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There's a bizarre "Old stuff is better" tendency which sees vintage tech as somehow more credible, ethical, characterful, expressive, and individual than modern

There's a bizarre "Old stuff is better" tendency which sees vintage tech as somehow more credible, ethical, characterful, expressive, and individual than modern tech. It's quite strange. It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use - but trying to pretend it isn't.

BoxOfRain 2y ago
I don't know take valve amps for example, the subjective qualities the clearly imperfect technology produces can be quite pleasant. Yes you could just as well simulate such an amplifier in software because there's no 'magic' to why it sounds that way, but there's something aesthetically pleasing about warm glowing glass. I'm no photographer but I feel there's something similar going on here.
- piltdownman 2y ago
  UAD and WAVES, amongst several other companies, operate their business on the premise that there is some 'magic' as to why it sounds that way that is somewhere between difficult and impossible to manage (sufficient to enthuse a musician/producer).
  - louthy 2y ago
    As an owner of a UAD Octo and plenty of their plugins, but also lots of analogue hardware [1], including valve based compressors, EQs, and distortion units that are emulated by UAD. The plugins still aren’t there. Especially for anything that needs harmonic distortion. I get the impression they use regular random number generators for some of the random variance, rather than trying to emulate the physicality of a valve. They just don’t quite have the mojo. For some things it doesn’t matter, but often music production is about a 1% improvement here, a 1% improvement there, which sums up to a lot. It’s still easier to get those wins with hardware. Like ‘mojo’ is the default setting. A really good example is the Chandler Curve Bender [2]. I have the real hardware. A new one will cost you £6,700 - so it would be insane to buy one when UAD have a plugin version for £179. I have the plugin too. The plugin is my favourite digital EQ. It sounds great. But the hardware does things that the plugin just doesn't touch. The hardware is all discrete circuits (with massive transistors). I think the slight latency shift between the left and right channels gives a 3D-ness to the sound that the plugin doesn't even attempt. Anyway, this demo [3] really shows what it can do and why hardware is still in the game. In many areas plugins are good enough, I tend to use the plugins for more precision and to have similar curves to the hardware, but there’s still a ways to go to until there’s parity with the hardware. That doesn’t mean you need the hardware, plenty of successful artists use digital alone. Just it’s still easier to get ‘the good stuff’ with hardware. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9swzlgk3wszeq6jfjxmw1/IMG_1411.heic?rlkey=lvujqh9bk80juoxxtg01xatj7&st=72vvrywv&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9swzlgk3wszeq6jfjxmw1/IMG_141... [2] https://www.thomann.co.uk/chandler_limited_emi_tg12345_curve_bender.htm https://www.thomann.co.uk/chandler_limited_emi_tg12345_curve... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUv9GtMlUwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUv9GtMlUwA
    - louthy 2y ago
      > transistors Brain wasn’t engaged, I meant capacitors
  - gambiting 2y ago
    I mean, audiophiles will gaslight themselves into believing and hearing what they want to hear. There are some areas where ok, maybe there is some difference to the sound, unlikely as it is, but once you start getting into "audio optimized SSDs" and "audio optimized ethernet switches" then it's all a 100% scam(and yet audiophile forums are full of people swearing that they can hear a difference in their audio tracks saved to an SSD that had a few extra capacitors added). So I'm not surprised that there are companies making money off that belief into what is effectively magic.
    - louthy 2y ago
      > audiophiles Audiophiles are ridiculous, frankly. I'm on the ATC group on Facebook. ATC make pro speakers used in many top studios, but they also make home 'audiophile' speakers. The speakers are amazing, but I often see them talking utter nonsense about how X sounds great or whatever, when they have pictures of their setup in an untreated room. Like they could even tell if the speakers are good in a room like that. They're hearing the room. Audiophiles are like astrologers, it's all in the wind with them. But they shouldn't be confused with people into pro-audio for music or film production. The name of the game is to get the best sounding room you can, so that it's easier to make your art, there is a motivation to get it right and not be hoodwinked by the things you state. Not that pro-studio people don't have their blind-spots too (especially around things like cabling), but they're not the same.
vasco 2y ago
On the other hand it helps preserve history so I'm not sure I care the intentions are not pure. I know I got on this bandwagon with a simple analog camera over ten years ago and now I'm drowning in 1800s and 1900s electrical engineering books and newspapers.
fragmede 2y ago
It focus on nostalgia and repairing of old things (because they don't make them anymore, so you have to), rather than buying the latest Apple shit, so there is a distinction from modern disposable consumption patterns.
vachina 2y ago
Old stuff feels better because people are familiar with it. People grew up with them and if anything their expectations are set by those very things.
- PetitPrince 2y ago
  I suspect their failure mode, limitation and purpose are more characterized and less surprising ? Single purpose tech vs magical black mirror that does everything.
gspencley 2y ago
My wife and I were just watching a YouTube video about the history of the Mattel Intellivision gaming console. If you've never seen one, the thing had wooden panels. It was definitely inspired by an era where your appliances were meant to match your furniture. I remember, as a child of the 80s, seeing televisions that were cased in wood as well. I would argue that these types of designs made an anti-consumerist statement which is why you don't see them anymore. An appliance that tries to look like furniture doesn't need to do that, it is a non-essential feature of the appliance that the manufacturer chooses to include. And it makes a statement: "I'm part of your home. Care for me. Display me. Treasure me. Enjoy me ... and don't throw me out because I'm not disposable plastic." The dedicated camera vs smartphone topic doesn't necessarily align with the concept of appliances as furniture, but it does strike me as being the difference between a specialized tool and a multi-tool. Everyone owns a smartphone. There's nothing special about that. And while taking a good photo arguably requires some degree of skill regardless of your tool, smartphones represent the average consumer; the lowest common denominator. Anyone can, and does, snap pictures with a smartphone. A dedicated camera, on the other hand, represents a conscious decision to take photography more seriously. To want to focus only on that, free of other distractions. To climb whatever learning curve stands in the way. Then, consider, that there are people who appreciate history and have no illusions about whether or not a particular historical time period was "better" or not. I follow a historic costumer on YouTube, from whom I learned how to sew by hand and how many historic clothing was constructed. Do I think that living in the Victorian era would be better on the whole? No. I value modern medicine and social advancements that have been made since that time. But do I love the Victorian aesthetic and value the knowledge of how to do things without modern machinery? You betcha. I feel like a more rounded person and, despite coming from a hobby, I have life skills that I didn't have before, like being able to fit, hem, repair and even produce some of my own clothing. Trends and fashion changes, and the phenomenon of "older is better" is human nature that has always existed. It is easy to find artefacts of the past that are less common, or gone entirely, that you consider to be better than the trends of the present. This doesn't mean things are worse on the whole now, nor does it mean that those artefacts aren't valid examples of things of value that are no longer produced. I guess it's part and parcel of change.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
