UKH

Bonus points for:

Oldest most powerful

Oldest most crappyest

And if you still have the camera.

Check out the specs on my first badboy that I got from Jessops, when it still sold second-hand kit as a main reason to go into the shop.

I still have the camera but its been 15 years since I turned it on or tried to charge the batteries.

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikoncp885

I had something similar way back in the late 90s, if I remember correctly it was a maximum of 350k pixels. Bought it off someone who'd got hold of a whole box of them in the factory I was working in that summer.

TBH I can't remember the model, it was a Nikon and it may well have been the 880, or 885 in your photo. Anyway, it wasn't mine as I couldn't afford one so I borrowed it off Alan James to take the crag shots for Peak Grit East. Things have moved on a bit since then!

Chris

It was a Fujifilm S3 pro. Horrible ergonomics, slow, low res even for the time but fantastic dynamic range and colour reproduction. At low iso settings anyway.

Sadly I don't still have it.

Whatever was on the first Siemens mobile phones... Terrible.

Casio QV-10 1995 - the first digital consumer grade camera

320 by 240

I don’t think I have it anymore, but there’s a slim possibility it’s stashed in the loft somewhere

Nikon Coolpix 8700. Had it for a very long time*, still as good as ever IMO. I like it

I'm not in any way a camera lover or photography buff / expert

*Edit, probably 15 years. Have taken it on numerous long trips

A tiny Nikon in late 2004 which was very like your one. I was a late convert, I was still carrying film SLRs (Nikons FM2 & F801) during that summer. My first DSLR was a Nikon D70s bought in 2006, a great camera, and so light.
Some of the files from those cameras, even the jpegs from the little Coolpix can be turned into very pleasing images with a bit of post, and some of my best photos yet came from the D70s.

I could not afford the D70, and I drooled over it in the shop. However I bought the D50 instead and I was blown away by the quality of images once I shoved a Sigma lens onto it. I then progressed to a D5000 before jumping ship and going MFT with a Panasonic GH4 which I killed this year filming the greatest storm of this century on Blackpool prom.

I did not realise how big the waves were until a pro photographer snapped me and kindly gave me a copy. This wasn't the wave that killed the camera, no a much fekin bigger one did that by nearly knocking me over and dislodging the lens from the body.  Up till that point the weather sealing was outstanding. I made a Youtube of the wave hitting me at 96 frames a second slowmo goodness. Even with fully admitted and disclosed user-stupidity, my insurance company covered the damage, hence an upgrade.

I now have a GH5 and the video quality is far superior to the excellent quality I got from the GH4.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/the1lemming/49955253796/in/dateposted-public/

Mine was a canon a95, I think. Decent enough for prints to A4.  And yes, I still have it somewhere.

T.

Not surprised that a bigger wave did for your Panasonic! Luckily it didn't get you or your dog if you have one...

A Canon Powershot A70 it was for me, apparently it was a reasonable camera for what it was. Photography wasn't a big thing for me back then; though a few years before I owned an Olympus OM10, which broke and ended up in Font bin. I'm not convinced my photos were so good bag then but move due to the user rather than the camera. 

I had a a Canon Ixus or two after that before moving to Nikon aps-c, Sony aps-c and now Sony FF. Very happy with Sony. 

The leader so far?

Mine was a Pentax Optio 330RS with a monster 3Mp. It took great pictures and still works but uses batteries (dedicated) very quickly. The compactflash card was huge but fitted into a tiny body that was great for taking on the hill.

Fujifilm A310, bought from Jessops for £135, discounted from £235. Got good reviews. April 2004 I bought it. 
3MP unless you set ISO to 800 in which case it reduced to 1MP. 

I would say I have ONE photo I took with it, that I still like. I need to see if I have the full version of that photo somewhere (it's of Jenny Lewis during a Rilo Kiley concert). 

I actually now own an older one, a Kodak DC120 which used to retail at close to £1000, I got mine for £12.99

The first one I ever used was my uni department's Olympus Camedia something something, the one up from the base level. I knew it was crap even in 1999. 

