How Apple’s Cheap Camera Failed

[@lordgarth1]

I was an apple dealer in the early mid 90s and sold the cowboy shit out of newtons and QuickTake cameras. I still have my old newton.

[@snazzy]

Way to go man. Hard era hahaha

[@Enzo187]

i love "apple dealer" 'hey kids ya want an apple?"

[@stpworld]

@@snazzyive got several apple workgroup servers including the first one

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

I used my Newton MP 120 as my primary note-taking and receipt-and-invoice creating device until ~2010.

[@lordgarth1]

@@snazzy no joke. I had to keep telling everyone no we aren't going to start selling quicktime and video spigots to our amiga video toaster customers....maybe in a decade.

[@JustLovett0]

Useless, fun fact, I work in a TV broadcasting center for the US federal government. No idea why, but we have one of the Apple QuickTake cameras in our storage. Our tax dollars at one point paid for that 😂

[@sunnohh]

There is a chance it saved money on the newsletter pics or something

[@MALXCHI]

Lemme snag that

[@jmd1743]

@@sunnohh Good point. You don't need a whole lot of fidelity for a newspaper.

[@michaeloconnor7849]

Fun fact, those tax dollars are paying you a living.

[@null0byte]

Fun fact, unless you know what it was used for during a time other digital camera were multiple times more expensive, you are only assessing uselessness through today’s lens which is a less than worthless assessment.

[@kylek6922]

Our family had gotten a Performa 550 in Novermber '93 when I was 7 and dad saw the Quicktake 100 the following year and got it for himself as a Christmas present. Later it became mine when he upgraded to a Panasonic. I remember taking it on our roadtrip to Disneyland and using my used Powerbook Duo 2300c I'd saved up for and bought myself, so I was able to download the pictures over that Din-8 Serial and use our Dial-up AOL from the hotels and we sent pictures to family and friends. That was so cutting edge for the time that some of them didn't understand and had to be convinced that we were still gone on vacation lol.

[@upload00]

This is the most inside-out looking shirt ever made.

[@snazzy]

The good news is the inside feels like the outside and that’s soft.

[@Emm2004]

Looks good!

[@TalesOfWar]

I can't un-see this now lol.

[@camdendawe608]

i don’t know why but i read outside out as the movie lol

[@acos21]

You basically ruined the whole video experience for me lol

[@dan9700]

It’s actually amazing how far we have come with digital photography

[@snazzy]

Indeed!

[@jayg339]

Just in the last 15 years or so digital photography has made huge strides. Pretty incredible

[@DarthAwar]

@@jayg339 Better sensors (as well as OIS & EIS) have helped ALOT but Computational Photography is what has really allowed it to Shoot Ahead so much

[@Dee_Just_Dee]

Even in just 10 years time, let alone 30. I bought my first digital snapshot camera in 2003 - pretty sure it was the Kodak EasyShare CX6200 - 2 megapixels for well under $200. Around the same time, I bought a new PC, and the computer store was offering generic 640×480 webcams as free giveaways with the purchase of certain computers.

[@BuckeyeStormsProductions]

I remember my Dad's work having one and me being allowed to, "get creative," one summer day with it, and basically the same period correct Mac. My teen self went wild. The edgy shooting angles. The overblown editing. The 90's asthetic was XTREME! When it was all said and done, I got to print out a handful of my creations (in black and white) on a LaserWriter. Thirty years later I realize my Dad was just trying to keep me out of his hair while he worked, and I enjoyed a summer day off from school. Still, it was fun, and a memory I keep with me. Edit: Basically, beside their graphic design person, I was the only other person who figured out all the hardware and software. I just learned it by fiddling around. I remember my Dad kind of being blown away by my, "tech savvy." Edit #2: I don't remember it being this slow... I'm sure it was, but this was so hi-tec!