HPsquared 2y ago
Old stuff is better understood. Parts and information are often more available, and the failure modes etc are well known. New stuff is more in the "unknown unknowns" territory. There's a reason brand new tech isn't favoured for safety-critical systems.
bondarchuk 2y ago
What is bizarre? Ethical, characterful and expressive they certainly can be, right? I also haven't seen anyone pretending it's not consumerism. People are just trying to have some fun.
blueflow 2y ago
I think the new stuff is getting worse. Enshittification and such. Digital cameras don't show you ads.
deltarholamda 2y ago
I was at an event recently, with a bunch of teenagers (one of which was mine) and I passed around a couple of those Fuji Instax cameras. They loved them. They liked writing notes on the border. The photos aren't nearly as good as even the most basic smartphone camera, but there was something genuine about them. For all the advances we've made in technology over the years, people are still thoroughly analog. And while digicams are not analog in any way, there is something about them that scratches that itch. Maybe it's as simple as hitting an actual button to make it go. For all the amazing high-tech in today's smartphones, you still feel like a monkey at the monolith as you paw at it.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  those little printers were a big hit a few years ago for this use case; haven't seen or heard much of them since.
- vundercind 2y ago
  I've got to admit, digging through a shoebox of fifty blurry lightly-water-damaged family or childhood photos is kinda better than finding a directory of 10,000 perfect digital photos of the same stuff. One's pure joy, the other's a damn to-do item.
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
  We had one of those out at my girlfriend's kid's graduation party for anyone to use. It was a lot of fun.
sevensor 2y ago
It’s super weird to find out that my old camera sitting in a drawer, the cheap one everybody had, is now an object of desire for people who weren’t even born yet when it was manufactured. However silly I think the motivations are though, I’ll get behind any trend that extends the useful life of our electronics.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  Especially since so many of the cheap cameras made right before the smartphone era were essentially manufactured e-waste that barely worked. Same with things like portable tape and cd players, the Sony ones were good, but any of the other brands were just the same trash electronics repackaged in slightly different packages for each brand.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  Millennials went through the same thing with 70s Polaroids.
bmitc 2y ago
There is something real to it. It's not just nostalgia or a fad. Go and look at product manuals from the 70s through 90s. They're awesome and detailed with diagrams and even exposition discussing the general genre of product. For example, synth manuals would actually teach you about synthesis while also covering the synthesizer in question in great detail. Nowadays, you are lucky to get a little placard of quick tips. The fact that manuals were produced with such care when it was really hard to do so is insight into how much thought was given to the entire product. It's not necessarily that the products are technically superior. It's that honest hard work was put into the products. You walked into a store and purchased it from a person. It couldn't be easier to produce product manuals these days with modern software, and yet it's never done. Today's consumer landscape is about disposability and scale. You have companies like Apple that intentionally remove features so that they can sell you them separately, like the dongle mess. Apple lied to their customers for the reasons they were removed and now sell them parts that costs sub-cents for dozens and hundreds of dollars. There is something real about all of this that modern people yearn for. I remember having to buy technology as a kid. You talked to people, asked them questions, and they new things about the product. It wasn't about just pushing a virtual button.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> "Old stuff is better" tendency which sees vintage tech as somehow more credible, ethical, characterful, expressive, and individual than modern tech Well stuff produced at 1/10000th the number of units sold of, say, a modern iPhone or Android phone is obviously more "individual". I mean: I see a dude driving an AC Cobra vs one driving a mass produced chinese EV... They're both cars but that's about it. That'd be Hank Moody driving an old beaten up Porsche 911 Carrera in Californication. I mean: for one reason or another, Hank Moody is driving an old beaten up Porsche and not a Hyundai. And the series shows him as liking his car and liking to drive his car. Where's the lack of use in someone daily driving an AC Cobra or an old Porsche? Where's the lack of use in someone using an old camera to take pictures? > It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use Someone takes his old camera, goes out at night, snaps a picture of the sunset, and goes back home. Where's the ownership of display? I don't post picture or my cars online. I take one out at night and go for a drive on desert roads. Where's the ownership of display? On HN? Sure, everything is still an object. But then everything is consumerism, unless you make your clothes yourself (funnily enough my mother-in-law knits clothes). Regarding ethics: I think something can be said about older tech. For example an old "dumb" 1080p projector both gives that "movie theather" feeling (mine had a gigantic diagonal no TV could match) and it's neither listening to everything you say nor sending your data to the motherload nor constantly updating apps for seemingly no reason nor can it be bricked remotely. Nor can it be hacked. I mean: there's at least something in vintage tech I think. P.S: I'm currently in the process of buying a "vintage" HP Z series workstation that I'll use a small server but that's because I want shitload of cheap ECC and huge, big, cheap SAS drives... And it's going to get lots of love and use. I may blog about it if I want to display ownership though.
elgaard 2y ago
I agree with all that. But smartphone cameras are not progress on all fronts. They are small and seem to be optimized to take pictures that look impressive. I sometimes have a slideshow with family pictures running on a large monitor. Sometimes I stop and look at a picture that somehow just look much nicer that the rest when you spend some time looking at it. If I then check the metadata, it almost always turns out to be one of few pictures I took with my old DSLR camera or a newer compact camera. Of course those cameras are much bigger and has bigger lenses and should be able to make better pictures. But the best camera is the one you brought with you. Which is why so few of the pictures are made with a smartphone. But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular. It seems like if you have the latest top tier phone: iphone, pixel, samsung s, etc., you get decent photos, if you have any of the 2nd tier phones, they all continue to suck no matter how many mp they claim to have or whatever optics they claim to have.
