I finished 2023 on a real high having dug up a real piece of digital photography history and a significant part of my childhood in the Casio QV-10a and going on an absolute odyssey to get it working, talking to a period correct PC and finally extracting the images out of it. 2023 was good to me, photographically speaking and I’d been looking forward to the start of 2024.
Prompted by a browse through Adobe Bridge (CS6 if you ask, I’m allergic to subscription software) looking for a picture to use as a comparison in a forthcoming review, it struck me that I’ve been on quite the journey this year in terms of buying, repairing and reviewing a really quite eclectic selection of cheap and some definitely not so cheap cameras. I’ve not done a “year in review” before, so it’s time to jump on the bandwagon and have a browse through some of the highs and lows and my favourite images from some of the cameras I’ve used this year.
The year that was:
- A slow, disappointing winter
- The Spring of bargains
- Serious Summer
- Autumn Camera Almanac
- And Next Year?
A slow, disappointing winter
I’ll be honest, 2024 did not start as 2023 ended, if anything it was something of a grind. Anyone who’s been in to photography, or indeed any hobby will know that your motivation goes in peaks and troughs. Looking back I clearly wasn’t in a great place creatively at the start of the year and I kicked off with a rather safe retrospective of one of the most important cameras I ever owned in the Canon Digital Ixus 400.
One glance in the folder of images from this review shows how much I was struggling, there are about four pictures in there and I managed to push out a post using these slim pickings. I’ve lived on and off in the same city for near enough 35 years and it can be really hard to find new subjects and things to photograph when I take cameras out locally for a photowalk – it feels like I’ve seen everything before (because I have) and nothing stands out. I read somewhere that this should be used as motivation in itself, to set yourself the challenge of finding something new in a familiar place and whilst I agree, it’s tough!
Things didn’t get much better when I bought a filthy Canon EOS 5 after reading many an old magazine article about how it was once the most respected and revered of Canon’s film line up. Sadly, I didn’t feel the same and could only conclude that the terrible auto focus performance was normal for the time. It didn’t feel special ergonomically and it’s a camera that didn’t click with me at all.
As if things couldn’t get worse, I then wrote my least popular article in the two years I’ve been writing on this site. I picked up an old CD-ROM that Canon tried to sell for £35 which let you use a “virtual camera” so you could effectively try an EOS 50 before you bought one. Suffice to say, the end result is as awful as you’d imagine it to be and apparently, so was my retrospective on it!
Mercifully, things picked up in March when I had one of my favourite photographic experiences ever and I wasn’t even holding a camera.
I bought a Minolta Dynax 500i completely by accident after mistaking it for a Dynax 7000i. It cost £9, came in a rather nice courier bag for some reason and was in perfect working order, but I didn’t really have a purpose or motivation for using it. That was until I read that one of the Minolta executives had once described it as a “camera so simple that a child could use it.” I promptly gave the camera to my six year old daughter and told her to fire off a roll of film for me. In the interest of a fair experiment I took a back seat and tried as much as possible to not offer any advice, guidance or assistance when using the camera.
The results from that roll of film were nothing short of fantastic in my opinion, but more than the images she produced it was just so nice to share an interest with her and see how she took to the experience. You can learn a lot about a child by seeing the world from their perspective and it was fascinating to see what she thought were interesting subjects, the things she noticed that I normally wouldn’t pay attention to and the fact she could do things I couldn’t. When a happy, smiling child waves a camera about on the streets people are happy to see them and she was able to get images I couldn’t.
Were Minolta right in their claim? Yes. They really were.
The Spring of bargains
Spring kicked off with a quick visit to the obscure world of early 2000’s Sony Floppy Disc cameras. I bought a mint copy that used to belong to the RAF and was impressed by the image quality from what was a very capable camera for its time. The Mavica FD2000 was the last in that particular line of extremely successful cameras, but by that point the floppy disc storage idea had totally reached its limits and was pretty much pointless with a limit of four images per disc.
