Here, in all its VGA glory is the best you could hope to capture with 300,000 pixels and a decent subject. The FD71 had an amazing (for the time) 1cm macro mode.
We didn’t care that you could go get yourself a coffee between shots thanks to the painfully slow write speeds, or that we’d be lucky to get 20 minutes of shooting from a set of batteries or that transferring the images via serial cable took longer than the average Super Bowl, or that for the most part the end results looked like a VHS tape on pause and had the resolution of a watercolor painting. No matter that back in the late 1990’s the pioneering digital photographer had to lay out thousands of dollars on a camera, a computer, a (color) monitor and the seemingly endless cables, cards and connectors needed to make it all work (and, it must be said, the time, expertise and patience required to tame all that technology). The secret to the eventual, inevitable, triumph over film were those most compelling of all disruptive drivers of change: convenience and immediacy. In the earliest days of consumer digital photography, back when the ‘smart’ in ‘smart phone’ was the same as the ‘smart’ in ‘a smart pair of pants’, almost every aspect of capturing, transferring, storing, sharing and printing digital images was so fraught with technical challenges and costly disappointments that it still amazes me that it ever took off at all.
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