  - prpl 2y ago
    I think low light performance is still worse than I thought it would be with an iPhone 16 Pro. With enough light the cameras are great.
    - telgareith 2y ago
      Probably because everybody is convinced they can beat entropy with math
    - asdff 2y ago
      With enough light all cameras look great
eschneider 2y ago
Not really. Different cameras, both old and new, draw differently. It's not a question of "good" or "bad". Sometimes I want a nice, sharp image, sometimes I want the scratchy, somewhat random image I get from a Holga. You pick the tool that gives the artistic effect you WANT.
skeeter2020 2y ago
Like walkmans! Beyond the portability - which on modern hardware is better in every way - the qualities were all worse than comparables at the time. Why anyone would want to relive cassettes and batteries is beyond me.
- nemomarx 2y ago
  I actually got a refurbished tape deck the other day, and the sound is quite good. A CD would sound a little better but they seem to actually become unreadable faster in storage than tapes? very counter intuitive. I'd love a nice mp3 player set up, but it's sometimes harder to get those legally for music compared to a CD or even an old tape now! streaming has a lot of downsides in comparison and I think that's fueling the desire to own a full album in some form.
  - badgersnake 2y ago
    A CD is a lot better, but the discman was crap because it was too big and it ate batteries. Converting a CD to MP3s is trivial though.
    - nemomarx 2y ago
      yeah, and you can go the other way and fit most of an mp3 library on one DVD or something with later CD players. (my car has one that can do this for instance). but ofc at that point you can use a flash drive and it's way easier
xanderlewis 2y ago
It’s not about being ‘better’. Older tech is just more fun! There are more moving parts, more differences between models, more to enjoy repairing, maintaining, hacking, comprehending! Modern tech is now so mature that it’s obfuscated to the point of being magic. I don’t think it has much to do with ‘ethics’ at all — at least not for me.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Sometimes missing features are a feature. For example, older stuff comes without surveillance capitalism built in.
- galleywest200 2y ago
  It is also reasonable for one human being to fully understand a piece of the "older tech". Modern stuff is often just a black box, even to the people designing parts of it because they only work on a single part.
ranger207 2y ago
Old stuff is harder to use and you have to put in more effort to get good results out of it, so the act of creation using old tech feels more meaningful
- asdff 2y ago
  Hardly. People are talking about point and shoots here. On button, flash button, click, shoot. The phone paradigm is way more awkward. Some buttons become shutter but one still locks the phone. Have to tap the screen for autofocus. Have to futz with touch screen menus to adjust settings. On an iphone you straight up fight with the exposure setting that is both stuck in molasses and wants to reset and ignore your instructions. Oh and someone could blow up your phone with notifications in the middle of this. And having that camera on and screen on tanks your battery. Plenty of reasons why the new ways are worse.
amelius 2y ago
> It's quite strange. It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use - but trying to pretend it isn't. Reality is strange. Like how Apple owners somehow think they own a product that expresses individualism and artistic freedom where it really is a mass-produced product that looks the same as everybody else's, and more so than any other brand with less choice, while almost every aspect of customization is heavily controlled by the company ...
- gr3ml1n 2y ago
  As someone with more-or-less the full Apple ecosystem in my home: I don't think it expresses any sort of individualism or artistic freedom. It just all works together really well without any nonsense. I understand that was Apple's marketing a decade ago, but it doesn't really seem to be their pitch anymore.
  - doubled112 2y ago
    This thread makes me miss see through coloured plastic on electronics. Hard to feel artistic and like an individual when everything is a piece of black plastic, metal and glass.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Yep, don't give a shit about making a statement, just finally gave them a try and realized I'd been wasting my time with half-broken computers my whole life until then, rather than the 75% broken computers I could have been using. If someone eventually makes a non-broken computer that's in no way cool, I'll switch to that. [EDIT] Though nb a mostly-just-works ecosystem of devices and integrations is basically table stakes for a competitor now. Just a better computer is almost useless to me, it needs to take just a couple clicks or taps (if any at all) to have it integrated with the rest of my shit. That's where the time savings and utility comes in, and fiddling-with-electronic-crap becomes computers actually doing things useful for me in my life, making paying any money at all for the damn things worth it.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    "What's a computer" was less than 10 years ago.
stuaxo 2y ago
The friction that they have in their use, means you have to be more intentional when you use them - you put in more effort and it feels more special.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >The friction that they have in their use, means you have to be more intentional when you use them - you put in more effort and it feels more special. This, I knew a guy 20ish years ago that was super into vinyl right as the rest of us were getting into MP3, and it was a whole experience of dusting off the records and cleaning them with a soft brush and waiting for the electronics to warm up and such. It's like the modern equivalent of those Asian tea ceremonies.
signaru 2y ago
While I gladly embrace the shift to solid state, I find the mechanical engineering in old electronic devices, cameras in particular, quite fascinating.
casey2 2y ago
It's not bizarre at all, if you assume a consumerist or marginal+consumer sovereign economy then after years of phone releases making cuts to whatever buzzword some group cares about eventually anything they buy will be worth less than whatever they already own, after that all it takes is someone pointing them to a old device. Are you just saying it's bizarre that we live in a consumerist economy? Or are you saying that you think we live in a capitalist economy with people brainwash by capitalists into a consumerist culture? Or are you just acting like a naive purist who thinks that art isn't economically motivated?
Dig1t 2y ago
In a lot of cases, older stuff is actually better by many objective criteria. I love old tools, both hand tools and power tools. There are many criteria by which you could judge the older tools, made in the USA, Canada, or UK, and say they are objectively better than even the highest-end tools I could buy today at Home Depot. Thicker metal, designs which are more repairable with swappable parts, they were obviously designed to be more durable. I have a roofing square I use on the job site which is over 100 years old, and it's better than one I could buy at the store. I use a chop saw which was made in Japan in the 80's and it is going to outlast any equivalent chop saw I could buy at the store today. You can tell immediately by just using the thing that it is more durable and higher quality. Yes, older tools lack some modern improvements like lasers or safety stops, but when it comes to reliability and durability you can't buy a brand new tool with the same quality of old tools for any price. I don't know if the same is actually true for digicams or whatever, but things like record players or typewriters have similar qualities to what I'm talking about with tools.
