How many good pictures did people see from back then, I wonder. You print something up in a newspaper you're losing a lot of information, and the little palm si

How many good pictures did people see from back then, I wonder. You print something up in a newspaper you're losing a lot of information, and the little palm size prints that shops used to do aren't exactly great either. And then there's the difficulty of producing good pictures. I remember, when I was younger, my father gave me his old 35-mm. No auto focus, manual settings for everything. Even buying the right film required some knowledge of what you were going to be doing. I can see why people would find good pictures from that long ago surprising, it was harder to do - you had to invest time to get good at it. Even if you knew what you were doing from a technical perspective - You could shoot a roll of film and get three or four good pictures. Heh. What I find surprising is how good the really old pictures are. Boer war/Victorian kinda things. Considering what they had to work with at the time.... There's some damn nice stuff out there. If you can get yourself a tour of a photographic archive from a newspaper or something, it's well worth doing ^_^ There's stuff there that's never been digitised just because there's so much of it and high resolution scans on something like a drum scanner are so expensive to do. Edit: > The resolution of standard 35-mm film was fairly hard to achieve in consumer digital cameras until recently To be fair, the obsession some people have with resolution, without regard to like noise (goes up hugely when you cram more pixels - so to speak - into a small frame sensor) and colour balance has probably done significant harm to the evolution of digital cameras. Not that I'm saying you are one of those people, but thought I'd mention it for random readers ^^;