"The Red Light Means It's Recording" - Comparing the Analog and Digital Consumer Camera Eras

2024-02-09

If you were born after a year that doesn't start with "199" (I can't believe I'm of the age where I'm saying that), there is a very real possibility you may have existed in an era in which a reasonable degree of your life may have been effortlessly documented via reasonably high fidelity cameras. The inverse is also in play; if you're old enough (or, were old enough), perhaps you grew up during a time there was perhaps little to no access to decent photo/video capture hardware. Maybe one had a few tapes that could hold a few hours of video, but they were over-written due to how expensive buying more might have been. The transitional generations, from the millennial generation and earlier, have the strangely unique experience in which we have grown up from what was considered the "early digital age" all the way up to the modern era where we're now talking about "spatial video" and full AR/VR/XR/PR/IR/OR/ER experiences (not necessarily in that order).

The "199X and older crowd" (myself included) may have grown up during a time where there was a need to possess a uniquely diverse skillset in which we may have had to know how to dial a rotary phone yet also could open a mean game of Number Munchers on an Apple II. We're still around too; yes, a fair amount of us (I won't assume) know modern tech as well, and as a result, we've sure seen a lot. Younger folks simply never had the pleasure of dialing up to AOL and knowing that we would be tying up the family phone unless you lived in one of those houses that somehow had call-waiting or multiple phone lines. In those days, a film camera and VHS/Hi8 camcorder may have been effectively the best way of capturing memories for most regular folks. Even then, storage was limited, expensive, volatile, and error prone. Fast forward a few years and maybe one might be fortunate enough to have something incredibly cutting-edge-for-the-time such as the Apple QuickTake "digital camera" which can take perhaps a handful of photos before running out of space. Continuing onward towards the late 90s and 2000s and suddenly we have the dot-com bubble and are now increasingly more capable of having cameras that could take and view photos immediately by way of the computer as opposed to fist-fighting people in line at your local CVS's One Hour Photo to get them developed. These devices were often frustrating to work with; many of which easily topped out with a small quantity of photos before needing a PC offload, and don't even think about video; that was likely still either a nonstarter or hilariously inadequate. Not to mention that waiting to get photos developed meant you weren't even certain that what you took was even good; it could have been junk and you wouldn't have known until you got it back. Perhaps there was a degree of thrill in that waiting period, but otherwise, it was difficult.

Continuing forward through time we then start to experience the concept of more affordable digital cameras with ever-increasing storage capacity as well as resolution and quality bumps. Then of course we have the smartphone revolution which largely started in the mid-2000s, accelerated by later generations of the iPhone and Android devices (yeah sure the first iPhone could take a picture, but so could the Palm Treo, the LG enV, and plenty of other phones, smart and dumb alike. The quality was….underwhelming at best). Obviously, the notion of storage and ease of use as well as return on investment would get better and better as time marched onward. I remember even from the span of say, 2006 to 2010, moving from an LG VX8100 (1.3 Megapixel Camera! Kinda. In the right situations.) to the LG Voyager, the LG EnV Touch, and then the LG Ally felt like leaps and bounds when it came to improvements to the camera. I went from a phone that was limited to about 15 seconds of video, to one minute, to two minutes, then unlimited recording time (provided you had the space). Crazy.

The point here is, there is a weird point in history in which we had the analog style of cameras, such as Super 8, 8mm, VHS, Hi8, DV, etc. Many of these formats could capture or record video in a middling 320x240 or perhaps 640x480 if you were lucky or well-off. The cool thing at least was that a 60 FPS frame rate was certainly attainable on quite a few of these more analog mediums, particularly with VHS, Hi8 and DV. In particular, most VHS and Hi8 camcorders wrote to tape at these standards and when digitized, it makes these videos still watchable in the modern day due to the fluidness of motion (I am one who will opt for a 1080px60 resolution/frame rate over 4Kx30 any day). Then there was a transitional period in which the digital era was still grappling with storage costs and capture quality. Many digital cameras (and early smartphones) of the 1990s and 2000s were incapable of recording at half-decent frame rates, or even coherent resolutions or color/brightness/contrast/saturation rates, unless you happened to have a snazzy camera with a very specific FireWire port/cable for exporting (and a computer that could do it, to boot), and by that point you are veering into professional TV equipment of the era, save for a few pricey DV camcorder models.

1985-07-04 Test Footage

Footage digitized from a VHS camcorder in 1985 (the camcorder predates me + I don't know what model it was), using a device that could capture the tape in 60FPS. Surprisingly very watchable due to the superb frame rate and decent resolution.

Dan Hits a Wall

Here comes the dropoff in quality, despite being filmed 20 years later. This is a video taken in 2005 with a Palm PDA (yes, a Palm PDA, if memory serves, it was either a Zire 71 or a Zire 72). The video file was in .asf format (thank goodness for VLC Media Player). You can count the pixels and frames. Would have been cool if it had just a few more pixels and frames, because this entire scene was absolutely hilarious IRL

Dan Plays Wii

A video in .3g2 file format taken on an LG VX8100 in 2006. Note the 15 second limit, a resolution of 176x144, and 15FPS, if the lighting was right.