- vundercind 2y ago
  I've run into this with nostalgia-toys and board games. Modern "reprints" usually suck, even if they superficially look the same. Loopin' Louie? The modern one's lighter and has a weaker motor, even if the original was never exactly greatest-games-of-all-time material, the modern one's just non-functional. Rock 'em sock 'em robots? Weaker punches, plastic's lighter, new models are often smaller. They suck compared to vintage ones. Hell even soda bottles are kinda like this. Those things used to be thick and you could re-use them for all kinds of stuff. It seems like at some point around the late '90s and early '00s we got a ton better at precisely optimizing plastic use in mass manufacturing processes, and all plastic products got somewhere between a little, and a lot, worse, because manufacturers could make them just barely thick enough to not fall apart. Good for waste on the one hand, for disposable things, so that hits "reduce" at the expense of making "re-use" a lot worse. But also makes non-disposable things so shitty they become disposable (often because they suck so bad to begin with that you're gonna toss them out after one use)
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
prpl 2y ago
Before 2008 or so a 35mm SLR has higher quality photos for the price if you weren’t taking that many photos and you could still process film all over, with good quality scans if you had the right place. When DSLRs hit 10+ MP and dropped to $700 or so that changed things a bit. My X100 still has better photos than my iPhone 12. I have an iPhone 16 Pro and I think it’s better as a camera than the X100 but I still prefer the X100 when I want a shot and I will put the time into it. That is 13 years old. I also have a canon S95 and it was still more useful for photos than my iPhone 12 was.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  My girl just got a 13 year old Canon DSLR and for indoors, low light, it's better than her Galaxy S24U.
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
Cameras imbue a grain onto what they shoot, both in the physical sense of grain in analogue cameras and the digital grain of the iPhone camera (The technical high quality but AI smearyness and color grade of modern iPhones is it's own grain) and that iPhone grain is now the aesthetic of almost all social media content so anything filmed in it has the same feeling as every janky social media video shot with it. If you're creating art and easy route to differentiate and not feel like everything else in the timeline is to use an entirely different "grain" and you'll stand out from the mass. It's not as simple as "old stuff better" it's more "other stuff feels different".
- card_zero 2y ago
  Going against the grain, you say?
- munificent 2y ago
  I try not to be this guy, but actually your terminology is a little off. Film cameras have grain. Literally, there are tiny physical grains of photo-sensitive material on the film. Those grains, which are distributed semi-randomly in a film across the medium determine the limit of film's resolution and give it part of its organic, non-digital feel. Digital cameras have noise. That's the term for randomness injected in a signal from the effect of physics: Brownian motion, heat, quantum effects on photons, etc. Noise means that while each pixel on the sensor is in principle quantizing a measurement of the real world, that measurement has some random error that can never be fully eliminated. A digital image recorded from a digital sensor has no grain. There was no film, and no grains of photosensitive media involved. (It might have simulated grain from some "film effect" look applied to the image.) The distinction matters because they look different. It's one of the key reasons film looks like film and digital looks digital.
  - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    Thought it was clear I was using "grain" as a blanket term for the affect a tool has on it's output in the same way a analogue cameras film stocks have unique literal grain. In the sense that the iPhone sensor > internal AI process > Apple Camera app post-processing choices imbue an iPhone Camera Image "grain" to what you shoot.
deleted 2y ago
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grbrr 2y ago
It's not "old stuff is better" as much as "I'm better than you." For a long time, that was by having sharper, higher-quality pictures. Your friend had some Kodak Instamatic and you had a Hasselblad and you could assert your dominance over them. But nowadays, the phones in everyone's pocket take such outstandingly sharp pictures that there isn't really meaningful room for improvement. So, people now differentiate themselves by getting vintage digital cameras which are hard to find, cost extra money, break frequently, etc., so that they can demonstrate their uniqueness.
- gruez 2y ago
  Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling
- baxtr 2y ago
  It’s a good old status game just with different metrics. A: Which iPhone do you have? Mine is an iPhone 13. B: I have got the 2019 iPhone 11. A: Wow. Respect! You’re better than me.
- 310260 2y ago
  Of course. People are never genuine in their interest or preference of things. It's always about status, wealth, and their standing among their peers. /s God y'all need to have some hobbies.
- z0r 2y ago
  When I first had got my nexus 4, my first upgrade over another Android phone that I can't remember, I was astonished by the improved fidelity of the pictures. Then after I got my next phone I looked back and saw that the pictures had terrible artifacts that weren't hard to find. Now I'm on a Pixel N after having a handful of earlier Pixels and I can see the shortcomings of the photos it takes (and all its predecessors have taken) without much difficulty. Just zoom into the picture a little. There's something to be said for analog.
alistairSH 2y ago
That's probably some of it, but I recently took up film photography again. A few aspects of shooting film appeal to me... the imperfection (memories aren't perfect, the photos shouldn't be either - but I'm also a huge Impressionism fan, so maybe that's it). The delayed gratification - in a world where most things are "instant", waiting a few weeks+ to get results changes the way I mentally process the images and associated memories. And the higher cost per shot forces me to be a bit more planful about shots. Of course, that said, I get the photos scanned (not prints), and view them in the same apps as pure digitals. So maybe I'm just weird or a hipster. I did ask for a Polaroid for Christmas - full analog baby! The Go model is dirt cheap (for a camera), maybe it'll be great, maybe I'll use it a few times and stick it in a drawer.
- mmmlinux 2y ago
  just go find a used Polaroid and shove some film in it. no need to spend money on a camera someone will probably give you for nearly free. That said, the instax wide is a better value. unless you really want the brand and square photos.
  - alistairSH 2y ago
    I'm looking a the Polaroid Go 2, primarily because it's the smallest of the bunch. And on sale for $60. I'd love an Instax wide or square, but the camera bodies are just too bulky (at least as big as my rangefinders or micro-4/3+prime). Same for vintage Polaroids, plus the need to use the older battery-included (and more expensive) film packs. And I'm aware of the limitations inherent in the current Polaroid chemistry and small size. It's a toy and I'm ok with that.