[@Dee_Just_Dee]

The mid 90s were such a wildly different time from today when it comes to digital media. These days we take it for granted that we're carrying a digital camera in our pocket at all times - a video camera, even - and that we can take a near-infinite amount of photos and share them anywhere, anytime. Back around 1994 I remember being so impressed by a grainy 4×3" inkjet printout my aunt showed me of a digital photo one of her coworkers had taken. That same evening she joked about how one of her other coworkers was a dummy for trying to get something important done on the internet during primetime hours when bandwidth was significantly slower. 😅

[@ALonesomeStreet]

My parents had a 2000ish version of a camera exactly like this, non-Apple but 32 pics, USB connected, and ran on AA. Honestly one of the best cameras made, the quality was incredible considering, and it was so much fun to just run around with as a kid and take pictures. I’m impressed with the changes made between this camera and that one, really makes our current accessibility to photography something to value.

[@mradford10]

Great video… but… whenever a young person does a nostalgic ‘olden days’ review, it’s always in contrast to today’s technology. Because you might not have been around, and definitely would not have been working and using this technology it’s understandable. I’m not criticizing or complaining… it would have been like me in the 1980s comparing an electric train to a steam train with my grandparents, so I get it. It’s normal. To understand what I mean, think what’s happening with AI at the moment. That’s what it was like seeing this for the first time in the 1990s... Magic. I was designing magazines, newspapers and books at the time and would have to drum or flatbed scan a print or 35mm slide to use it in my artwork files. This was after waiting 24 to 48 hours to get the film processed, collected and scanned. So being able to shorten that process was nothing short of amazing. The Apple Mac was the only computer that could be used for desktop publishing. It too was also magic… before using it I was using ink pens, grid board, wax machines, bromide machines, French curves and external type setters… laying out artwork for printers, all taking days and days to achieve. So the ‘wait time’ you endured for comedic relief (of course it’s funny now, I agree with you) was like using a Time Machine at the time… it was blazingly fast compared to what we had at the time. Of course today I’m using all the latest gear… seeing this through your eyes was great and reminded me of how far we have all come! Awesome.

[@WilliamHaisch]

I was looking for this comment! Even these limited digital cameras were more convenient and faster than processing film. Remember when getting doubles for free became an option? 😂

[@Casmael01]

Really interesting point of perspective man thanks for sharing. Peace. ✌️

[@richardpb11]

My background was exactly the same. We used a QuickTake camera on client premises in conjunction with 35mm. To show clients QuickTake photos in layouts (Quark) on a PowerBook (MacBooks weren't a thing then) on site. The clients would lose their minds 😂 Then replace the QuickTake comps with the 35mm after processing back in the studio.

[@mradford10]

@@richardpb11 Sounds familiar! Crazy to think that’s how we worked to get things done. I worked with a photographer who was experimenting with a digital back for his 5x4 Hasselblad - on a stand and mounted Mac Desktop no less. He would use this camera for some framing I read of using Polaroids… We couldn’t use any of the shots commercially of course and always went back to film, but it was a glimpse of what might be possible. Today I guess you can just type what you want into Midjourney and never even need a camera. It’s like another world!

[@mradford10]

@@Casmael01 No worries. Technology has been a wild ride over the last 30-40 years. It’s been like time travel looking back on it.

[@JSYBen]

To be fair I had a QuickTake 100, and it came with rechargeable batteries and an Apple branded AA Battery charger, so the fact it drank batteries wasn't that big a deal. Incidentally, I love how the Mac I'm on right now actually auto-corrected QuickTake to capitalise the T :D

[@calorion]

11:53 Apple *Desktop* Bus, not *Display* Bus.

[@leetisdale8456]

Came here to say this ❤

[@DanielMiller82]

The QuickTake software works a LOT better on a PowerPC mac. In middle school we has one of these in our Digital Imaging class ( it was brand new and i can't believe the teacher actually let us run around the school with it). The computers we were using were PowerMac 6100s and they did things a lot faster that the one you are using.

[@JoseRodriguez-dx4pb]

This was exactly what I was thinking when I saw him struggle with the little classic lol

[@zollotech]

Ah…deep thoughts with Quinn at 21:00 lol. Great look at the QuickTake.

[@twylo]

I actually used one of these at work in 1996 to take pictures for our very early internal website.

[@HorizonOfHope]

I remember stumbling upon an old photo album in an SD card from an old digital camera. So excited and opened up only to find... something? Is it a bridge? I think that’s a face... everything is so pink?

