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Somewhat related anecdote - my dad bought one of the first "proper" digital cameras of its day, the Sony CyberShot F707. Even now, looking back at the quality o

Somewhat related anecdote - my dad bought one of the first "proper" digital cameras of its day, the Sony CyberShot F707. Even now, looking back at the quality of the pictures taken with it, it's still mighty impressive(well, it was reflected in the price tag too, but I digress). The camera used memory stick format, and my dad shelled out for the ridiculously expensive 128MB card to go with the camera, which was great.....except that even that stupidly expensive memory stick could only hold about 50 pictures. But......we quickly discovered some setting on the camera which made it store something like 500 pictures on the card instead! Brilliant! And they still look the same on the display, so no harm done, right? Well, cue to our first family holiday with it, and coming back only to discover that pictures taken in 640x480 resolution really don't cut it. That was a very.....sad lesson to learn about resolutions and digital cameras. I remember much later we bought a 256MB memory stick that was basically two 128MB sticks in one - it had a physical switch between "side" A and B.

IgorPartola 5y ago
Compared to a typical 27 frame film that was still an improvement. Plus you could preview the photos and delete shots that didn’t come out, while a film camera was literally a black box until you developed the film.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Yes but in the words of my dad - you could buy extra roll of film literally anywhere, for not a whole lot of money. When you were on holiday with only that one 50-photo large memory stick, and no way to empty it before going home, that's a big problem.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I remember being in Bangkok in mid 2000s on vacation and walking the streets looking for a store to burn a CD with our pictures/video so we could delete the memory stick and use it for more pictures (forget what format it was, might or might not have been Sony). I think we found a shop that did it pretty quickly.
durnygbur 5y ago
The memory cards had such small capacity, were so expensive, and general backup options were so few that I have maybe low hundreds items of digital photos from the era before 2010-2015. For a long time the best backup strategy had been 4.4GB DVD, oftentimes the memory card was erased without any backup. Since then I've been storing almost every digital photo.

IgorPartola 5y ago

Compared to a typical 27 frame film that was still an improvement. Plus you could preview the photos and delete shots that didn’t come out, while a film camera was literally a black box until you developed the film.

gambiting 5y ago
Yes but in the words of my dad - you could buy extra roll of film literally anywhere, for not a whole lot of money. When you were on holiday with only that one 50-photo large memory stick, and no way to empty it before going home, that's a big problem.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I remember being in Bangkok in mid 2000s on vacation and walking the streets looking for a store to burn a CD with our pictures/video so we could delete the memory stick and use it for more pictures (forget what format it was, might or might not have been Sony). I think we found a shop that did it pretty quickly.

durnygbur 5y ago

The memory cards had such small capacity, were so expensive, and general backup options were so few that I have maybe low hundreds items of digital photos from the era before 2010-2015. For a long time the best backup strategy had been 4.4GB DVD, oftentimes the memory card was erased without any backup. Since then I've been storing almost every digital photo.