BoxOfRain 2y ago

I don't know take valve amps for example, the subjective qualities the clearly imperfect technology produces can be quite pleasant. Yes you could just as well simulate such an amplifier in software because there's no 'magic' to why it sounds that way, but there's something aesthetically pleasing about warm glowing glass. I'm no photographer but I feel there's something similar going on here.

piltdownman 2y ago
UAD and WAVES, amongst several other companies, operate their business on the premise that there is some 'magic' as to why it sounds that way that is somewhere between difficult and impossible to manage (sufficient to enthuse a musician/producer).
- louthy 2y ago
  As an owner of a UAD Octo and plenty of their plugins, but also lots of analogue hardware [1], including valve based compressors, EQs, and distortion units that are emulated by UAD. The plugins still aren’t there. Especially for anything that needs harmonic distortion. I get the impression they use regular random number generators for some of the random variance, rather than trying to emulate the physicality of a valve. They just don’t quite have the mojo. For some things it doesn’t matter, but often music production is about a 1% improvement here, a 1% improvement there, which sums up to a lot. It’s still easier to get those wins with hardware. Like ‘mojo’ is the default setting. A really good example is the Chandler Curve Bender [2]. I have the real hardware. A new one will cost you £6,700 - so it would be insane to buy one when UAD have a plugin version for £179. I have the plugin too. The plugin is my favourite digital EQ. It sounds great. But the hardware does things that the plugin just doesn't touch. The hardware is all discrete circuits (with massive transistors). I think the slight latency shift between the left and right channels gives a 3D-ness to the sound that the plugin doesn't even attempt. Anyway, this demo [3] really shows what it can do and why hardware is still in the game. In many areas plugins are good enough, I tend to use the plugins for more precision and to have similar curves to the hardware, but there’s still a ways to go to until there’s parity with the hardware. That doesn’t mean you need the hardware, plenty of successful artists use digital alone. Just it’s still easier to get ‘the good stuff’ with hardware. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9swzlgk3wszeq6jfjxmw1/IMG_1411.heic?rlkey=lvujqh9bk80juoxxtg01xatj7&st=72vvrywv&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9swzlgk3wszeq6jfjxmw1/IMG_141... [2] https://www.thomann.co.uk/chandler_limited_emi_tg12345_curve_bender.htm https://www.thomann.co.uk/chandler_limited_emi_tg12345_curve... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUv9GtMlUwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUv9GtMlUwA
  - louthy 2y ago
    > transistors Brain wasn’t engaged, I meant capacitors
- gambiting 2y ago
  I mean, audiophiles will gaslight themselves into believing and hearing what they want to hear. There are some areas where ok, maybe there is some difference to the sound, unlikely as it is, but once you start getting into "audio optimized SSDs" and "audio optimized ethernet switches" then it's all a 100% scam(and yet audiophile forums are full of people swearing that they can hear a difference in their audio tracks saved to an SSD that had a few extra capacitors added). So I'm not surprised that there are companies making money off that belief into what is effectively magic.
  - louthy 2y ago
    > audiophiles Audiophiles are ridiculous, frankly. I'm on the ATC group on Facebook. ATC make pro speakers used in many top studios, but they also make home 'audiophile' speakers. The speakers are amazing, but I often see them talking utter nonsense about how X sounds great or whatever, when they have pictures of their setup in an untreated room. Like they could even tell if the speakers are good in a room like that. They're hearing the room. Audiophiles are like astrologers, it's all in the wind with them. But they shouldn't be confused with people into pro-audio for music or film production. The name of the game is to get the best sounding room you can, so that it's easier to make your art, there is a motivation to get it right and not be hoodwinked by the things you state. Not that pro-studio people don't have their blind-spots too (especially around things like cabling), but they're not the same.

vasco 2y ago

On the other hand it helps preserve history so I'm not sure I care the intentions are not pure. I know I got on this bandwagon with a simple analog camera over ten years ago and now I'm drowning in 1800s and 1900s electrical engineering books and newspapers.

fragmede 2y ago

It focus on nostalgia and repairing of old things (because they don't make them anymore, so you have to), rather than buying the latest Apple shit, so there is a distinction from modern disposable consumption patterns.

vachina 2y ago

Old stuff feels better because people are familiar with it. People grew up with them and if anything their expectations are set by those very things.

PetitPrince 2y ago
I suspect their failure mode, limitation and purpose are more characterized and less surprising ? Single purpose tech vs magical black mirror that does everything.

gspencley 2y ago

My wife and I were just watching a YouTube video about the history of the Mattel Intellivision gaming console. If you've never seen one, the thing had wooden panels. It was definitely inspired by an era where your appliances were meant to match your furniture. I remember, as a child of the 80s, seeing televisions that were cased in wood as well. I would argue that these types of designs made an anti-consumerist statement which is why you don't see them anymore. An appliance that tries to look like furniture doesn't need to do that, it is a non-essential feature of the appliance that the manufacturer chooses to include. And it makes a statement: "I'm part of your home. Care for me. Display me. Treasure me. Enjoy me ... and don't throw me out because I'm not disposable plastic." The dedicated camera vs smartphone topic doesn't necessarily align with the concept of appliances as furniture, but it does strike me as being the difference between a specialized tool and a multi-tool. Everyone owns a smartphone. There's nothing special about that. And while taking a good photo arguably requires some degree of skill regardless of your tool, smartphones represent the average consumer; the lowest common denominator. Anyone can, and does, snap pictures with a smartphone. A dedicated camera, on the other hand, represents a conscious decision to take photography more seriously. To want to focus only on that, free of other distractions. To climb whatever learning curve stands in the way. Then, consider, that there are people who appreciate history and have no illusions about whether or not a particular historical time period was "better" or not. I follow a historic costumer on YouTube, from whom I learned how to sew by hand and how many historic clothing was constructed. Do I think that living in the Victorian era would be better on the whole? No. I value modern medicine and social advancements that have been made since that time. But do I love the Victorian aesthetic and value the knowledge of how to do things without modern machinery? You betcha. I feel like a more rounded person and, despite coming from a hobby, I have life skills that I didn't have before, like being able to fit, hem, repair and even produce some of my own clothing. Trends and fashion changes, and the phenomenon of "older is better" is human nature that has always existed. It is easy to find artefacts of the past that are less common, or gone entirely, that you consider to be better than the trends of the present. This doesn't mean things are worse on the whole now, nor does it mean that those artefacts aren't valid examples of things of value that are no longer produced. I guess it's part and parcel of change.

