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	Canon RC-360 Video Still Camera (October 1992). The Canon RC360 is an analog video still camera prior to the wide spread introduction of true digital cameras. Information was stored electronically in analog fashion on small diskettes and could be played back on a television. The Canon Camera Museum states it had "a 1/2 inch 260,000 pixel CCD image sensor, recording and playback with horizontal resolution of 380 TV lines." There is no LCD display of the image. Digicamhistory.com states it cost $2,600 or about $3,650 in 2006 dollars! It had a fixed focus lens equivalent to a 51mm focal length 35mm film camera lens but could be equipped with wide angle (which mine has) and telephoto auxilliary lenses. See Vision Quest. To get a digital image you would need a digital capture board on your computer. The Vision Quest article states the only true digital system at the time was the single lens reflex (SLR) Kodak DCS 200 which cost over $18,000 at the time! The Kodak DCS 200 was a Nikon SLR based camera with 1.54 megapixels and no LCD viewing screen. See Kodak DCS cameras based on Nikon. As of Summer 2006 you can buy a 4 or 5 megapixel compact digital camera for about $100 or an 8 megapixel Canon Digital Rebel XT SLR with lens for under $800. Truly a revolution in photography has occurred in the past 15 years. I purchased my Canon RC-360 on eBay on 5-16-06 for $10.23 and $4.05 shipping. It is in good cosmetic condition. It comes with a miniature diskette. It has a sticker indicating it was owned by the Orange County (Florida) B.C.C. (Board of County Commissioners). It has a small 8 volt sealed lead battery, Canon Battery Pack BP-4P, but no charger. I am therefore not aware of the operating condition. The battery compartment is clean.
Apple QuickTake 100 introduced February 16, 1994, the Apple QuickTake 100 was one of the first consumer digital cameras. Wikipedia - QuickTake has excellent information about it. It came with a heafty price tag of $749 for a single focal length, fixed focus camera with maximum 640 x 480 resolution. Adjusted for inflation the price was nearly $1,100 in 2006 dollars. Shutter sppeds were 1/30 to 1/175 second. The QuickTake 100 could only be used directly with an Apple Mac. The later Quicktake 150, introduced May 1995, could also be used with a Windows PC. Both had only 1mb internal storage and no external storage. They could hold about 16 images before you had to download the images to the computer. Connection to the computer was with a round Apple serial cord. The QuickTake 100 and 150 were made by Kodak. The later Quicktake Model 200, introduced February 17, 1997 was made by Fuji and is similar to the Fuji DS-7. According to Wikipedia - Quicktake none of the models sold well and were discontinued in 1997.	Apple QuickTake 150 introduced May 1995 with a price tag of $700. I have one boxed Quicktake 100 and three QuickTake 150s. All were purchased on eBay. My latest QuickTake 150 came boxed with all of the software for an Apple Macintosh and it worked using a Power Macintosh 5500/225 I acquired at a garage sale in the Summer of 2006 for $25. Pretty cool. I haven't tried to transfer the images to a modern computer yet. My latest Quicktake 150 was purchased on 8-5-06 for $15.50 with $4.05 shipping. It was the seller's first eBay sale. According to Wikipedia - QuickTake the Quicktake 100 only saved images in the PICT and QuickTake file formats, while the 150 and 200 also saved them in BMP,PCX and the JPEG. Now that I have the software, I will be trying out the other QuickTake cameras I have. The QuickTake 100 and 150 had only a simple optical viewfinder and no viewing screen. My QuickTake 150 came with a macro lens attachment which is on top of the box in the image below. Other images: specifications from box, box.
Large Image	Ricoh RDC-1 (1995). Introduced in late 1995 and selling by the Spring of 1996 for $1,800! (CBR; See also Steve's Digicams.) That's over $2,400 in 2007 dollars. The RDC-1 was the first camera to record both digital stills and video with sound. (See dycam.com.) In November 1995 it won a Best of COMDEX Award. (See highbeam.com.) There was an optional LCD monitor which attached to the camera. The camera takes a PCMCIA memory card. Mine comes with an 8mb card. In this photo of the camera and memory card, I have included a modern, and much smaller, 2GB SD card, which holds 250 times more information. The camera did contain all the elements of a modern camera including 3X zoom lens, relatively small size (camera, without monitor, is roughly 13cm x 7.5cm x 2cm, and weighs 9 oz.), optical viewfinder, LCD viewfinder/monitor (optional), flash, and movies with sound. Resolution was only 380,000 pixels (.38 megapixels), however. Movies with sound were at a respectable 30 frames per second, but only lasted 5 seconds and you could only take 4 of them on a card. (See Henshell, Ricoh RDC-1 Digital Camera.) I have two complete camera sets each in a plastic case with the LCD monitor, remote control, charging unit and instruction manual. I have not tried them yet, but they are near new cosmetic condition. I paid $9 each at a San Carlos area of San Diego garage sale on 9-29-07. These are fine examples of early digital camera history that show how far we have come in a little over ten years.
