WTF is a Digicam

Apparently we reinvented the digital camera.

Not invented. Reinvented.

The same little silver thing your mom brought on vacation in 2009 is now a digicam, which sounds considerably cooler and therefore costs $300 on Depop.

Amazing.

IT’S LITERALLY A DIGITAL CAMERA

That’s it.

Point-and-shoot.

Flash.

SD card.

Tiny screen on the back where everybody immediately crowds around to see the picture.

We had these.

Then the iPhone came along and we collectively went, great, one less thing to carry.

Fifteen years of camera development later, our phones can photograph the moon, remove people from the background and somehow decide what our skin should look like before we’ve even seen the photo.

Naturally, everyone wants the shitty little camera back.

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, THE G7 X BECAME A BIRKIN

You know the photo.

Dinner is basically over. Someone pulls a Canon G7 X out of their bag. Flash goes on.

Suddenly everybody looks incredible.

Not professional incredible.

More like it’s 11:47 p.m., the lighting is terrible, nobody really posed correctly, and somehow it’s the best photo anyone took all night.

That’s the sweet spot.

The G7 X got so popular that seeing one come out now gets roughly the same reaction as someone placing a small exotic animal on the table.

“Wait. Is that the G7 X?”

Yes.

Please act normal.

THEN WE STARTED BUYING OLD IPHONES

This is where things get stupid.

People are buying iPhone 5Cs again.

Not to use as phones.

For the camera.

A camera Apple spent the next decade making significantly better.

But that’s kind of the problem.

The 5C doesn’t know what your skin is supposed to look like. It isn’t sharpening every pore or quietly fixing the lighting before you’ve even opened the photo.

It just takes the picture.

Flash looks like flash.

Night looks like night.

Sometimes everything is slightly blue for absolutely no reason.

Perfect.

FILM PEOPLE WERE RIGHT. ANNOYINGLY.

Film never really left.

Twenty-four or thirty-six shots. No burst mode. No taking seventeen versions and then holding a small committee meeting over which one everyone likes.

You take it.

You move on.

Then you get the roll back and discover somebody blinked, six are unusable, one appears to have been taken during an earthquake.

And then there are two that are perfect.

Not perfect-perfect.

Better.

The kind you couldn’t recreate if you tried.

Which is probably why we keep coming back to all of this.

OUR CAMERAS GOT TOO GOOD

An iPhone can take an objectively better photo than most of the cameras we’re currently hunting down on eBay.

That’s not really up for debate.

But “better” got a little boring.

Everything is sharp now. Everything can be retaken. Everything can be edited before anybody else sees it.

We can take 70 photos in one night and somehow end up with less evidence that the night actually happened.

Meanwhile, the blurry one where nobody was ready ends up being the one you keep.

Maybe because it looks less like content.

More like evidence.

That you were there.

That your friend was laughing.

That the club was too dark.

That somebody’s finger was slightly over the flash.

That nobody stopped what they were doing to make sure it looked good first.

So yes, buy the digicam.

Bring the G7 X.

Resurrect the blue iPhone 5C from whatever drawer it has been decomposing in since 2015.

Just don’t spend $600 trying to make your pictures look cheap.

Have some dignity.