[@dothetontim]

2:56 that vintage macworld footage is amazing.

[@TMWriting]

I’m starting to think that maybe your favourite robot vacuum is just whichever one’s cheque cleared last.

[@snazzy]

Or hear me out… I only accept sponsorship from products I actually like and each successive evolution and iteration from a competing market improves on the product before it.

[@EposVox]

omg the bit waiting on PhotoFlash was gold

[@ItsMateoPlays]

That's where the QuickTake name comes from on iOS's camera now!! Never knew this was a thing...

[@calorion]

What? Where?

[@TalesOfWar]

Apple love to reuse their old names for things.

[@agcouper]

The responsiveness of old Mac OS UI seems like responsiveness of modern web sites to me. So much time passed, but we still have to wait.

[@lucianoag999]

Because sometimes we ask the market to go faster than we should or need. We could wait a couple of years for features to mature before wanting new ones. But no. Even though 90% of the usage of a cellphone hasn’t changed for the average user in the last years, you need to increase storage, ram and processing power in order to compensate for apparent inefficient coding or hidden bloatware. I have a MBP mid 2012. I don’t like that I have to change it soon since it is made obsolete.

[@sentientarugula2884]

@@lucianoag999 Well, a lot of that extra storage or processing power goes to future-proofing... you never know what compute-heavy tasks you might need to run 10 years from now.

[@heinrichthiart]

Cool video, but the scanline on the CRT kills me, please set the shutter speed to match the refresh rate

[@medes5597]

He did. It's very very difficult to avoid rolling shutter altogether on a color classic. Something to do with the color circuitry refreshing at odd rates, not an even set. If he hadn't made any adjustment, the rolling shutter would be much worse, it's unbearable unadjusted.

[@xmetal280]

My dad brought one of these home from work and I got to play with it for a few days. My overriding memory is that, even then, it seemed to take a very long time to do anything and shooting a picture in your room at night was a study in noise. But while sluggish and quite horrible in image quality, it was still pretty magical to take a picture and then be able to look at it on the ol' Powerbook a minute later.

[@alc5440]

I think part of your issue with the software being slow is that, while adorable, the Color Classic was awful even compared to its contemporaries.

[@heathman4478]

ADB was Apple Desktop Bus. But I think this used serial not ADB. Nice video.

[@bltvd]

It certainly did not use appletalk 😂

[@calorion]

Yes, it has to be serial.

[@kidsafe]

Yep…ADB was only ever used for peripherals and while Apple’s serial bus could be used for AppleTalk, I’m sure most people used it for printers, modems, Connectix QuickCams, etc.

[@Nookster]

Cloning hurt Apple, but only because Apple were building crap Macs - they refused to make Macs expandable, upgradable, and halfway affordable. Meanwhile cloners built multiprocessing Macs with ZIF sockets, loads of PCI slots, smaller and larger form factors, and higher clock speeds. Had I not picked up a cheap UMAX in 1998 and upgraded the heck out of it, I would have likely ditched Apple altogether by the Millennium. Clones kept the Mac OS platform alive just long enough for Steve to pull the OS licences ahead of launching the Bondi Blue iMac.

[@friscodog]

Brings back so many memories! Not that I could afford that camera, but I certainly lusted after them. And really just that whole era of computing. Slow as can be, but really amazing for its day!

[@mrdummy_nl]

But... what did it fail exactly? Too slow? I miss the final conclusion talk. Poor program and Mac problems? Too much work? Poor quality? Well that was expected for early cameras.

[@null0byte]

It failed the expectation that it would be in any way comparable to today’s tech. It didn’t actually fail back when it was released. He gives that away with his statement regarding eBay, “This camera? They’re a dime a dozen, you can find them everywhere.” Failed products don’t tend to be so plentiful they’re still being sold for less than $100 on the used market 30 years later. Also, the fact that Apple followed it up with newer improved and upgraded versions also shows it was actually pretty successful for the time.