Some climbing friends had a £500 Casio think in 1999, I don't think it was the QV 10 but it had that split-swivel body (theirs was more 50-50 though). It was the one that famously would get totally bricked if batteries ran out whilst transferring pictures to computer. 

My A310 went missing during a trip to London. Quite probably pickpocketed. 

I bought one a few years ago for £7.99, used it a few times then it died on a winter climbing trip. 

Digital Ixus 300, built like a tank

still works, batteries still give enough for the odd shot. just for fun

I still have my Panasonic DMC-FZ20. I was most attracted to it by its Leica lens - it was the closest I was ever going to get to anything with the Leica logo on it. It still takes very good pictures, but its battery life is woeful. 

Vivitar ViviCam 3105s bought second hand from CEX in 2009 for a quick trip to Arran.   AAA batteries (easily replaced but didn't last long), Just found it in cupboard containing unwashed clothing. Pics were OK.

I had one of its siblings, a Nikon Coolpix 775

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikoncp775

It was stolen in a burglary in 2005 sadly.

My first DSLR was a Nikon D80 bought in 2007. I part-exchanged that for my next DSLR so don't have that either.

Kodak DX3700 in 2001. https://www.dpreview.com/products/kodak/compacts/kodak_dx3700

A disgruntled Kodak employee listed these for sale on their website for £100 down from whatever stupid price they were back then and my dad bought one on a whim. 

I remember the hardest thing was actually getting the photos off the camera vis USB using the supplied software. It deleted photos as it transferred which then ended up permanently loosing files when the body inevitably locked up mid process. 

Fun times. 

Edit: I'm sure the camera is still in my parents attic somewhere. 

Nikon D801

Nikon Fm2

Then moved onto Nikon D70s as first digital SLR, I also had a mju digital (600) I think took not to bad pictures for the family album.

then onto Nikon

D200

I had a camcorder that died 1 month before the 5 year cover finished and got sent £500 in Curry's vouchers in 1999/2000.

I used them to get a Canon A50 power shot camera. 1.3 megapixle and an 8 Meg compact flash card, it would save about 20 photos. 

I replaced it a few years later with a 4 or 5 mega pixel Canon Ixus camera (because I could get a waterproof housing) and the A50 took better pictures, well by better I mean you could zoom in on the pc with much less pixelation than the much bigger Ixus photos had. 

I still have the Ixus and the waterproof housing, I cleared my garage out in March and found it in a bag in a shelf. 

Canon Eos d60 (not the 2010 era 60d)

6mp and took stunning pictures unless the light was poor, then it went grainy as hell. Max iso was 400 I think and it was unusable at that

Bought second hand in early 2003 for about a grand. Still have it but use a 7d these days

My first digital camera was a Nikon D2H. It was a beast, but despite the really quite low resolution it produced some fantastic pictures - its got a 100,000 plus shutter actuations now and is very flakey and the only thing I would use it for now would be to defend myself from a burglar. Coming from a good film body (F100 and previously F301) it was so convenient and fast (and saved hours of slide scanning) and you could just blast off multiple pictures (often using exposure bracketing) and then pick from there. I had used a D100 at work, but this was so much better.

I cannot remember the actual model, though I may well still have it in the drawers in the study. Actually I've just gone and found it. I had a Fuji FinePix S602Zoom, which was shaped vaguely like a small SLR, w 6x Optical zoom.

I bought it prior to going to Africa, to Zambia, and Tanzania and Zanzibar, and including Kilimanjaro.

I used this and a Nikon F90S, and surprised myself, that I preferred the facility associated with the Fuji on this trip. In fact I still have about 15-20 developed slide films from then, that I did not get round to properly looking at due to lack of time, and the excellent nature of the digital images.

Fuji Finepix 4700zoom

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fuji4700z

Bought on the basis of a number of 'best value' reviews and was pleased with it.  It died when I had it in a jacket map pocket whilst night sledging on my stomach and it got crushed in a hard landing off an unseen jump.  I still have it.