marcosdumay 2y ago

HPsquared 2y ago

Old stuff is better understood. Parts and information are often more available, and the failure modes etc are well known. New stuff is more in the "unknown unknowns" territory. There's a reason brand new tech isn't favoured for safety-critical systems.

bondarchuk 2y ago

What is bizarre? Ethical, characterful and expressive they certainly can be, right? I also haven't seen anyone pretending it's not consumerism. People are just trying to have some fun.

blueflow 2y ago

I think the new stuff is getting worse. Enshittification and such. Digital cameras don't show you ads.

deltarholamda 2y ago

I was at an event recently, with a bunch of teenagers (one of which was mine) and I passed around a couple of those Fuji Instax cameras. They loved them. They liked writing notes on the border. The photos aren't nearly as good as even the most basic smartphone camera, but there was something genuine about them. For all the advances we've made in technology over the years, people are still thoroughly analog. And while digicams are not analog in any way, there is something about them that scratches that itch. Maybe it's as simple as hitting an actual button to make it go. For all the amazing high-tech in today's smartphones, you still feel like a monkey at the monolith as you paw at it.

skeeter2020 2y ago
those little printers were a big hit a few years ago for this use case; haven't seen or heard much of them since.
vundercind 2y ago
I've got to admit, digging through a shoebox of fifty blurry lightly-water-damaged family or childhood photos is kinda better than finding a directory of 10,000 perfect digital photos of the same stuff. One's pure joy, the other's a damn to-do item.
zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
We had one of those out at my girlfriend's kid's graduation party for anyone to use. It was a lot of fun.

sevensor 2y ago

It’s super weird to find out that my old camera sitting in a drawer, the cheap one everybody had, is now an object of desire for people who weren’t even born yet when it was manufactured. However silly I think the motivations are though, I’ll get behind any trend that extends the useful life of our electronics.

Suppafly 2y ago
Especially since so many of the cheap cameras made right before the smartphone era were essentially manufactured e-waste that barely worked. Same with things like portable tape and cd players, the Sony ones were good, but any of the other brands were just the same trash electronics repackaged in slightly different packages for each brand.
kridsdale1 2y ago
Millennials went through the same thing with 70s Polaroids.

bmitc 2y ago

There is something real to it. It's not just nostalgia or a fad. Go and look at product manuals from the 70s through 90s. They're awesome and detailed with diagrams and even exposition discussing the general genre of product. For example, synth manuals would actually teach you about synthesis while also covering the synthesizer in question in great detail. Nowadays, you are lucky to get a little placard of quick tips. The fact that manuals were produced with such care when it was really hard to do so is insight into how much thought was given to the entire product. It's not necessarily that the products are technically superior. It's that honest hard work was put into the products. You walked into a store and purchased it from a person. It couldn't be easier to produce product manuals these days with modern software, and yet it's never done. Today's consumer landscape is about disposability and scale. You have companies like Apple that intentionally remove features so that they can sell you them separately, like the dongle mess. Apple lied to their customers for the reasons they were removed and now sell them parts that costs sub-cents for dozens and hundreds of dollars. There is something real about all of this that modern people yearn for. I remember having to buy technology as a kid. You talked to people, asked them questions, and they new things about the product. It wasn't about just pushing a virtual button.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> "Old stuff is better" tendency which sees vintage tech as somehow more credible, ethical, characterful, expressive, and individual than modern tech Well stuff produced at 1/10000th the number of units sold of, say, a modern iPhone or Android phone is obviously more "individual". I mean: I see a dude driving an AC Cobra vs one driving a mass produced chinese EV... They're both cars but that's about it. That'd be Hank Moody driving an old beaten up Porsche 911 Carrera in Californication. I mean: for one reason or another, Hank Moody is driving an old beaten up Porsche and not a Hyundai. And the series shows him as liking his car and liking to drive his car. Where's the lack of use in someone daily driving an AC Cobra or an old Porsche? Where's the lack of use in someone using an old camera to take pictures? > It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use Someone takes his old camera, goes out at night, snaps a picture of the sunset, and goes back home. Where's the ownership of display? I don't post picture or my cars online. I take one out at night and go for a drive on desert roads. Where's the ownership of display? On HN? Sure, everything is still an object. But then everything is consumerism, unless you make your clothes yourself (funnily enough my mother-in-law knits clothes). Regarding ethics: I think something can be said about older tech. For example an old "dumb" 1080p projector both gives that "movie theather" feeling (mine had a gigantic diagonal no TV could match) and it's neither listening to everything you say nor sending your data to the motherload nor constantly updating apps for seemingly no reason nor can it be bricked remotely. Nor can it be hacked. I mean: there's at least something in vintage tech I think. P.S: I'm currently in the process of buying a "vintage" HP Z series workstation that I'll use a small server but that's because I want shitload of cheap ECC and huge, big, cheap SAS drives... And it's going to get lots of love and use. I may blog about it if I want to display ownership though.

elgaard 2y ago

I agree with all that. But smartphone cameras are not progress on all fronts. They are small and seem to be optimized to take pictures that look impressive. I sometimes have a slideshow with family pictures running on a large monitor. Sometimes I stop and look at a picture that somehow just look much nicer that the rest when you spend some time looking at it. If I then check the metadata, it almost always turns out to be one of few pictures I took with my old DSLR camera or a newer compact camera. Of course those cameras are much bigger and has bigger lenses and should be able to make better pictures. But the best camera is the one you brought with you. Which is why so few of the pictures are made with a smartphone. But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular.