I then had a lot of fun with a camera that was designed from the ground up to be as cheap as physically possible. The Cosmic 35 (a superb name for a camera if ever there was one) cost very little when released and could be picked up for as little as £10-15. It had “everything the real photographer needs” which equated to a lens, a shutter and a film winder. That’s your lot. I actually bought the wrong camera because I’d been after an even cheaper version called the Cosmic Symbol and that camera was part of an Amateur Photographer / Jessops promotion to show just how simple and cheap photography could be. Weirdly, they sell now for more than the Cosmic 35, despite the 35 being a slightly better camera. The second hand market never ceases to bewilder.
In fairness, the Cosmic 35 is far better built than many cameras I’ve used, especially the “toy” type plastic cameras that were released in the 90’s. I’d take a Cosmic 35 over a bottom of the range 35mm compact from that decade any day of the week. The lens was surprisingly good, the package very compact and zone focussing proved to be very accurate and useful. My only gripe with this little gem was that the shutter lever would have a nasty habit of releasing into my finger causing some blurry shots, but on a camera this cheap you can’t expect perfection. Proof indeed that “they don’t make them like they used to.”
Inspired by the ever excellent Canny Cameras, I kept the bargain theme going by trying to find a camera for nothing more than a single pound. This turned out to be a surprisingly hard challenge as every time I’d find a potential candidate, someone would put in a throwaway 99p bid and spoil the party. Not to be put off, I went down the “spares or repairs” route and eventually won a Fuji Finepix S3500 – a four megapixel “bridge” camera with a zoom lens and electronic viewfinder.
The camera came complete with a broken memory card slot but was otherwise working. After taking it apart and repairing totally mangling the card slot to the point where a bit of it pinged across the room, I managed to smush it back together enough so that a memory card would stay seated and the camera could be used again.
Talking of memory cards, I may have broken the challenge completely when I had to spend £14 on a memory card because I didn’t have the right type to fit this particular camera. That came with a story of its own with the images that were left on it and is just another reminder that you really do need to make sure you securely erase all memory cards, sticks, hard drives and any storage in computers that you sell on if you value your privacy. Just pressing delete or dragging to the recycle bin does not erase things permanently.
That camera sat firmly in the “it’s ok” territory and for a quid it was quite the bargain. The zoom lens did make for some strange behaviour at the long end where for some unknown reason the camera would give really odd exposure and blow everything out. Then again, this is an early Fujifilm and having reviewed quite a few this year and last, they all share common traits – awful battery life and a complete lack of any manual control whatsoever.
Serious Summer
I’ve always felt most at home with SLR type cameras and the summer was full of them. I began with a side by side comparison of two second generation autofocus cameras from Nikon and Canon. The Nikon 401S and EOS 600 were two of the most capable cameras of their generation, sitting firmly in the upper middle of their respective ranges they commanded both a high price and lots of respect. For anyone who reads this site regularly, you’d be forgiven for expecting a foregone conclusion with the EOS 600 being the runaway winner.
Surprisingly I preferred the Nikon 401S. Despite the weird control dial layout it proved to be an accurate, reliable and well built camera that pulled shots out of the bag more often than not. The AF performance was noticeably better than the EOS 600 and that ultimately won the day for me. I also learned that early EOS cameras are starting to suffer from degradation of a hidden damper which lives underneath the shutter curtain assembly. This turns into that horrible black sticky mess and coats the shutter curtains which then jams them shut. Look out for any tell-tale black marks on the shutter blades of old Canons if you’re in the market for one.
In a perfect display of foreshadowing I moved my attention to trying to decide which was the best value film SLR available today. To cut a long story short I concluded that you cannot beat the Canon EOS 300 for value, features and performance for a budget film SLR. They are regularly sold for £5 or less and are so widely available anyone can get one without issue. They’re not perfect cameras by any means, but lets face it for the price of a pint you can’t expect the earth. I later put my money where my mouth is and picked one up to review.
