One of the newest trends among teens is using older compact digital cameras for cute photos with friends and to capture the classic vintage style. Despite my love for the classic digital camera, it does not feel like a worthy investment. I have a small Canon camera from 2008 that I found in my basement. I love how portable it is, the cute vintage look and also how small it is compared to my bigger and newer Nikon D3000. But for a fellow photographer, it may not be worth the price or time to go out and find one.
The price of older digital cameras range from $30 to $200, with many of them being on the pricier side, which makes me question if they are really worth the money.
The first potential issue with digital cameras is quality. Older digital cameras don’t have the best quality, and the graininess of the photos makes them sometimes unusable. Not all older cameras offer good quality pictures, which is a downside to consider when buying one.
One of the other arguments for using older cameras is that they are portable, especially compared to my DSLR.
But we all have portable cameras that we don’t have to pay extra money for: our phone cameras.
If someone wants a digital camera that is more portable, would it not make more sense just to use your phone for better quality? When I was taking pictures on my digital camera, especially the first few times, I struggled to get non-blurry pictures. It might have been my shaky hands, but the more likely explanation is the camera itself. I needed to stay extremely still, so while a digital camera will take less physical space, it may compromise on the photo composition. This is not an issue that I have with my Nikon camera or even my phone.
The main selling point of digital cameras is the vintage look that photos get, and I have two thoughts on that. First, the vintage look can be cute sometimes, but at some point it gets old. These cameras often, especially when the flash is on, make people look orange and add major red eyes. Secondly, is it really worth spending money on a digital camera when you could just edit your photos to look more vintage, or just add a vintage filter on all your pictures? Editing apps such as VSCO easily offer filters that mimic the vintage look, while offering a phone camera which has far better low-light performance and picture quality. Using such filters would also allow for one to have a copy with both a vintage and non vintage look, and choose which one they prefer.
If you find a digital camera that is really cheap or one in your basement like me, then by all means, be the digital camera friend. But trends cycle through so quickly, that the hype for digital cameras will most likely be gone soon. I remember that polaroid cameras used to be a big trend when I was in middle school, and now I know very few people with Polaroid cameras. People will get over the “vintage look,” making the small digital cameras obsolete and unnecessary in a number of months.
If I didn’t have a digital camera sitting at home, gathering dust, I would not have gone out of my way to buy one.
