Photography’s been slapping me across the face and telling me he loves me lately, so I decided to spend a bit of time with my camera curios to get back into my groove. I started with two Canon PowerShot digicams: the A710 IS I got from Virgin Megastore in Downtown Beirut all the way back in 2007, making it my first camera, and the SX260 HS from 2012 that my father-in-law gave me during his last visit. He said that if I could figure out how to charge it, I could have it (it needed a replacement battery pack).
Both of these cameras have been all around the world; here they are in the SAM earlier today. I thought what better place than an art museum to compare their color renderings—more on that later. These are almost totally SOOC, save for cropping and a generous dose of denoise on the old 7.1 megapixel clunker.
The wide gap in megapixels (7.1 versus 12.1) isn’t the only interesting difference between the A720 IS and the SX260 HS—they also feature totally different sensor technology: CCD and CMOS respectively.
I read up about what that means, and it’s genuinely fascinating, but for our purposes here I’ll just say that CCD sensors are what people are talking about when they think of millennial “retro”—they’re basically the indie sleaze of digicams.
It’s also interesting to note that both cameras feature fully manual modes too, making these a curious time capsule of a market that was about to be decimated by smartphones; in fact, a few years later, Canon would focus on competing with ultraslimness, so the manual controls were dropped. But now, older cameras are highly sought after by zoomers with eBay accounts.
I highly recommend spending a day at your local art museum with a camera or two for instant aura or rizz or whatever.