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Kodak DC-50 (1996) the first digital zoom camera with external storage selling for (just) under $1,000. The manual is available in PDF format from Kodak. Specifications at page 74 indicate 754 x 504 pixel image size at high resolution which equals 381,024 pixels or 0.38 megapixels. 3X optical zoom from 7mm to 21mm equal to about 37mm to 111mm in 35mm format. Dimensions of the camera are 15.2cm X 11.9cm X 6.4cm which equals a volume of about 1.158 Liters. (It is roughly a rectangular prism. I hence multiplied length X width X height and expressed the answer in Liters.) It weighs 1.16 lbs or 18.56 oz. Compare the 1996 DC-50 with the Kodak EasyShare C330 that I purchased on clearance at Office Depot in July 2006 for $100 which included a Kodak docking station/printer. The manual at pages 50-53 states the C330 is a 4.0 megapixel 3X optical zoom (34mm to 102mm 35mm equivalent) camera with dimensions of 9.15cm X 6.5cm X 3.5cm which equals a volume of about 0.208 liters. (It is also roughly a rectangular prism.) It weighs 5.6 oz. In 10 years the C330 has 10 times the resolution at one tenth the price, one fifth the size and about one third the weight! My DC-50 came with a 5mb PCMCIA ATA flash card. A 1.0 gb SD card for the C330 has 200 times more capacity with a physical volume of about one tenth that of the PCMIA card. (I just eye-balled this. The SD card looks to be about half the thickness and you can fit nearly 6 SD cards on top of the PCMCIA card.) This rapid change in a single decade is amazing! My fascination with such rapid technological growth is why Mr. Martin's Web Site's Museum exists. DCVIEWS has a similar wonderful comparison of the DC-50 with Kodak's smallest camera in 2006, the Easyshare V550. Also, compare the DC-50 with the first sub-$1,000 digital SLR, the 2003 Canon Digital Rebel below, which came out only seven years later. I purchased my DC-50 on eBay on 8-20-06 for $5 plus $6.05 shipping. Pretty steep depreciation in ten years! It works well although it took awhile to figure that out. There is no LCD image display. (Camera back.) You have to download the images to a computer to view them. Kodak states that the DC-50 is "fully supported" by "Windows 95, 98, 98SE, Mac OS 7.6.1 - 9.x" and is "not supported" by "Windows 3.1, NT, 2000, ME, XP; Mac OS 7.5.0 and earlier, OS X." The camera also stores images in a unique file format. Therefore, if you want to see the images you better have some old computers sitting around. No problem there for me. Here are the steps I went through to view the images! I took some photos. Put the PCMCIA card into the PCMCIA slot in my laptop running Windows XP and hence not supported. Transferred the images from the PCMCIA card to an external floppy drive hooked up to my laptop. Went over to my old HP computer running Windows 98 Second Edition. Loaded the Picture Works Photo Enhancer Software that came with the camera onto my old HP. I first had to copy the program files to the desktop since it was not installing from the floppy disk. It did install from the desktop. Copy the images from the floppy disk to the desktop and then open them with Picture Works. Save them in Picture Works in a JPEG or TIFF format. From there I could view them on my desktop running Windows XP and should also be able to view them on a modern Macintosh. Here are some DC-50 photos of some canine friends of mine: dog 1 and dog 2. Dog 1 (159 kb) is not changed in any way. Dog 2 (63.3 kb) was cropped and the contrast increased slightly in Picture Works. Both were saved in JPEG format from the original Kodak format. Many sites discuss the DC-50: DC Views Photo Opportunities Mount Holyoke Dvorak Uncensored DC50 Page Testing the Kodak DC50 GCN Digital Cameras
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Sony Mavica MVC-FD7 introduced late 1997, early 1998. The FD7 with a 10X optical zoom lens and the FD5 with a single focal length lens were the first Sony Mavica cameras which used floppy disks as the storage device. The Mavica name had previously been used for Sony analog video still cameras in the 1980s. Also, the Mavica name was also later used for the Sony digital cameras that used CDs for storage. The manual is available from Sony online in PDF format. Page 44 gives the specifications. I used a similar Mavica at my first teaching job in 1999. It has a 4.2 to 42mm 10X zoom lens which equals 40mm to 400mm in 35mm format. The maximum aperture is f1.8 to f2.9. Both of these statistics are impressive. The lens also has wonderful closeup features. At the time the use of standard 3.5 inch floppy disks for storage was also wonderful. They were reasonably inexpensive and made transfer to the computer a breeze. On fine mode one floppy disc would store about 15-20 images. Maximum resolution was 640 x 480, about 0.3 megapixel. That made it okay for Web viewing of relatively small images. Just "okay," however, and really poor for printing. It is very easy to use. There is no optical viewing but the large 2.5 inch screen is good under most circumstances. Mavicas were great cameras to use in a school setting. The original price appears to have been around $700. Its successor the FD71 which was lighter and faster had a list price of $799 according to PC World (July 28, 1998). I believe I used the FD71. I remember Mavicas having a street price of about $500 when I first used one in late 1999 - early 2000. Several sites discuss the FD7: Wikipedia, wrotniak.net, jerrypournelle.com, purpleplanetmedia.com, aardvark.co.nz, reviewsonline.com, videomedia.com. My Mavica FD7 was purchased on eBay on 8-4-06 for $51.53 with $6.50 shipping. It included a nice case, battery and a Canon ShurShot 60 film camera. Sort of on the pricey side for a 0.3 megapixel camera but Mavicas still seem to have a following on eBay. It is in good cosmetic and working condition. I bought a new off brand charger and battery from a different source on eBay.
