that all cameras of the past were necessarilly better.

[ruslan]

When I switched from film to digital I started to shoot more.

[Ed_Ingold]

Yes you can go stand in line at a concert with a 1500$ Nikon camera, and the picture you take wont be any better or worse then what the 15 year old standing next to you takes with a iphone 10

Actually, that's what I do, and am paid for it. Somebody thinks I do a better job than a 15 year old (or his parents) with a smart phone.

[danny_o]

When I switched from film to digital I started to shoot more.

 

So did I, and now I wish that I had never seen a digital camera.

 

The zero expense, and spontaneity of "the next frame" eliminated my previous habits of care, forethought, planning .... and care. I ended up with several hard-drives full of repetitious trivial crap, and a huge workload in editing ( and discarding) an exponentially larger proportion of pictures, and intentionally saving far fewer than my prior film average.

 

I've since shifted back to a preference toward film, but I have yet to reclaim the fascination that my film days held for me. I've lost the patience, and the eye; I'm trying to recover.

[ruslan]

Yes you can go stand in line at a concert with a 1500$ Nikon camera, and the picture you take wont be any better or worse then what the 15 year old standing next to you takes with a iphone 10

Wrong. I don't have an Iphone (just not my cup of tea and out of my interest) but out of curiosity I regularly open full size images from dpreview site and other websites. My sister has Iphone. Iphones hardly ever come close to best compact cameras of the period when they existed. At ISO 400 Iphone photos are hardy usable unless you put them here in 500 dots resolution sharpened. With Nikon you can use ISO 6400 with better quality than Iphone's ISO200. They are OK-ish in bright sunlight, OK-ish but still mediocre. DR, resolution and microcontrast are just "sordid".

 

A leica made in 1930 when clean, will take as good a picture NOW as it did then

Unless metal fatigue, lack of lubricants, rust, etc....

[Gary Naka]

Film is relaxing. Its slow. Its steady. Like drafting out a floor plan or small model steam engine.

 

ITs how im starting to slow my brain down. Spent an hour this afternoon wandering the yard chasing down a rabbit. Took maybe 10 minutes to stalk it, each step did a quick recheck on the settings, but if you leave 400 iso film at1/500 shutter speed, going from dark areas to brightly lit lawn your good to go at 5.6 - 8 on the aperture ring.

 

Spent one whole day without power looking at the rain come off the roof planning out how id setup for a single photo.

 

 

With a digital camera, id have fired off perhaps 150 pictures of the rabbit while I did a wild desperate run at it before it hopped into the flower bed. Or I would simply take 3,000 photos of the rain coming off the roof and hope to get a few good ones.

 

Whats superior about that?

 

It is all in how you use the tool.

Film forces you to slow down. You can slow down even more with a view camera.

But you can also just not shoot fast with digital. Think of each shot costing $5, and you slow down.

 

This was a similar discussion of 35mm cameras with a motor drive vs a single stroke film advance lever vs. a knob to advance the film vs. a sheet film camera.

Each change in film/film advance mechanism encouraged the photographer to shoot more.

[ruslan]

With film I was totally dependant of the lab. Severeal times I got my film scratched. There were periods whan I had to be very thrifty not to buy film and the camera was just sitting on the shelf. With digital I shoot only twice or three times as many frames on the venue than I did with film. I am not clicking mindlessly.

[ed_farmer]

Photography went downhill the day they released the first motor drive

 

The use of or availability of new tools does not cause anything to "go downhill" . . . The misuse of new tools can cause this though.

 

Motor drives didn't cause the downfall of the photography civilization. But, they were not designed for portraiture or architecture.

[tomspielman]

There are typically tradeoffs in technological advances, - most things are better, some things are not. And if you happen to be one of those people that care a lot about the things that are worse with the new technology, you'll see the old as being better.

 

Just think about horses vs cars for a minute. Few people travel by horse anymore but they have tons of advantages over most motor vehicles still. Horses can cross streams that would cause cars to stall. They can jump over stuff. They don't need expensive infrastructure. How much does a mile of asphalt cost in your city? It's pretty costly here.

 

Anyway, to me it's pretty much no contest that new is better when it comes to cameras, - all things considered. That said there are some things that are better about old cameras including things that I enjoy. So I have a number of old cameras.

 

Lucky for us we don't have to choose between new and old. As long as we can afford it, we can have both.

