Kodak - Rejoice, We Are Spoilt

Christmas, 1961. A camera under the tree. "Weeeeee!" goes little Rufus. "Weeeeee!" goes little Agda. "Weeeeee! Why'd we give our kids weird names?" goes mom. "It was your idea. This marriage is a lie! Weeeeee!" goes dad.

Not to put too fine a point on it, your mobile phone can do 90% of what this family wanted this camera to do for them. Your pocket-sized point & shoot can do 90% of what all the stuff on the right could do. Maybe 92%. This is definitely great. All this capability owes it's existence to these guys, who just won the Nobel Prize for inventing the CCD chip that has made basically every non-filmy camera technology possible.

Look how cool all those cameras are. All boxy and chunky. In some way or another, each resembles the front of a semi truck. Hilarious and great. So, in a way, it's kind of sad that the era of this stuff is now gone. You can find really good film cameras in antique stores for not much money at all, maybe 15-50 dollars, even for a European brand. They are tempting, but I'd only be buying it to worship the engineering. As always, all of these images can be clicked and viewed at insanely high resolution.

Lastly, look at the plug for Disney's TV show "The Wonderful World of Color". BAH hah hah! That's adorable. Color was still enough of a thrilling novelty that they put it in the name of the show.

Jeez. Now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I'll have to get an old film camera. You know.. just to worship the engineering of it.