Ryan Shocker

A video taken from what I believe was an LG Voyager phone in a dimly lit glow bowling alley. Again, I sorely wish this was higher quality all around...because...well, just watch the video.

Chair Race

A video (.MPG format) taken by a Sony Cyber-shot (DSC-F717 I believe?) digital camera, in 2007 (Edited in Magix Movie Edit Pro). Back in the day we considered a stable 16FPS to be pretty good, but by modern standards, both the frame rate and sound quality are….an acquired taste. It's better than a Palm PDA or cell phone camera, but not much better.

Stanford Larsen Prancing in Toronto Canada

A video taken of a sadly departed friend in 2006 from a very mediocre DXG 568 digital camera of mine. I wish videos like this in particular could have been much longer and higher quality, given the circumstances.

Poog Yes We Can Dance

A video (edited with Magix Movie Edit Pro, again) taken with a DV camera in 2007. I don't remember the model + no longer have it, sorry. DV cameras seemed to offer a more stable frame rate and resolution as they were inching more towards "prosumer" territory. My computer at the time imported these tapes at around 30FPS via Windows Movie Maker over a FireWire connection to a Compaq Presario laptop. I believe it technically could have been as high as 60 FPS, but I got what I got. Oh Windows Movie Maker, 80GB hard drives and Core 2 Duo processors, you betray me.

NHSS January Thaw Jazz Choir - 2007-01-17

A video taken with a Hi8 camera in 2007. While the lighting and resolution are a little sub-par, the 60FPS and sound quality makes this very watchable, even 17+ years later.

Once we get to the year…..2011-ish, a degree of smartphones have evolved to a reasonable point in which cameras on most flagship models are able to take good quality photos and videos, and things only got better from there and things get a lot simpler. I hestitate to say “all” smartphones due to middling quality or reliability issues (Samsung Droid Charge, grrrr). Videos became clear (and eventually “HD”), frame rates stabilized, and most invitingly, video formats standardized compared to some of the wacky file formats we saw before (see above).

That gap in the middle where immature digital cameras were what we captured memories on is going to be a very interesting part of history in which we see an odd quality dip away from the old analog methods of capture before they manifest themselves back to (and exceed) the standards of the 90s and below, especially in terms of frame rates. I know I personally have a lot of photos and videos from that time where I really with I either somehow had an even OLDER camera with me, or could somehow be transported a smartphone from the future, just to get a little more resolution (and potentially a lot more frame rate) out of a moment that is otherwise locked to my memory outside of the postage-stamp sized video moving at slideshow speeds. Even when searching for and watching old homemade YouTube videos of the era, the quality difference across just a few years is astounding.

What I also find inversely intriguing is the idea that in earlier times, if one had a camcorder and was recording to tape, the camera operator may have recorded far more footage than what was needed, due to the novelty of recording home video as well as wanting to use up the tape to get the value out of their purchase. This introduces a certain charm and a “slice of life” quality to this older footage. Sure, a bunch of it might be junk, but it might also invoke atmosphere, unintentionally capturing the ambiance of an era that is long gone. In modern times, folks often record very specifically focused videos on their phones for a few minutes at a time and then press “stop” as soon as the main focus or subject of the video was complete, with no such equivalent atmospheric recording. One might press record, people sing “happy birthday,” then immediately stop recording once the candles are blown out. See what is likely more lost to time compared to the camcorder method? There's also the notion of immediately deleting the video if it didn't come out right, a feature that may not have been as nearly of a convenient luxury in the “before” times. As a result, there's this interesting dissonance between the analog era and the digital era where some scenes and videos may have been longer (and perhaps delightfully messier, in a “happy accident” sense) in older times versus a present-day video that may be 90 seconds of precise focus but with nothing more. I have a feeling that birthday parties in the 90s somehow contain a collectively higher amount of captured runtime compared to modern day.

Very recently I've been finishing up a project where I've been digitizing a series of Hi8 and VHS tapes from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s (and perhaps a bit of the very early 2010s) using a device that can take video input from a VCR, capture it at 60 FPS in 640x480, and save it to a flash drive for playback on modern systems. About a decade prior I had digitzed them using a cheaper and lower quality device that had done it in 30 FPS and a much worse video quality, so suffice to say that doing this on a more modern piece of importing equipment made a world of difference. I've been rather amazed at how well this analog footage holds up compared to the low quality digital-by-default videos I had taken in the 2000s across several dumbphones, digital cameras, and smartphones. My collection is a jarring split between high quality analog Hi8/VHS tapes versus crude early digital camera/smartphone content. In particular, the 60 FPS playback from the Hi8 and VHS tapes make a world of difference in transporting oneself back to the point in time when the footage was taken. They (I don't know who “they” are) say that imagination can often do a better job at filling in the gaps when provided with a low fidelity or incomplete image, but at the same time, it could have been nice to simply have a little more objective clarity. In this area of consumer tech, things feel like we had to get worse before we got better, but I just wish it didn't mean we of a certain age had to sacrifice the fidelity of our memories to get there. Maybe there will be some method of “AI” upscaling or interpolation, but that would only be based on guesswork and could never replicate the actual event.