[@charliefoxglove4471]

12:40 Ok, big factual error in this one, the sensor in the Apple QuickTake was nowhere near the size of an APS sensor. It had an 8mm lens giving the equivalent FOV of 50mm, which is a crop factor of 6.25x. That makes it a tiny 1/2.6" type sensor, only a little bigger than the smartphone sensor shown in the diagram. Edit: apparently it had a little area masked off around the edges, so it was probably a common 1/2.5” sensor using a 1/2.6" capture area.

[@nilswegner2881]

Sadly, not the only big factual error in this video. Seems like he half assed his research on this one.

[@kendokaaa]

Pretty close to what ended up being standard in point and shoot cameras

[@ProHolle]

Not a person who writes comments, but this video especially is just great in every possible way. Thanks for everything :) Greetings from Germany

[@dillardc81]

I remember we had these in my middle school computer lab.

[@Charlesb88]

You made a rather significant mistake in the beginning of the video when you said the QuickTake use the Apple Display Bus (ADB) to transfer pictures to the Mac. First, there was no such thing as the “Apple Display Bus”, though there was the “Apple Dekstop Bus (ADB)” which was used only for low-speed devices like Keyboards, Mice/tracballs, and other input devices. On the Mac, recognizable as 4-pin DIN connector. The port the QuickTake actually used on Macs was the Mac serial port which also used a DIN connector but it’s a Mini-DIN 8 pin connector carrying RS-422 signals. The Quadra AV and Powermacs had an updated serial port type knowns as GeoPort (and marked as such) that’s compatible with standard Mac RS-422 Serial port devices, but also supported special GeoPort modems that drew their power solely from the Mac via an additional 9th pin providing 5v DC. The Mac Serial port looks exactly the same as the Printer/AppleTalk port as they both where RS-422 serial ports and in fact they could be used interchangeably for Printers and Modems/serial devices despite being labeled Serial and Printer, with the exception of GeoPort modems which could only be used on GeoPort labeled Serial Port. It’s possible to use RS-232 (25-Pin serial D-Port) Serial devices on a classic Mac with RS-422, with the appropriate adaptor. This is why your QuickTake 150 could also be used with a PC with RS-232 adaptor kit for the QuickTake. Note: I see you sort of corrected yourself at the end but still QuickTake uses serial not AppleTalk though it’s the Printer Port doubles as an AppleTalk port.

[@GRAHAMAUS]

As an Apple developer in the 90s, Apple gave us one of these to see what we could do with it. I took it to a family wedding, and it sort of blew people's minds - it was the first digital camera anyone had ever seen. However, there was no quick way to show people what you had taken, no way to share the images with them, no website you could publish them to, nothing you could really DO with it. So once the wow factor wore off, people were a bit nonplussed as to what it was for. (On the other hand, people were used to waiting for photographs, but in the end the generally unsharable images meant waiting indefinitely, and then forgetting all about it). That's the trouble with the future arriving piecemeal - you need a lot more of it in place to make it useful. It's no surprise it was a non-starter, it was just a bit too soon.

[@joshj88]

I’d say a color classic was not the best Mac of the period to use. The CPU and Ram were severely limited by the LC lineage of the platform. Your best bet would be to use an Apple Mac IIsi or even a Quadra 605. Those are all so much faster then the color classic

[@chriswilson4614]

It looks very much like the early Kodak camera I had one for a while but could not use the pics because the format was obscure

[@MissMTurner]

At my first corporate job around 97-98, they had one of these. I remember seeing it and thinking how amazing it was.

[@Sam42069]

Honestly don’t think the QuickTake photos look that bad…

[@app0the]

the fact that you messed up RS488 for AppleTalk and then called it ADB and then explained it with the words for the wrong ADB is the perfect representation of how crazy all the ports and things were on computers back then

[@lifelongez]

Never would have guessed this was the first color digital camera. Really cool!

[@ironqqq]

4:01 oh wow... that was a very good lead in to the sponsor. so good I watched the lead in 4 times! My only criticism is that your outfit changed.

[@FintanMoloney]

Love seeing this coverage of old Apple tech. For all their mistakes in the 90s in fairness the QuickTake was way ahead of its time.

