Category: Pointless Digressions || By Jason Togyer

Above you see a few samples from a lifetime (er, "so far," I hope) of camera-collecting. That's not all of the cameras, but all of this "stuff" has been used at one point or another over the past 12 years to produce content at Tube City Online.

Well, OK, not the Kodak Duaflex in the upper right, and while I do use one of the Polaroids on occasion, the Canon QL-17 and AE-1 in the foreground have been used for 90 percent of the images.

But you get the picture (pun intended). This has been primarily a film-based operation, until today. I'm tippy-toeing into the digital age.

Thanks to eBay, I finally own a digital camera.

"Welcome to 1999," I can hear you say. "Next you'll get a Touch-Tone phone."

Wise guy. I have a Touch-Tone phone. It's color TV I'm waiting for. (They don't have the bugs out yet.)

. . .

Finances, rather than nostalgia, prevented me from taking the plunge earlier. I got a break, however, because Minolta has exited the camera business, orphaning its well-received dImage line of digital cameras and making them dirt-cheap on the used market.

Shipping the 3.2-megapixel Minolta E323 almost cost more than the camera; when I went to Office Depot to get a USB cable for it, the salesman helpfully suggested I just buy a memory card and a portable flash-drive instead. "The drives are only $9," he said, "but the cable will be worth more than the camera."

Hearing that Minolta (actually, "Konica Minolta" --- the two merged in 2003) had left the camera business was kind of a stunner; I'll bet you didn't even notice it happened.

That's the whole problem. No one noticed that Konica and Minolta were in the digital camera business, let alone that they had left the business; during its last full year with a camera division, the merged company lost 8,700 million yen on cameras and supplies, which is equivalent to ... um ...

( ... carry the one ... )

Well, a lot of money. (OK, about $82 million U.S. at the present rate of exchange.)

. . .

Anyway, in the photography world, Minolta was once one of the big players, along with Canon and Nikon. And I'm sure the idea that a Japanese camera company was losing money is kind of sick joke to the ghosts of George Eastman, Edwin Land, and all of the employees laid off from Keystone, Ansco and the other defunct American camera companies in Chapter 11 heaven.

By the way, how technology do change: the Minolta E323 takes up less space and weighs less than my GE light meter, visible in the bottom center of the first photo.

Not having a digital camera has kept me from shooting some things for the Almanac, because I either have to kill an entire 24-shot roll of 35-mm film, or monkey with one of the Polaroid cameras. The Polaroids aren't actually that bad, but they're terrible for action photography and they're lousy in cold weather, unless you want to walk around with a picture in your armpit, counting to 90.

. . .

I decided to go cheap on my initial foray into digital camera ownership because I'm still not convinced I want to abandon my film cameras. Not yet. Besides the fact that I like taking pictures with them, film is still cheap.

More importantly to me, pictures and negatives are easy to store, and they never become "obsolete."

I've got 3.5-inch floppies from 10 years ago on which I archived early versions of this website. They're completely useless now; some of my older homemade CD-ROMs are already crapping out; and digital prints fade faster than a college radio station.

I don't really want to take the chance that 20 years from now, some priceless photo will be impossible to retrieve. For now, anything I want to keep is going to be shot on film.

So ignore Tube City Online's business manager, over there on the right, trying to flog my cameras. They're not for sale.

Besides, as my friend Dan says, when I die, my entire collection of cameras, radios and other fine, gently-used antiques will be sold at auction.

Dan thinks my estate sale should fetch upwards of $5.