gdanmitchell
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anselwannab wrote:
8 inch floppies on work computers (they were old).
First digital camera was a Sony that used 1.44 floppies…
First real one was the Canon 20D. Treat it right, and those 8mp files could be printed fine on my Epson 2200 at 13x19,
When the 1DXII came out with FF and 20+MP, I was line DONE. Plus 14+ frames per second. I just keep collecting them…
My professional life back in the day was tied to music, specifically music created using electronic tools. Your mention of 8” floppies brought back a memory. Very early on I had my first experience with computer music software using a then-high-end facility during a summer workshop at the Stanford Artifical Intelligence Lab (SAIL), so I had a skewed notion of available computer power.
At some point later on I went to one of (if not the) first MacWorld Expos in San Francisco, where some guy was trying to do on an early personal computer what we took (almost) for granted using a PDP-11 at that workshop, namely get the computer to play back didigtal audio files in real time. But he didn’t have the same data storage capacity that SAIL had, so he…
lined up two 8” drives attached to his computer, sorted and stacked 8” floppies on top of each drive, inserted the first drive in each pile in its respective drive, and hit “play.” The computer would read a few seconds of audio off the first drive, then switch to the second to continue reading date, at which point the operator manically ejected the first drive’s disk, threw it over his shoulder, and inserted the next disk in the stack, finishing just in time for the computer to switch back to the first drive to continue reading the date…
… at which point he ripped the first 8” floppy out of the second drive, tossed it, inserted the next disk in its stack, and (again, just it time) it started reading that data as he repeated the operation on the first drive again. Lather. rinse, repeat. As I recall, he got a standing ovation at the end.
Back to photography…
I my first DSLR (XT?) used that 8MP sensor, and I cut my digital printing teeth on the Epson 2200. Printing that way was a marvel, though by later standards that printer was pretty awful. (Epson had to go through some crazy gyrations to get something close to balanced color out of it, and the metamerism failure was something… black and white prints weren’t great.) But still…
The XT was a great tool to test the waters, but not a camera for my serious photography. The first camera for me that fit that bill was the 5D.
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Rivermist wrote:
Well yes the Rebel did that, but it also allowed serious amateurs to transition from film to a 6 MP DSLR that did not break the bank, coupled with decent EF-S lenses like the EF-S 17-85 IS (in 2004 for me). Yes I could have done a decent wedding with that equipment (OK, only 3 AF points...), but that was not my goal. It allowed a much larger demographic to get into the digital era, which led rapidly to upscaling to better gear as it became available. 3 years later I had a 5D and a 40D, the 17-40 L, 24-105L, 70-200 f:2.8 L IS and other more expensive glass and cameras. This broader market scope allowed Canon and other brands to develop and sell a wide variety of quality lenses at comparatively reasonable prices (excluding the super-telephoto gear) which would be a benefit to professionals as well....Show more →
That’s how the Rebel XT worked for me. I already had various SLR systems — an early Minolta system and then a couple of Pentax bodies and multiple lenses — but after using other very early digital cameras (as early as the mid-1990s) I was gradually moving in that direction, to the point that I wanted something to test the waters more fully. So the XT was it, equipped with a 50mm and 35mm prime plus that (IIRC) 17-85mm APS-C lens. Using the camera convinced me that digital “had legs” and after that I moved to full frame and more serious lenses.
(That 17-85mm lens was a real mixed bag. The focal length range was excellent for an APS-C camera, but the image quality was not great. To this day, I lament using it on those early tests as I found myself in some locations with conditions that will likely never repeat, making photographs of dubious image quality that I struggle to print at 13” x 19” sizes, much less larger.)
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