[@PhillyMJS]

I bought a QuickTake 100 back in ‘94. It was a pretty cool device for the time, in that very brief window where camera makers got a little creative with the form factor instead of making them look just like film cameras. One convenient thing about it was it could be powered with the same AC adapter the PowerBook 1xx series used. The software also let you control the camera from a connected computer, with a duplicate of the camera’s UI on the monitor. I assume that would be useful in a setup where you were taking ID photos in an office or something.

[@jckatz]

In University I remember having time to make tea when opening SPSS

[@v0lkai]

Connecting it to a Color Classic Mac instead of a modern work-around was icing on the cake. So cool.

[@AusAviation149]

Around 1999ish, at my primary school (Australian equivalent of elementary) when I was in year 3, every Thursday we would go over to the high school for computer class. In there was a room that had lots of strange looking computers that looked very different to the one that was at home, and indeed in class. They all had a coloured little apple on them, and said "Macintosh". I remember looking in there one day, and there was a shelf with about 6 boxes on them that were all sealed, except for one. They were all Quick take cameras, brand new and unopened! I looked at it thinking it looked so cool, but never got to try it. The sad thing was, the high school closed and I subsequently learned that they all sat in that room for nearly 2 decades, and only recently all just got thrown away....

[@fred_derf]

EPS = Encapsulated PostScript.

[@m0rgen_]

19:15 -> Actually, you get your full 1000 Gigabytes of storage that you paid for, Windows just happens to display it in "Gibibytes", which leads to less capacity shown in absolute numbers. If Windows wanted to be precise they wouldn't display it as "GB" but instead as "GiB", but they just don't care.

[@snazzy]

Formatted storage is typically quite a bit less-even considering same unit size.

[@qwertzy121212]

"gibibytes" what a load of hogwash! a terabyte is 1024 gigabytes, a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, and a kilobyte is 1024 bytes. there is no such thing as a 1000 byte kilobyte, regardless of the court-endorsed lies of hard drive manufacturers.

[@m0rgen_]

@@qwertzy121212 No its not hogwash. Mega, Giga, Tera etc are defined prefixes that stand for different powers of 10 (Mega=10^6, Giga=10^9...). A Mebi, Gibi, and Tebibyte on the otherhand are defined by 2^x. This leads to different capacities showing up compared to the advertised capacity.

[@EVPaddy]

@@m0rgen_ Yeah real man like the definition we grew up with :) Ask someone what a Mebibyte is in the 80ies.

[@butlerwm]

Gasoline on the fire: "As the computing industry has matured, having the same prefixes refer to two different units of measure became confusing. Drive manufacturers tended to use the decimal system when labeling the capacity of hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives. OS vendors often used the binary, power-of-two system to measure computer memory and data storage capacity. As a result, a disk drive manufacturer would label a new HDD as having 100 GB of capacity. However, when the customer installed that hard drive, the computer OS would report that the drive only had 93.13 GB capacity. Discrepancies such as that led the IEC to create the new prefixes for the binary of measurement. If the OS had used the binary system prefixes in the example above, it would have reported 93.13 GiB instead of 93.13 GB. While the IEC created the binary prefix system to solve the capacity measurement problem, in practice, the binary prefixes are mostly used in academic settings, technical literature and Open system circles. They are not used much in commercial environments. As a result, confusion around these terms persists today." Just as GiB = GigiByte and GB = GigaByte, it take 16 bits to make a byte, and lower case "b" stands for bits while upper case "B" stands for bytes. Because even when we can be nothing else, we can at least be confused.

[@lenn55]

My family had a Sony Mavica MVC-FD73 with the floppy drive storage. It took really nice photos for back then.

[@snazzy]

That’s sweet!

[@SMTahmid]

Always wanted one, ever since I saw the brochure for it back in the day.

[@mendodsoregonbackroads6632]

My friend had one and I thought it was so cool, a game changer! So I saved up my money, went to Fry’s and they didn’t have the one with the floppy anymore. Instead it wrote to a compact CD-RW so I bought that one. Less than 2 years later there were newer cameras that wrote to an SD card.

[@BixbyConsequence]

Yes, if you really wanted to max out the quality of your 640x480 image you could even store the photo as a .bmp -- no compression artifacts! But then you could only store 1 photo on the disk. 😆 I did like it though. Not having to deal with film and not having to worry about "wasting shots" was a game-changer. And the Lithium battery gave way more runtime than the quicktake apparently did, despite having to power the electromechanical disk drive.