Fuji Finepix 6900,3.3 megapixel, 6.0 megapixel file size, 6X optical zoom, f2.8-3.1, numerous exposure controls including manual, auto and manual focus. This is a fine camera. The major drawback in this class of camera is the electronic viewfinder which makes it very difficult to focus manually. The next step up is a true optical SLR digital camera such as the Canon Digital Rebel. Purchased new in December 2001.	Olympus Camedia D-150 Zoom, 1.3 megapixel, 3x optical zoom, 5mm-15mm, f2.4-4.3. Takes Smart Media cards. No movies. Purchased around late 2001 for $150 at Costco. Compare with the Kodak DX 6340 a little over two years later - same price, 3.1 megapixel, 4X optical zoom, movies with sound, adjustable exposure, etc.
Kodak CX 6330, 3.1 megapixel, 3X Optical Zoom, SD card storage. Purchased December 2003.	Kodak DX 6340, 3.1 megapixels, 4X optical zoom Schneider-Kreuznach lens, aperture and shutter preferred automatic in PAS mode, up to 400 ISO, movies with sound and speaker in camera, + or - 2 stop exposure adjustment. Good low light capabilities. This is is a step up from the CX 6330, but after rebates was purchased for the same price, $150. It was purchased around March 2004. A wonderful point and shoot camera for the family or at school with some advanced features. This camera was used to take most of the museum photographs.
	Canon Digital Rebel, introduced September 2003, the Digital Rebel was the first digital optical single lens reflex camera to break the $1,000 price barrier, with a initial street price of $899 for the body only, or $999 with an 18-55mm zoom lens (about 28-90mm 35mm equivalent). I use it frequently for sports photos since it has very little shutter lag, shoots at approximately 2.5 frames per second, and has a top ISO setting of 1600, great for indoor sports. It has a burst mode for up to four shots. Top resolution is 6.3 megapixels with JPEG and RAW settings available. It has the same sensor as the significantly more expensive EOS 10D. I bought my Digital Rebel new from B&H Photo in October 2004 for $815 with lens and a 1gb high speed Compact Flash storage card, after rebates. In March 2005, Canon introduced a new Digital Rebel XT that is 1/2 inch smaller, 3 ounces lighter (due to a smaller battery) and 8 megapixels. It also has a faster startup time. The street price with lens is $999, which has caused the prices of the original Digital Rebel with lens to fall to around $750. I have included the Digital Rebel in both the autofocus SLR category and the digital camera category since it is both. The look and feel is very similar to EOS film cameras. It has several advantages over film cameras since you can shoot about 300 high resolution JPEG images on a 1 gigabyte CompactFlash card - there's no film to change. You can switch the ISO from frame to frame. You also can see what your image looks like on the back of the camera after you take the photo. The lens that comes with the kit is for the digital camera only - it will not fit film cameras since it will protrude too far into the camera. The Digital Rebel will accept all EOS lenses, however. Since the film sensor is smaller than a 35mm frame, the effective focal length is increased by a factor of 1.6. This is both positive and negative. It effectively gives me fast, telephoto lenses. For example, it makes my 70-210 f4 zoom effectively a 112-336 f4 lens. A lens for a film camera with that range and maximum aperture would be very expensive. On the downside, the 1.6 factor limits the use of wide angle lenses. Unlike other digital cameras, optical digital SLRs do not display the image electronically before the image is taken and as yet do not have video modes.

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