Moving on, it wouldn’t be a year in budget photography without a trip to one of the most dangerous websites in the world – MPB.com. Whilst I’ve definitely been browsing cameras that I can’t afford on there, I do like to do a “sort by cheapest first” and see which digital body has fallen to the bottom of the pile. This time it was the turn of the Canon EOS 400D, the successor to the wildly successful and market defining EOS 350D which started me off in the DSLR world way back in 2006.
For £28 I received a rather beaten up 400D complete with bent hot-shoe and worn out buttons. It was a complete shock to then learn that the camera had only taken 8000 odd shots in its entire life. How a camera ends up looking like that with so little use is beyond me, but there we go.
Whilst the image quality was superb and there were a number of quality of life improvements over the 350D I couldn’t help but draw the same old conclusions – yes its a great camera for £28 but these days you are spoiled for choice. Keep your powder dry on eBay and you’ll definitely score a 20, 30 or 40D for £30 and they’re superior in every single way to a 350 or 450D. Those cameras have had their moment in the sun and now in the second hand market their compromised bodies and feature set don’t make sense any more.
Things just kept getting better during the summer and for someone who is rubbish at small talk I somehow found myself hosting a film photowalk organised by the people at Analogue Wonderland. The premise was simple – everyone gets a film and you, er, walk about and take pictures. I don’t know much about much so I took them round my usual street photography route in Birmingham and fortunately the weather held and the characters came out in force. Everyone said they had a good time, so you can’t ask for more than that but the stress of being responsible for so many people enjoying themselves… that’s a bit much.
I rewarded myself shortly after with my absolute, hands down favourite film camera of all time – the Canon A-1. I love the Canon AE-1 Program, that is the camera that showed me the sheer joy and magic of film photography, of manual focus and massive clear viewfinders and the anticipation of finishing and developing a roll of film to see what comes out. It is also the camera that resurrected my love of photography, the reason I made this site and continues to be a faithful and superb image making tool.
So why on earth buy an A-1? Simple – I love that camera too. I had an A-1 many years back but it wasn’t a happy camera by any means and certainly hadn’t been looked after during its life. The one I bought this year looks as new as the day it came out of the factory, it is in remarkable condition for a camera that’s pretty much fifty years old. It made me fall in love all over again with those Canon manual focus SLR’s and I had the fortune to get a press pass to a local music event and those two things combined to produce some of my all time favourite images. Pressing the shutter and throwing the advance lever on that camera will never, ever grow old. The summer really did peak right there.
I finished summer with a flurry of three more posts about vastly different things. First up was a review a long, long time in the making about the rather excellent Minolta Dynax 7000i. One thing I’ve tried to do this year is branch out from my systematic journey through everything Canon ever made and no one can deny the monumental influence that Minolta had on the photography industry.
Minolta were a company that really knew how to make a decent camera and they stole a massive march on everyone with their Dynax AF series. The cameras were beautiful, superbly designed, amazingly ergonomic and for the time – rammed with technology. Not only was their AF system first, it was fast, accurate and really very usable right from the start. Their story is a painful one of missed opportunities and lawsuits eventually bringing down what would surely have been a much needed third player in the market.
The 7000i is a great camera that has the rare distinction of staying in my collection of cameras that I actually use. I try not to keep cameras that could be put to use by other people and I’ve given away countless bodies this year to people who can get more out of them than I would just admiring them on a shelf. However, as with many old cameras (and especially electronic ones) their longevity is a problem. The Dynax suffers from crumbling plastics in their grips and my first tried to snap its own back in half when the advance mechanism repeatedly jammed. Still, I did smile when the poor thing just displayed “help” before giving up.
Looking forwards, I would love to get my hands on a Dynax 7 or 9 and give their top of the range cameras a run out but that’s one for the future if I ever manage to find one at a reasonable price.
