It is 1996 and my character Helen has been given her dream present: a new Kodak digital camera. I can find all sorts of info on which cameras are available, which versions of Photoshop, which printers. Windows 95 has been released the year before. What I cannot find is how those work together. Especially, now Helen has been given or has access to all those items, can she now print her pictures at home and have them look halfway decent? This is meant to be the start of a passion for photography that becomes important later on. Hope someone had the experience they'd like to share. thanks hvb
Did you see this? http://www.dpreview.com/articles/5778663183/ten-unique-cameras-from-the-dawn-of-consumer-digital-photography Sure, she could print the pictures, once she loaded them on her PC. The usual means would have been via cable, plugged into a serial port (no USB yet). There's another method involving the PCMCIA slot, but I'd need a legacy techie type to explain how it worked. I still have the ca. 1993-vintage Toshiba laptop I bought refurbished in 1995. It runs Windows 3.11 (still works). I had no digital camera till 2003, but back in 1997 or so I got some of my manual SLR images digitized onto 1.44 MB floppies (bitmap format, not .jpg) and printed them via that lappie all the time. I think they looked pretty good. You want I should dig out the floppies and check?
1996? Hmm. I don't quite remember exactly when I got my first HP picture printer. I think it was 1997 or 1998, pretty expensive but the quality was quite good. Slow but decent. I remember we used to get inter-negatives made and use those to make conventional chemical prints. That was more from the professional side though. It would have been Photoshop 1 or 2 back then. There were serial ports and for the better higher quality items there may have been SCSI at that time.
In 1995, the "EOS DCS" was released jointly with Eastman Kodak as a line of digital cameras for professional use, and later in July 1996, a model for the general user, the "PowerShot 600" was marketed. The "PowerShot 600," which used a CF or a PC card as the recording media, marked the full scale start of Canon’s digital camera era. The idea of professional use was a complete joke for those cameras. The game changing digital camera was the Canon EOS 1Ds in 2002. When first released, cost $15,000 and was worth every penny of it. When I purchased one, I had $4000 of film in the fridge I just bought. I figured I would easily use it up as I transitioned to a digital workflow, but a few years later I sold ALL the film for a couple hundred dollars. I hadn't shot a single roll since getting a DSLR. The funny thing is I love film and wish digital never got invented, but it became impossible to compete for me with a film workflow as soon as a true professional digital camera hit the market.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bldigitalcamera.htm http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Kodak_DC40 Early home digital cameras had a very low resolution (0.4 megapixels) The images looked okay on the screen (as monitors had about the same resolution), but the images looked 'blocky' when printed out. Color printers weren't that good either, being more for graphs and charts than photos.
Man, I see a post like this and its a quick reminder of just how much technology has changed in 20 years.