Hah! I still have a similar one - Nikon's first take on consumer cams, the Coolpix 100 from 1996, although I bought it much, much later as a "novelty". I'd sometimes take it on assignments alongside the DSLRs for laughs, even to some high profile political press pools 

https://www.nikonweb.com/coolpix100/

512x480 pixels and a very strange form factor - the whole camera was the memory card, you had to insert it into PCMCIA slot to read the photos and it held only 19 photos! 

My "real first" digital camera (even used it for work, can you imagine that!) was the Sony DSC-D700 (or D770?) from 1998. 1.3 megapixels 1/2" CCD, fixed but fast f/2 28-140mm equivalent lens with manual zoom ring, flash shoe and a real optical SLR viewfinder. It was the king of compacts! Unfortunately, it was also a Sony back then The AF was really bad, it used to backfocus a few cm behind the subject all the time and manual focusing just didn't work (the "SLR-like" optical viewfinder was rubbish, they had to go through some serious engineering to make a optical through-the-lens viewfinder with a 1/2" chip and failed). Fortunately then the real DSLRs slowly started to appear. Went through a lot of them. The one I still remember fondly is the Canon 1Ds - the first (?) full frame DSLR. It was so slow by modern standards, but for portraiture, it was a game changer. Something like 11 megapixels AND a full frame chip? No one cared if it was only useable on ISO 100 and the max of 1250 looked like a trip on acid

https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/D770/D770A.HTM

Not quite the same (or maybe relatively it was?) but in 2010, I somehow found myself in the press pit for a then-at-their-peak Mumford and Sons headlining the Sunday of the Leicester Summer Sundae music festival. Now I’ve always scornfully said that Mumford and Sons seem to be as much a Tommy Hilfiger advert as a band, and to be honest the cameras and lenses on show in that pit seemed to confirm this. But I wasn’t press. I was just a punter vaguely near the front before it started, when a random press dude or photographer gave me a pass for absolutely no reason. I was armed with a Minolta X700 with 135mm f/2.8 lens and my last seven frames of Ilford HP5+ , and my Fujifilm F30 teeny compact. Both cameras would have fit into the LENS HOOD of some of the big cameras 😃 But I got one absolutely cracking photo of the audience before the band came on. On my compact. None of the pros were even looking, and they probably had too long a minimum focus on their big zooms to get what I got 😃

Was that really that strange pre-2000?

I know my Kodak DC120 was fairly advanced at a prosumer level in 1999 for using a CF card. Not sure about other 1990s ones, the uni department Camedia was always tethered to a computer anyway

I was quite a late adopter of digital. Bought a Pentax Optio S4 in either late 2003 or early 2004. Great little camera, quite pricey at the time for a compact. 

Nice story! Having gifted a few press passes back when nobody cared that much about security I can sympathise - the poor pro probably just wanted to get to his family back home from a concert he didn't quite fancy ASAP 

Concert photography really needs two camera bodies, so you were better prepared than most there! I used to take a classic 16-35mm + 70-200mm combo (sometimes substituting a 24-70 for the UW zoom, depending on the venue, usually instantly regretting it when the lead singer took an unexpected very close "mic lean" towards the audience and me and the 24mm wasn't quite wide enough).

Not so much, I guess. The very early pro DSLRs from Kodak (basically just a big digital back strapped on a film SLR from Nikon or Canon) used removable PCMCIA cards before CF came along (ah, the lovely whirring sound of 1GB CF MicroDrive) and the very first DSLR had a proper "external" storage - the Kodak back for Nikon F3 had a whole suitcase computer including hard-drive tethered to it, including a small CRT! I don't know when the first compact with removable cards appeared.

The whole thread reminds me of that 4 Yorkshiremen Monty Python sketch - I certainly sound like one 

Olympus C70 from 2004. Great little camera which I'd still carry in a pocket today, but the auto focussing packed up and there's no manual focus. 

I had a nice, slim Casio point and shoot with a rechargeable battery from the bigger SLRs.

Great camera but for the build quality: Stupid thing died the first time I stepped on it with my crampons on Dom summit.