The second of my three August articles was an absolute flop which told the story of trying to turn my humongous monster of an EOS 1N-HS into a standard EOS 1 so I’d get more use out of it. This was a case of once you start something you just have to finish it. The full camera with battery grip and power booster is really impractical these days and offers features you just don’t need any more such as fast continuous shooting. Buying a new EOS 1N without the grip is really quite difficult and costs a fortune on its own.
Little did I know that finding the replacement hand grip was only the start of the story, I ended up ordering a small circle of metal from Japan for close to £30 which is just insanity in itself. To add insult to injury, the camera then started to refuse to fire the shutter – a common problem on this model and it’s been unreliable ever since. One fix is… to put the power booster on which somehow just powers through the problem…
Finally, I got round to shooting an obscure camera by Ihagee in the Exa 1a. This is a brand with some serious prestige behind them who were revered “back in the day” and I can honestly say I’ve never enjoyed using a camera less than this one. It was frustrating, badly designed, lacked useful shutter speeds and was unreliable as any camera I’ve used. Trying to frame a portrait shot with the reversed viewfinder is one of the funniest and pointless activities I’ve engaged in photographically. I was glad to just get to the end of the roll of film and put it back in the box.
The results of that roll were awful. The lens was so soft it may as well have been smeared with butter and the number of out of focus images was eye watering despite the distance scale / f stop being set to give plenty of depth of field. I recently gave that camera away to someone from Instagram and I hope they get better results out of it than I did. Definitely the type of camera you either love or can’t stand.
Autumn Camera Almanac
It’s a well worn cliche when someone says “I was up in the loft and came across this old box…” but this is exactly what happened whilst I’d been rooting around for something completely unrelated and found a box containing a light meter and range finder I’ve been trying to find for months if not years. Also inside the box was a camera I didn’t know I had nor had any memory of owning – but it had a very important family connection as it was one of my Grandad’s cameras. I own three of the possibly four or five he ever had, those being a Voigtlander Bessa, a Praktica 35mm SLR and this newly rediscovered Kodak Retinette 1A.
I think this year more than any other I’ve come to appreciate the nuances of using different types of camera. I tend to have quite a fixed idea of what I like and deviating beyond that has never been a strong point, hence the slew of SLR type cameras I’ve used. Its comfortable, it’s familiar, but there’s a lot to be said for branching out and trying new things. I’d really enjoyed the Cosmic 35 and the Retinette is similar in many ways – only far more refined.
The family connection obviously gives more motivation to use any camera, but the Retinette was a favourite from the first frame. It really put me in the mind set of what it must’ve been like in the 60’s and 70’s, on your holidays with your snapshot camera recording everywhere you’ve been, taking endless photographs that would be neatly stored in a drawer and fetched out every few years for the ritual viewing. For that kind of travel snapshot photography it is absolutely perfect. Retinette’s are lightweight but well built, with good lenses that are really easy to set according to the distance scale and nearly all shots came out as expected.
The Retinette has a film advance lever on the bottom of the body which I felt at first was going to be a real oddity. After a few frames it made total sense and, dare I say it, is actually quite a natural place for a winding lever to live. This particular one is so light to advance that I initially thought the film hadn’t been loaded properly and I was winding thin air, but no, it’s just really well engineered.
Despite some odd light leaks on one roll that I still can’t quite explain, the Retinette remains in the collection – not just because of the family connection (you cannot ever sell family cameras) but because it is a genuinely lovely camera to use and I’m planning a street photography mission with it soon because it has the potential to be a discrete, fit and forget marvel in those circumstances.
The Retinette had begun something of a Kodak side quest and as Remembrance Day approached I’d been reading the collective war diaries and letters of those who fought in the First World War. One thing quickly became apparent in that a huge majority of the entire photographic record of the conflict was recorded on Kodak Vest Pocket cameras. These were the iPhone of the 1910’s and 20’s, packing lots of photographic technology and engineering into an almost never seen before compact design.