Suppafly 2y ago
>But it seems to me that all the computational power of smartphones does not quite compensate for the smaller optics. Or that they are trying too hard to make the pictures look spectacular. It seems like if you have the latest top tier phone: iphone, pixel, samsung s, etc., you get decent photos, if you have any of the 2nd tier phones, they all continue to suck no matter how many mp they claim to have or whatever optics they claim to have.
- prpl 2y ago
  I think low light performance is still worse than I thought it would be with an iPhone 16 Pro. With enough light the cameras are great.
  - telgareith 2y ago
    Probably because everybody is convinced they can beat entropy with math
  - asdff 2y ago
    With enough light all cameras look great

eschneider 2y ago

Not really. Different cameras, both old and new, draw differently. It's not a question of "good" or "bad". Sometimes I want a nice, sharp image, sometimes I want the scratchy, somewhat random image I get from a Holga. You pick the tool that gives the artistic effect you WANT.

skeeter2020 2y ago

Like walkmans! Beyond the portability - which on modern hardware is better in every way - the qualities were all worse than comparables at the time. Why anyone would want to relive cassettes and batteries is beyond me.

nemomarx 2y ago
I actually got a refurbished tape deck the other day, and the sound is quite good. A CD would sound a little better but they seem to actually become unreadable faster in storage than tapes? very counter intuitive. I'd love a nice mp3 player set up, but it's sometimes harder to get those legally for music compared to a CD or even an old tape now! streaming has a lot of downsides in comparison and I think that's fueling the desire to own a full album in some form.
- badgersnake 2y ago
  A CD is a lot better, but the discman was crap because it was too big and it ate batteries. Converting a CD to MP3s is trivial though.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    yeah, and you can go the other way and fit most of an mp3 library on one DVD or something with later CD players. (my car has one that can do this for instance). but ofc at that point you can use a flash drive and it's way easier

xanderlewis 2y ago

It’s not about being ‘better’. Older tech is just more fun! There are more moving parts, more differences between models, more to enjoy repairing, maintaining, hacking, comprehending! Modern tech is now so mature that it’s obfuscated to the point of being magic. I don’t think it has much to do with ‘ethics’ at all — at least not for me.

mixmastamyk 2y ago
Sometimes missing features are a feature. For example, older stuff comes without surveillance capitalism built in.
galleywest200 2y ago
It is also reasonable for one human being to fully understand a piece of the "older tech". Modern stuff is often just a black box, even to the people designing parts of it because they only work on a single part.

ranger207 2y ago

Old stuff is harder to use and you have to put in more effort to get good results out of it, so the act of creation using old tech feels more meaningful

asdff 2y ago
Hardly. People are talking about point and shoots here. On button, flash button, click, shoot. The phone paradigm is way more awkward. Some buttons become shutter but one still locks the phone. Have to tap the screen for autofocus. Have to futz with touch screen menus to adjust settings. On an iphone you straight up fight with the exposure setting that is both stuck in molasses and wants to reset and ignore your instructions. Oh and someone could blow up your phone with notifications in the middle of this. And having that camera on and screen on tanks your battery. Plenty of reasons why the new ways are worse.

amelius 2y ago

> It's quite strange. It's still consumerism - primarily about ownership display, not use - but trying to pretend it isn't. Reality is strange. Like how Apple owners somehow think they own a product that expresses individualism and artistic freedom where it really is a mass-produced product that looks the same as everybody else's, and more so than any other brand with less choice, while almost every aspect of customization is heavily controlled by the company ...

gr3ml1n 2y ago
As someone with more-or-less the full Apple ecosystem in my home: I don't think it expresses any sort of individualism or artistic freedom. It just all works together really well without any nonsense. I understand that was Apple's marketing a decade ago, but it doesn't really seem to be their pitch anymore.
- doubled112 2y ago
  This thread makes me miss see through coloured plastic on electronics. Hard to feel artistic and like an individual when everything is a piece of black plastic, metal and glass.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Yep, don't give a shit about making a statement, just finally gave them a try and realized I'd been wasting my time with half-broken computers my whole life until then, rather than the 75% broken computers I could have been using. If someone eventually makes a non-broken computer that's in no way cool, I'll switch to that. [EDIT] Though nb a mostly-just-works ecosystem of devices and integrations is basically table stakes for a competitor now. Just a better computer is almost useless to me, it needs to take just a couple clicks or taps (if any at all) to have it integrated with the rest of my shit. That's where the time savings and utility comes in, and fiddling-with-electronic-crap becomes computers actually doing things useful for me in my life, making paying any money at all for the damn things worth it.
- LtWorf 2y ago
  "What's a computer" was less than 10 years ago.

stuaxo 2y ago

The friction that they have in their use, means you have to be more intentional when you use them - you put in more effort and it feels more special.

Suppafly 2y ago
>The friction that they have in their use, means you have to be more intentional when you use them - you put in more effort and it feels more special. This, I knew a guy 20ish years ago that was super into vinyl right as the rest of us were getting into MP3, and it was a whole experience of dusting off the records and cleaning them with a soft brush and waiting for the electronics to warm up and such. It's like the modern equivalent of those Asian tea ceremonies.

signaru 2y ago

While I gladly embrace the shift to solid state, I find the mechanical engineering in old electronic devices, cameras in particular, quite fascinating.

casey2 2y ago

It's not bizarre at all, if you assume a consumerist or marginal+consumer sovereign economy then after years of phone releases making cuts to whatever buzzword some group cares about eventually anything they buy will be worth less than whatever they already own, after that all it takes is someone pointing them to a old device. Are you just saying it's bizarre that we live in a consumerist economy? Or are you saying that you think we live in a capitalist economy with people brainwash by capitalists into a consumerist culture? Or are you just acting like a naive purist who thinks that art isn't economically motivated?