CB

Bought in Australia in 2002.. an HP photosmart (i think the model was) 120

it's highlights included

a stupendus 1 megapixel sensor

Ran on AA batteries

had a compact flash slot, I purchased a whooping great 32MB card for it i later went crazy and put a 128MB card in it

took just under 10 seconds from turning it on to being ready to take the shot.. yeah, that was as much fun as you'd think it would be

shutter lag was sporty... just under 2 seconds

had a zoom function sponsered by nike

i hated it and loved it in equal measures

don't have the camera anymore, but i'm pretty sure i still have pictures from it

My first DSLR was a Canon eos 350d bought around 2007 to replace my aging eos 300 film camera. It worked well enough for my needs at the time but I was constantly getting p*ssed off by it having a CF card instead of SD. No PC manufacturer includes a CF slot FFS!

Moved on to an EOS 70d about 5 years ago which is brilliant but I'm on the brink of ordering a new full frame 5d as I've accumulated a few 'L' series lenses and think they're slightly wasted on APS-C 

The 1998-99 Kodak DC120 took 30 seconds to write each 1MP picture - not jpeg but Kodak's own format, I think .kdl or something, to the CF card. Unless you shot in their claimed equivalent to what we would now call RAW, which was a massive TIFF file that I don't believe held any more real data. Then it took around 2 minutes. I still have the camera (I only bought it circa 2010, for "a laugh"), if I can dig it out I'll check those timings. 

It GOBBLED AA batteries in the old days, when it was released Ni-Cd were the standard, and Ni-MH were exotic and niche. 

Slight tangent away from FIRST and just onto some OLD ones I own. 

The Fujifilm F810 which in 2004 was my "dream" camera (dSLRs at that time were still a financially non-viable £1000+ dream). The F810 retailed at around £400, which I could not afford or justify at that time. 

Fujifilm were a bit naughty with one aspect of the otherwise impressive specifications. There was a disingenuous use of the term "widescreen" which could lead the unsuspecting to think that there was a sort of panoramic photo mode to mimic a wider angle lens. Nope, it just cropped the top and bottom of a photo "in camera" and displayed it on its, er, wide screen!

Other than that, it was a BEAUTIFUL camera. Machined aluminium, not plastic, and gorgeous form factor, and more importantly, a really nice interface(*)

Here is a review from the professionals
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilmf810

I found one in near-mint condition a few years ago in a local charity shop, complete with its neat little docking station. 

Sadly, rose-tinted spectacles are exactly that. Whilst beautiful to handle and with - as mentioned - a nice to use interface, it's a) not actually that much fun to use, with various bits of lag compared to ANY decent camera post-2011 (my arbitrary choice of year as that is the production year of my Sony NEX F3) and b) nothing particularly special about its photo output. I mean, acceptable by today's standards, but not really any better than what I could shoot with my iPhone 7. Still, £10 well spent and it went to charity. Just lucky that I still own a 1Gb xD card as they are expensive these days. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/blue-straggler/albums/72157669930507068/with/...

edit - hmm my Flickr gallery says it was a "joy to use", I'll check this later...

And another one. From about the same period as the Fujifilm F810, more humble and at a reduced price, but if I'd spent real money on this in 2004 I would not have been happy at all (I did my research back then and spent about £230 on a Fujifilm F30 which kept me happy for a long time). 

The Sony DSC-P93. Again a nice looking thing and again with decent menus and plenty of features, but still has a cheap feel to it. There was a time around 2011-2014, that I fancied one of these if I could get one at a bargain price, because it looked nice and has an optical viewfinder. 
Found one in a local charity shop for a tenner, in 2015 I think, some time after I lost the desire to have one, but it was sold with a nice case, charger, a set of Eneloop batteries and some USB sticks and possibly a spare Sony Memory Stick, all of which are useful. 

Took it on a weekend trip to Berlin. 

The camera was crap

Old online reviews of these things are so quaint in their positivity

https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/P93/P93A.HTM

Cannon 350 D

Had a Kodak DC50 a brick of a device, must have been in the 90's.

Seem to remember no easy to get image off and when you did the quality was very poor.

The oldest digital photos I have were taken in 2002 with a Fujifilm Finepix A201

https://m.dpreview.com/products/fujifilm/compacts/fuji_finepixa201