[@GavinSeim]

Love the side-by-sides. Soon us vintage camera hunters will be praising QuickTake color. But in al seriousness it looked pretty good for 1996.

[@csumme7]

My dad was an amateur photographer back in the 80/90s and he would spend a weekend all day working on his Macintosh with photo editing. Yeah it was slow but in the day that was fast and is why the media companies bought Macintoshes.

[@miawgogo]

Hey, snazzy, you need to credit creative commons pictures, i noticed that you used the picture from wikipedia that is CC licenced

[@onigvd77]

It’s a real shame you got the ADB part wrong and went down the wrong rabbit hole with a completely irrelevant explanation. Yeah it was a serial port and often used to connect Macs to printers and modems, as well as LocalTalk networks.

[@marknhopgood]

Thanks for reminding us of how much we used to wait for computers to do their stuff back in the day.

[@playeveryday01]

No expandable storage was really dumb, you would get more functionality from using a disposable camera and then digitally scanning them at kinkos.

[@TheBennedy85]

Sometimes I want to go back to when the picture quality was no better than a Quicktake 150...

[@cplater]

While the connectors do look similar, the QuickTake cameras used Apple Serial, not ADB.

[@worldexplorer75]

You gave us your quick hot take on the QuickTake. This video has some high stakes!

[@WilliamHaisch]

There were a lot of these QuickTake cameras in public schools. If I remember correctly, there was a hefty discount if they also bought a PowerBook, too.

[@dfcx1]

I think I saw one of these at school too.

[@hiskishow]

Dude this is a museum of a video 😂

[@john_ace]

There was a theme that was fusing all of the different parts together: the digital hub. Since the late 80s (1987 to be exact) Apple tried to fuse different media into a single ecosystem. Just watch the "Knowledge Navigator" demonstration to understand the goals. Steve Jobs took up the shards that were left of that idea and reconstructed that central hub-like system. Apple lost sight because the technology wasn't as advanced as the executives had thought or better: had wished. By cutting everything back to a cleaner starting point instead of trying to archive all at once, Steve Jobs was successful to later finally archive the vision of a single screen-driven device to replace all other information devices. In the 80s and 90s no-one would have thought that the mobile phone would be that central device, even though the signs were in plain sight (hindsight is 20/20, though). Simply said: In the 80s and 90s Apple would release a product with 20 innovative features of which only a hand full were actually fully working while the others had major flaws. Steve changed that and demanded that every released feature _should_ work 100% (with mixed results) even if it meant to leave out innovative functions to a later release.

[@mc127]

wow you make me feel old, I remember using these at the time. Feel even older when people don't know or are confused about ADB, Localtalk, teleport (an EXCELLENT NAME) , EPS and maybe PDF (Printer Description Files!!) Anyway, make me happy and say "excellent" in every video, something makes me smile when you say that word (as an Englishman!) :-)

[@andrewstones2921]

I bought one of these when they went on sale, I’d previously had a Logitech B&W camera that was even more of a toy. I only remember taking 2 photos, one of which I emailed to a friend and I was quite amazed at the ability to email a photo.

[@Alpha8713]

I wonder why they bothered making a color camera when the intended use case was for pictures to go in B&W publications?

[@rachelblack3816]

I was interested in this, but became bored with the box. The Box. The Box. The damn Box. Interest lost.

[@snazzy]

So… skip the part with the box.

[@rachelblack3816]

@@snazzy I did. And the rest of it.

[@cjsebes]

I was gifted a used QuickTake 100 as I was heading off to college in 1997. It came in handy a couple of times for putting together storyboards for my video production classes. In 2000, I used it to create an ObjectVR of my truck. Cutting-edge stuff for back then.

[@Steamrick]

That PhotoFlash launch reminds me of how Stronghold used to launch on the family PC back in the day. It took literally 5 minutes to load into the game and the opening cinematic performed in seconds per frame - but the game itself ran pretty smoothly.