Dig1t 2y ago

In a lot of cases, older stuff is actually better by many objective criteria. I love old tools, both hand tools and power tools. There are many criteria by which you could judge the older tools, made in the USA, Canada, or UK, and say they are objectively better than even the highest-end tools I could buy today at Home Depot. Thicker metal, designs which are more repairable with swappable parts, they were obviously designed to be more durable. I have a roofing square I use on the job site which is over 100 years old, and it's better than one I could buy at the store. I use a chop saw which was made in Japan in the 80's and it is going to outlast any equivalent chop saw I could buy at the store today. You can tell immediately by just using the thing that it is more durable and higher quality. Yes, older tools lack some modern improvements like lasers or safety stops, but when it comes to reliability and durability you can't buy a brand new tool with the same quality of old tools for any price. I don't know if the same is actually true for digicams or whatever, but things like record players or typewriters have similar qualities to what I'm talking about with tools.

vundercind 2y ago
I've run into this with nostalgia-toys and board games. Modern "reprints" usually suck, even if they superficially look the same. Loopin' Louie? The modern one's lighter and has a weaker motor, even if the original was never exactly greatest-games-of-all-time material, the modern one's just non-functional. Rock 'em sock 'em robots? Weaker punches, plastic's lighter, new models are often smaller. They suck compared to vintage ones. Hell even soda bottles are kinda like this. Those things used to be thick and you could re-use them for all kinds of stuff. It seems like at some point around the late '90s and early '00s we got a ton better at precisely optimizing plastic use in mass manufacturing processes, and all plastic products got somewhere between a little, and a lot, worse, because manufacturers could make them just barely thick enough to not fall apart. Good for waste on the one hand, for disposable things, so that hits "reduce" at the expense of making "re-use" a lot worse. But also makes non-disposable things so shitty they become disposable (often because they suck so bad to begin with that you're gonna toss them out after one use)
- kridsdale1 2y ago

prpl 2y ago

Before 2008 or so a 35mm SLR has higher quality photos for the price if you weren’t taking that many photos and you could still process film all over, with good quality scans if you had the right place. When DSLRs hit 10+ MP and dropped to $700 or so that changed things a bit. My X100 still has better photos than my iPhone 12. I have an iPhone 16 Pro and I think it’s better as a camera than the X100 but I still prefer the X100 when I want a shot and I will put the time into it. That is 13 years old. I also have a canon S95 and it was still more useful for photos than my iPhone 12 was.

qingcharles 2y ago
My girl just got a 13 year old Canon DSLR and for indoors, low light, it's better than her Galaxy S24U.

whywhywhywhy 2y ago

Cameras imbue a grain onto what they shoot, both in the physical sense of grain in analogue cameras and the digital grain of the iPhone camera (The technical high quality but AI smearyness and color grade of modern iPhones is it's own grain) and that iPhone grain is now the aesthetic of almost all social media content so anything filmed in it has the same feeling as every janky social media video shot with it. If you're creating art and easy route to differentiate and not feel like everything else in the timeline is to use an entirely different "grain" and you'll stand out from the mass. It's not as simple as "old stuff better" it's more "other stuff feels different".

card_zero 2y ago
Going against the grain, you say?
munificent 2y ago
I try not to be this guy, but actually your terminology is a little off. Film cameras have grain. Literally, there are tiny physical grains of photo-sensitive material on the film. Those grains, which are distributed semi-randomly in a film across the medium determine the limit of film's resolution and give it part of its organic, non-digital feel. Digital cameras have noise. That's the term for randomness injected in a signal from the effect of physics: Brownian motion, heat, quantum effects on photons, etc. Noise means that while each pixel on the sensor is in principle quantizing a measurement of the real world, that measurement has some random error that can never be fully eliminated. A digital image recorded from a digital sensor has no grain. There was no film, and no grains of photosensitive media involved. (It might have simulated grain from some "film effect" look applied to the image.) The distinction matters because they look different. It's one of the key reasons film looks like film and digital looks digital.
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  Thought it was clear I was using "grain" as a blanket term for the affect a tool has on it's output in the same way a analogue cameras film stocks have unique literal grain. In the sense that the iPhone sensor > internal AI process > Apple Camera app post-processing choices imbue an iPhone Camera Image "grain" to what you shoot.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

grbrr 2y ago

It's not "old stuff is better" as much as "I'm better than you." For a long time, that was by having sharper, higher-quality pictures. Your friend had some Kodak Instamatic and you had a Hasselblad and you could assert your dominance over them. But nowadays, the phones in everyone's pocket take such outstandingly sharp pictures that there isn't really meaningful room for improvement. So, people now differentiate themselves by getting vintage digital cameras which are hard to find, cost extra money, break frequently, etc., so that they can demonstrate their uniqueness.

gruez 2y ago
Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling
baxtr 2y ago
It’s a good old status game just with different metrics. A: Which iPhone do you have? Mine is an iPhone 13. B: I have got the 2019 iPhone 11. A: Wow. Respect! You’re better than me.
310260 2y ago
Of course. People are never genuine in their interest or preference of things. It's always about status, wealth, and their standing among their peers. /s God y'all need to have some hobbies.
z0r 2y ago
When I first had got my nexus 4, my first upgrade over another Android phone that I can't remember, I was astonished by the improved fidelity of the pictures. Then after I got my next phone I looked back and saw that the pictures had terrible artifacts that weren't hard to find. Now I'm on a Pixel N after having a handful of earlier Pixels and I can see the shortcomings of the photos it takes (and all its predecessors have taken) without much difficulty. Just zoom into the picture a little. There's something to be said for analog.

alistairSH 2y ago

That's probably some of it, but I recently took up film photography again. A few aspects of shooting film appeal to me... the imperfection (memories aren't perfect, the photos shouldn't be either - but I'm also a huge Impressionism fan, so maybe that's it). The delayed gratification - in a world where most things are "instant", waiting a few weeks+ to get results changes the way I mentally process the images and associated memories. And the higher cost per shot forces me to be a bit more planful about shots. Of course, that said, I get the photos scanned (not prints), and view them in the same apps as pure digitals. So maybe I'm just weird or a hipster. I did ask for a Polaroid for Christmas - full analog baby! The Go model is dirt cheap (for a camera), maybe it'll be great, maybe I'll use it a few times and stick it in a drawer.

mmmlinux 2y ago
just go find a used Polaroid and shove some film in it. no need to spend money on a camera someone will probably give you for nearly free. That said, the instax wide is a better value. unless you really want the brand and square photos.
- alistairSH 2y ago
  I'm looking a the Polaroid Go 2, primarily because it's the smallest of the bunch. And on sale for $60. I'd love an Instax wide or square, but the camera bodies are just too bulky (at least as big as my rangefinders or micro-4/3+prime). Same for vintage Polaroids, plus the need to use the older battery-included (and more expensive) film packs. And I'm aware of the limitations inherent in the current Polaroid chemistry and small size. It's a toy and I'm ok with that.