How do you overcome the physical constraints of making a small form factor camera? When you’re Kodak you can do what you like, so they just invented another size and standard of film – 127 roll film to be precise. Kodak numbered all of their different film stocks and pretty much all of those standards have lasted to today. Finding 127 film today is no joke and the price is extortionate when you work out the cost of each frame.
I picked up a mid 1920’s Vest Pocket that was confusing in that it didn’t match up exactly with any of the examples I could find on collectors sites. Buying a camera that’s a century old is never going to be trouble free, although considering the initial state of my copy it was doing fairly well. I discovered a tiny, pinhole light leak that I fixed after using up the first of two rolls of film but I never got to the bottom of why huge scratches were appearing along my film.
In hindsight I’m more convinced than ever that I bought dodgy film because not only were the scratches diagonal (how would that happen in the body if something sharp was always in the same place?) and the numbers from the backing paper transferred onto the negatives which is usually a sign of really poor quality film. If I win the lottery, I’ll run another roll through the Vest Pocket from another manufacturer.
As mentioned earlier, I took my own advice and bought my self proclaimed “best value film SLR.” For 99p I purchased a mint condition Canon EOS 300 that came in a camera bag with a few bits and pieces. Just let that sink in – 99p. It’s mad how cheap these cameras are, but hilariously I did see an Oxfam charity shop trying to charge £100 for one. I’m all for charity, but that’s quite the donation for a 99p camera.
How did it fair? It’s brilliant. It cemented my opinion and although the later 300X is more desirable, it is equally far, far more expensive by an order of magnitude. As one of the last EOS film cameras, the 300 includes 90% of everything good that Canon ever did with their film cameras and if it had red flashing dots on the AF points in the viewfinder I’d struggle to find a single thing I’d improve about it. In short, if you know anyone who wants to try film photography, or if you’re thinking of it – read that review and then get one.
Finally, I rounded this year off with an unlikely face off between two of the cheapest, rock bottom bargain basement plastic fantastic 35mm film compacts from the early 1990’s. One was my first ever camera, an “Opus Prime” bought by my father from SupaSnaps and the other was an off hand purchase of a “Vivitar Eco 35” made whilst scanning through old copies of Amateur Photographer that saw me go on a monumental rant about disposable cameras. I hate disposables, they are and always have been an environmental disaster and they need to stop. Now.
Neither were fantastic in terms of image quality, but the Opus definitely had the edge despite both possessing the most low tech single element plastic lens it is possible to find in a camera. Both just proved how flexible and forgiving film is – when you can totally ignore exposure and just fire off shots in all kinds of light and still get results you know you’re on to something good.
In between these two articles was a complete tangent in the form of an MP3 playing digital camera – the Fuji Finepix 40i. If ever there was a relic of technology and a product that was trying to solve a problem that the technology didn’t quite exist to make successful – this is it. The camera itself isn’t awful but its no great shakes either and for the purchase price of close to £1000 in todays money, it must’ve been such a let down. The 40i tried to do two things and did neither of them well. I am so, so grateful we have moved on from those early days of underpowered tech, limited expensive storage and God awful software with built in DRM annoyances.
And Next Year?
Firstly, thank you to everyone who reads this site. It doesn’t exactly have the highest readership of any photography site on the internet but in an age of video content being king, it’s nice to have a loyal following of people who still enjoy the written word. For a site which exists solely on a knackered PC behind my sofa, it’s not doing too badly and two years down the line I’m surprised that both it and I are still in working order.
What’s next? Well, I have a couple of small projects lined up but nothing is ever that well planned. I tend to go where eBay searches, magazine articles and other things that catch my eye send me. Photography is an endless hobby but I’m sure I’ll run out of things to write about one day. Until then, thanks again for indulging me, for reading this site and happy snapping regardless of what format, style or genre of photography you’re in to.
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Thank you for the trip down Memory Lane, I have enjoyed these posts throughout the year and it was still interesting revisiting. Looking forward to your articles in 2025
Always interesting to read, thank you.
thanks for reading 🙂