[@tutacat]

It is a more limited filesystem. It doesn't have journaling, limited filenames, etc. That is why it takes up less space.

[@halfsourlizard9319]

Don't forget defragging -- because FAT is basically the dumbest possible thing, fragmentation made space effectively unusable a lot of the time.

[@badcatdesign]

I used one of these to do photo illustrations for FamilyPC magazine. Good times.

[@FerlinHicarte]

I just love watching the struggles working with old software and hardware. awesome job!

[@T3GMedia]

That's not as bad quality as I was expecting. That thing was hitting some of those shots pretty well!

[@SMTahmid]

I got my hands on a Handycam back in 1998-99, and included with the packaging was a brochure for a Mavica. It was a chunky, square unit with a floppy disk as storage drive. I guess they never stopped using magnetic disks, even when they switched to truly digital sensors.

[@null0byte]

That was because, at the time, Compactflash cards were still extremely expensive while floppy disks were everywhere and cheap as chips and didn’t require the purchase of a special reader. Compactflash didn’t really start coming down in price until Smartmedia cards appeared (somewhat a precursor to the MMC and later SD cards, which were themselves an evolution of the MMC)

[@andre-le-bone-aparte]

Question: Do you like the "look" of the QuickTake 150, as a throwback vintage type filter?

[@snazzy]

No haha

[@joshhud]

You should add that you have an ad for a robot vacuum in the title. I think that's your main genre now lol

[@ericbauer4559]

Such a fun era. My first digital picture taken of me was with a 100.

[@cassnate6259]

I was truly charmed by your small talk going from LOTR, to Harry Potter, to deep existential crisis 😂

[@motionsick]

I had one, it was the biggest piece of nad. The worst imagine you ever seen literally a potato camera. We all had scanners and film-to-CDROM options in this era so the camera was literally useless. Used it once.

[@dfcx1]

Actually surprised by how little noise there is in the photos, big sensors were big sensors even back in the day I guess.

[@halfsourlizard9319]

I'd be curious to see what images read directly from the sensor look like -- at full-res rather than whatever downsampling / interpolation it's doing.

[@JohnCena-rf2lw]

it really is fun seeing u play with retro tech. u can't deny it, such old trinkets "while being very primitive" had and still have their charm. i wouldn't buy anything like that anytime, but i'll definitely enjoy a throwback review

[@iamfrankstallone]

The pause and sigh for the BitCoin comment... 😂🤣

[@EthanWI349]

Back in 1994-1995, my high school offered a "Multimedia" computer class. It was mainly an Apple HyperCard class fueled by the extreme popularity of the Myst game. In this class, we had the ability to check out and take home a QuickTake 100. I remember thinking that the camera was neat, but way too expensive considering the poor user experience and image quality. At the time, I honestly didn't think digital photography had any real future. Guess I was wrong!

[@The_Laser_Channel]

I know people complained about the Game Gear draining 6 AA batteries in 2-3 hours, but how many batteries does this camera take? 7 shots to drain batteries is STILL bad...I remember back in 2007, I was copying music to my Minidisc player and it would drain a AA battery in 15 minutes when copying music over.....it got REALLY good playback time, like 40 hours on a single AA, but when you were copying music over, it would drain a battery for every album you copied to it. Probably why they recommended getting the AC adapter....I just never did that....

[@null0byte]

Writing takes a lot more energy than reading. Still does, but you don’t notice it as much as power efficiency has gotten exponentially better. It’s also slower than reading as you have to manage the charge levels when writing while you only have to look at the charge level when reading.

[@sohiearth]

We need a discrete speaker from Apple that doesn't rely on Airplay, imagine what they could sound like!

[@SuperDuprTech]

I love that just spent almost 30 minutes of my day watching a video on a product I will never own or see in person. It's impressive to see the camera improvements from where we started with that Kodak & the Sony to the QuickTake and I loved the comparison to the current gen iPhone. Also side note that load time was crazyyyyy. Would be interested to know the volume change between the original Kodak cam to something like the iPhones cam, must be like x10000 times smaller and to answer your question; no, I haven't watched Lord of the Rings too..

[@Helderhugo]

You look like Obi Wan with his binoculars.

