It was the early 2000s when compact digital cameras made it to the mainstream here in Hungary. I have distant memories of a Chinese little cam with VGA resolution, getting it around 2000, but can’t recall its exact type.
Edit: I managed to identify it in 2023, it was a Sipix Blink StyleCam, and looked like this:
The first proper compact I used was most probably an HP Photosmart 720 in 2002. It was the office camera of my dad’s employer, they used it to photograph company gatherings, and he brought it home twice for the weekend to take some pictures of the family. Speaking of him, he was an avid photographer from his mid-twenties till his early forties. He had a Zenit and a Praktica and a set of M42 lenses. I’m from the formal eastern bloc, that was the best you could get here. His hobby eventually succumbed to his alcoholism, just as the man succumbed to it himself in 2004. Actually it was his passing that made me realize: we had close to zero family photos from the preceding probably 10 years. Those two weekends when we had that HP was literally all we had. Letting go of him put me into deep lethargy, and there was this hard fact adding insult to injury: his memory dies with me and my sisters, as we can’t present a visual recollection of his life to his grandchildren.
That realization really struck me. I was a gadget guy my entire life, so it was pretty obvious what needed to be done. I still remember reading the reviews, pixel peeping image samples, and trying to find the best possible buy – second hand. I ended up getting an HP PhotoSmart 935 – used, bought not just without trying it first, but without seeing it in real life.
By that time I had tried a Canon S50, and my first impressions of the HP were lukewarm: not bad, but clearly not a Canon. That said, I had it for the next four years and put a few thousand clicks in it. Image quality was pretty solid, but the camera experience was sub-par compared to Canon, and it just could not stop eating up batteries.
In 2008 I got myself an HTC Touch smartphone. Not my first cameraphone (that was a Samsung whatever), but my first smartphone. I was blown away by its capabilities, and used it for taking photos for a little while. The following are some pictures taken with it. All shot in Krakow back in 2008.
I eventually switched to a Samsung ES17 – sold the HP to get some money out of it -, which was by all means a shitty camera. I have much less photos taken in this period than right before – the ES17 actually alienated me from taking photos, it was that bad.
Then smartphones-with-good-cameras happened. The Nokia 5230 conditioned me into the comfort of mobile phone photography, then I recollect the Galaxy S3 as the first “good enough” phone when it comes to taking images. Given that I had the ES17 as a compact, this statement still makes sense. Something else happened around that time too: my financial situation improved significantly, and in 2013 I decided to buy a Sony WX100, just one day prior to my then longest ever road trip: from Budapest to Barcelona. More on that in my next post.
Featured image: a picture taken with my first digital camera, an HP 935. It’s from 2008 and was shot in Prague