Edited July 22, 2019 by tomspielman

[Vincent Peri]

...Think of each [film}shot costing $5, and you slow down.

 

35mm film costs approx $.16 per shot. Processing with 4x6 prints is another $.36 per shot. Total expense: $.52 per shot. (Prices are from BH Photo for film and Dwayne's photo lab for processing.

[Ricochetrider]

I know a guy shooting film on a camera from the early 1900s and his one lens is from the late 1800s. Let's wait and see if any of today's plastic fantastic cameras are still in use 100 or more years from now, shall we? Before we answer the. OP's question. I'll wager that people will still be oo-ing and ah-ing over Hasselblad 50CMs in the distant future, but who will still love the now-new Canons in 100 years?? Simply on the subject of design ethics and style- the cameras of yesteryear were built in the era when pretty much everything had some element of thoughtful & intriguing design- not only were things built to function endlessly (and were rebuildable), they looked like art too.

 

New is Better than old? If vastly increased ranges of functionality (1/12000 shutter speeds VS 1/500 to cite one example) means Better, than yes. If design ethos, build quality, functionality, & longevity are the metrics by which we judge a thing or given set of things... maybe not so much.

[Ricochetrider]

Never dented a lens down all the decades - plastic is plastic, molded, mass produced - most virtually un repairable. There's a reason no one wants a plastic saddle.

 

and there's a reason why the new Olympus Pro lenses are METAL. (and heavy) (and expensive). Kinda (almost) negates the original idea of M4/3 or mirrorless systems being "smaller" and "lighter" but hey. And while I'm extolling the virtues of my 21st century lens (and camera, there's little plastic, methinks, in the 1st gen OMD EM!), how 'bout that GLASS?

 

Do I love the 500CM any less?

 

*sounds of silence, sound of clock ticking*

 

Do I love it more? welllllll......... yyeeeessssss.

 

But let's be real... For pro work, especially in sports, the modern cameras simply smoke the old cameras. The modern cameras might also vastly outdo the old cameras in terms of low light photography also, so there's your concert and theater pix. And I can pack 10 SD cards along on a trip in a case the 1/3 size of a pack of cigarettes... SO there's more than a few THOUSAND photographs (and/or videos, if that's your thing)...

 

For pro or "prosumer" use, of course the faster, more fully functional, newest cameras are the thing. Go to any place where top-level modern, digital images are being displayed and see how amazing they are up close and personal (Smithsonian wildlife photo exhibit comes to mind here), look at the top pro sports photos (Moto GP motorcycle racing for example where the subjects are traveling at incredible speeds). Things are happening that simply are not possible with any old camera. Add a high-tech computer and a skilled post processor.... well.

 

But I STILL like my mechanical Hasselblad 500CM and YES it travels with me, it has already been to Italy and The Netherlands, and it's going to England a couple weeks.

I'll pack my pile of SD cards, my M4/3 camera and probably only one lens, and the 500CM, probably 2 lenses,and a handful of rolls of film along.

Edited July 22, 2019 by Ricochetrider

[tomspielman]

I know a guy shooting film on a camera from the early 1900s and his one lens is from the late 1800s. Let's wait and see if any of today's plastic fantastic cameras are still in use 100 or more years from now, shall we? Before we answer the. OP's question. I'll wager that people will still be oo-ing and ah-ing over Hasselblad 50CMs in the distant future, but who will still love the now-new Canons in 100 years?? Simply on the subject of design ethics and style- the cameras of yesteryear were built in the era when pretty much everything had some element of thoughtful & intriguing design- not only were things built to function endlessly (and were rebuildable), they looked like art too.

 

New is Better than old? If vastly increased ranges of functionality (1/12000 shutter speeds VS 1/500 to cite one example) means Better, than yes. If design ethos, build quality, functionality, & longevity are the metrics by which we judge a thing or given set of things... maybe not so much.

 

I think if photographers on mass were demanding that manufacturers start building a new versions of your friend's camera from the early 1900s, that would be evidence that they were better. The fact that you know of only one (or maybe a handful) of people using cameras like that seems to be evidence that perhaps they are not. ;)

 

Most cameras from that era didn't survive 100 years either. I'll go further and say that a lot of cameras built in the previous century that did survive and work just fine aren't particularly good cameras or at all attractive. Not everything old is a work of art and not everything built today is a mass market piece of junk.