[@TheBigNegative-PhotoChannel]

When I look at the image quality, I would have also said, 'Screw that, I'll continue using my film camera.'

[@headwerkn]

That’s what almost everyone not involved in newsgathering, press or catalogue work said until around 2000.

[@medes5597]

That's not really how they were used. These were popular but they were more like replacements for Polaroid cameras. Fun kind of shots but not a replacement for your main camera most the time. They were very popular for pro studio photographers, who would use them to set up shots and had a system apple sold via photography magazines, that let you instantly display your photos on a monitor in your studio. They were rarely full film camera replacements.

[@dan9700]

Looking forward to watching this, as a pro photographer I don’t use my canon 5d mark iv much anymore and use my 15 pro max

[@PeterGort]

Ah the Color Classic! That brought back some fond memories! I did try out a QuickTake 100 around y2k or so, but it ate batteries at a ferocious rate, and all for 640x480. It was a neat idea, and Apple’s industrial design was excellent, but I think it was hobbled by available technology of the day.

[@JangoAC]

For 1994 this is really good. Better than my first phone camera 10 years later

[@legacyoftheancientsC64c]

I got into so much trouble because of this camera when I was in high school. A teacher had lent it to me for a Hypercard multimedia project for a week. I returned it and then got called to the principal's office a few days later being accused of "indecency". Turned out my cousins had taken a hold of the camera at some point before I returned the camera and proceeded to take photos of their butts, dog poop, some porn mag, in short anything they found funny. Only thing that saved me is that one of my cousins has a scar in his buttocks and confessed when my aunt recognized it.

[@trashyraccoon2615]

So I guess your childhood was basically a Nickelodeon show. Well done

[@legacyoftheancientsC64c]

@@trashyraccoon2615 Oh man, I wish. Actually my early childhood was almost Disney-like cliched, until my father re-entered my life as a teen. Then it was pretty much the opposite.

[@benjaminsmith3625]

Feels like it really misses having removable storage. You couldn't just take it on holiday with a pack of batteries and some spare cards.

[@medes5597]

This is why I still think a decent digital camera is a worth while purchase.

[@savagemadman2054]

My high school had a bunch of Quicktake cameras. I dont recall them getting used much - they were pretty outdated at the time. The camera we *wanted* to use was the school's one and only DSLR (a Nikon? I remember it had a Firewire interface) which was used all the time.

[@Tokyodb]

The photography montage was really fun. The comparison shots were great, too!

[@helloukw]

The camera I didn't knew it exists. Its nice to learn a bit of tech history and its especially nice to see old computers, and even more old Apple ones since I'm not familiar with them and they are kind of cool.

[@milesm3419]

@ 0:45: "Released the same time I did, just over 30 years ago." This made me laugh! 😂Snazzy Labs is king

[@dhunHERO]

i want more existential conversations with snazzy labs

[@taylor1038]

I shoot film and digital today, so I'm used to being able to take a few thousand 30MP photos on my Sony A7 and only having 36 shots on film. It's insane to think there was a time you could film more on physical film and at higher resolution than digital media at the time.

[@sylar5373]

I remember playing with this thing back at school when it was bleeding edge and I remember thinking how cool it was, how far we have come from the .3 megapixel sensor.

[@cblizz730]

Digital cameras had that look until about 2013.

[@cristobal521]

Bought a boxed QT100 Plus, paid like $100 for it on eBay. It’s fully functional but I can’t make it work with any of my old Macs (iBook g3 running OS 9 with a USB adapter)

[@memadmax69]

I remember I lusted for this camera back then along with everything mac back then like the Quadra and Color classic, LCIII, etc etc... Good time to be alive, apple was on a roll.

[@tobybridson]

Great review, and funny. Never really appreciated how slow computers were back then, and how easy it is to capture and use a photo today!

[@hardhanded4ever]

Hey buddy, after the latest iOS update, some iPhone shortcut automation you shared in your previous video seem to have stopped working for me. The new update must have changed something that broke compatibility. I found your previous shortcut video incredibly helpful, so I was wondering if you could make an updated video going over shortcuts and automations that are working properly with the latest update? Your guides are always so clear and easy to follow.