 

In another 100 years, will a generic DSLR from 2019 interest anyone? Yeah, probably somebody. I know people that like shooting VHS movies and collecting Super 8 digest films.

 

And I think it's fair to say that there's some interesting industrial design still happening. Whether a DSLR or any camera from 2019 still works in a 100 years is an open question. They very well may not but then again, today's DSLRs are about 1000 times more complex than your friend's old camera.

[Ricochetrider]

I think if photographers on mass were demanding that manufacturers start building a new versions of your friend's camera from the early 1900s, that would be evidence that they were better. The fact that you know of only one (or maybe a handful) of people using cameras like that seems to be evidence that perhaps they are not. ;)

 

Most cameras from that era didn't survive 100 years either. I'll go further and say that a lot of cameras built in the previous century that did survive and work just fine aren't particularly good cameras or at all attractive. Not everything old is a work of art and not everything built today is a mass market piece of junk.

 

In another 100 years, will a generic DSLR from 2019 interest anyone? Yeah, probably somebody. I know people that like shooting VHS movies and collecting Super 8 digest films.

 

And I think it's fair to say that there's some interesting industrial design still happening. Whether a DSLR or any camera from 2019 still works in a 100 years is an open question. They very well may not but then again, today's DSLRs are about 1000 times more complex than your friend's old camera.

 

1000 times more c complex and they'll fire though 30,000 shutter clicks without a blink or niggle.

 

It is absolutely true that today, there exists a fair number of things that incorporate quality design, artful build, and industrial duty capabilities- in almost every realm. This is all very very expensive stuff, and no doubt. BUT you get what you pay for.

 

And yeah, ha ha, those old large format cameras in use today do certainly. produce a dated looking photograph- I'll graciously call it "charm"! And I like it when they are used expertly, to great affect.

 

I personally have a large blend of old and new, well everything, really- in my life. Some old things function perfectly well, some less perfectly. But some things, there is simply no substituting old for new- yet in other ways, the opposite is also true. If you insist on having cool old stuff to fit a certain ethos or for its charm, that absolutely. comes at a cost. And that cost can be plenty high, outrageously so even, depending on what we are talking about.

 

All that said, there is a large movement right now, of people "going back" to film, going back to old medium format (and brand new) large format film cameras, going back to turntables and vinyl records, going back to having music recorded with full dynamic range. The reason is these things produce a quality product that is unmatched by the modern equivalent. In the end, tho, everything travels. in endless circles. As can be said with everything, "this too, shall pass". But we'll see it again someday.

 

EDIT: while I was writing this the mailman delivered some negatives and contact sheets from Blue Moon Camera and also a 5 pack of Kodak Ektar 100 film.

Edited July 22, 2019 by Ricochetrider

[ed_farmer]

The return to vinyl records and film doesn't make them better. Yes, the best recorded, mastered and produced LP's on the best turntables blow away the sound from the best CDs on the best CD players. At least the first ten or fifteen times they are played. Once wear starts to set in on the LP the CD starts to quickly sound better. So . . . which is the better product?

 

A Nikon F5 or F6 can be fitted with a 60 year old lens and switched to manual and used just like a 1959 F. When this is done, the newer shutter will be more accurate and last far longer, without maintenance, than the old camera. Which is better?

 

Film and vinyl don't produce a product that is "better" in any real objective way. "Different" is about as far as you can really go. Can one be preferred over the other? Sure . . . Why not?

[rgs]

Better? Not sure about that, but they were certainly lighter. Thinking of my beloved Olympus OM-1 and Pentax MX: beautiful engineering and so light.....

[glen_h]

The return to vinyl records and film doesn't make them better. Yes, the best recorded, mastered and produced LP's on the best turntables blow away the sound from the best CDs on the best CD players. At least the first ten or fifteen times they are played. Once wear starts to set in on the LP the CD starts to quickly sound better. So . . . which is the better product?

 

(snip)

 

Around the time that CDs came out, there was an optical (laser) vinyl disk player.

 

Obviously way too expensive (maybe not compared to the first CD players), but no wear.

 

The problem was that the stylus of usual turntables will push dust out of the way, or maybe

smash it into the vinyl, but the laser doesn't do either of those. It sees it for the huge

bump that it is, and sends out the signal accordingly.