Anyone remember the Fujifilm S5600?

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This was my first proper camera when I was about 13. I dug it out recently from the drawer where it had been hibernating, put some AA batteries in it and was delighted to find it still works perfectly.

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I took something like 90 000 photos with it (mostly not very good!) between about 2006 and 2009 when I got an Olympus EP-1 for Christmas… happy times. :slightly_smiling_face:

Back in the present, I’d forgotten that it can shoot Raw - I didn’t have any software back then, so never used it, but it does, and I’m pleasantly surprised by the image quality TBH. These are a few snaps I took earlier this morning in the garden, processed in dt 4.3. Obviously not very good photos, but from a pixel peeping perspective I’m impressed, for a 2005 vintage consumer camera. The 38-380mm (equiv) f3.2-3.6 lens in impressive too.

What was your first digital camera?

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My very first digital was a Canon PowerShot A710 IS, and my first ‘proper’ one was my Fuji X-T10. These are the only two I’ve ever owned.

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You are making me feel very old. My first “proper camera” I was shooting with when I was 12 was a hand-me-down Zeis-Ikon Contaflex:
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(Image copied from this page)

The first camera that was mine from new was a Praktika MTL-5 (slight variant on MTL-3):
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that I saved up my after-school wages for.

Whilst living in Europe I bought a point-and-shoot 35mm film camera - motor drive, IR remote, captions and date embedding, motorized zoom. At the time, it was pretty good. That one I still have, and found in a cleanup of the garage a month or so back. Of course, finding and processing film is now a specialised thing.
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First digital camera was one owned by family - a Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Z-20 bridge camera purchased in 2005. It came with a small memory card and we splashed out (!!!) on a 16MB (!!!) SD card to be able to take more than a handful of pics. That suffered a fall and was replaced by insurance with another bridge camera. That one - a Panasonic, took RAW pics.
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That sounds a good choice!

It’s amazing really how the storage capacity has increased - I remember when we bought a “massive” 512MB card. I think it cost something over $250 AUD IIRC. Not quite sure when that was off the top of my head, but we bought it as we were planning an overseas trip and it was a lot cheaper than buying a laptop to offload photos. :blush:

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I had the S5700. Stellar camera, no RAW though. That sensor does very well with Infrared or Full-Spectrum conversion. I did mine through Ilijia at KolariVision.

Adored mine and used it for about 9 years, until I replaced it with the HS25exr, which I also Full-Spectrum converted with Ilijia.

First digital camera was an ORite VC3210 2.1MP I bought from my local grocery store’s pharmacy counter. I used that heavily for about 6 years. I converted it myself to Full-Spectrum and still use it occasionally, due to its unique imaging quality and errors.

Now, I use a KolariVision Full-Spectrum converted Fujifilm X-T2 after bouncing around through a ton of Fuji X-Series cameras.

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Technically the first camera I used (I think) was my dad’s old Ansco Cadet (120 film), something like this:

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That was probably the late '60s, early '70s. But that was the family camera (i.e., my dad’s) and I wasn’t really allowed to waste film nor potentially break anything.

Later I got a 127 Instamatic for Christmas, possibly something like this:

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However, I find it difficult to imagine my parents would’ve sprung for the “expensive” name-brand Kodak version, or at least not this top of the line version. It was probably cheaper.

The first camera I used that was assigned to me (checked out from my university for the two B&W photo classes I took) was a Yaschica TLR, something like this:

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That was the late '70s - 1980 or so.

The first camera I bought myself was a Pentax ME Super, about 1985 or so:

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It came with an Asahi 50mm and I bought a … *ahem* … Focal 35-70 push-pull zoom a couple of years later. “Focal” was the house brand from the US KMart discount store chain. I was a poor college graduate and couldn’t afford a decent lens. As a side note, with “Focal” they had the brand name almost correct. Fecal would’ve been more appropriate given the optical “quality”.

Then in 2003 (?) I bought a Kodak EasyShare DX4530 digital P&S, my first digital camera, all 5 MP of it:

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In 2007 I got a Canon Digital Rebel XT (350D) 8 MP DSLR, in silver no less:

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I didn’t get the kit lens but opted for a Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 DC Macro instead. I later added a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM.

Then in 2020, I got my current camera, the T8i / 850D (still using the same two lenses):

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Not exactly a gear-head, am I? :smiley:

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Is that the Canon in the photo? I have an article about one just like that in a book somewhere… quite impressive.
Film isn’t really that hard to buy or get processed now (albeit expensive) - I’ve bought from Walkens here in Australia, and they do mail order processing too. I haven’t used their processing though - I’ve only done B&W and developed it myself using Cinestill monobath. Next time I’d like to try a more traditional development.

Oh right, I’ll have to look that up! Interesting about the IR stuff too.

@lphilpot Thanks for the timeline! :slightly_smiling_face: Very nice selection. Nothing wrong with not being a gearhead. :face_with_peeking_eye:

Edit: I just had a look at the website I linked above, and there is a lot more ‘out of stock’ labels then I remembered last year… still a workable selection though… :neutral_face:

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Just posting to be anti-climactic but my first camera was an X-T3 at 22 :sweat_smile: Now at 25 I also have an X100V(Got it before the craze) and longing for an X-H2 for those bird crops… Maybe next year, first I want to get the tamron 17-70.

Is the Fuji S5600 one of those that had the big and small pixels?

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Nice!

I had to look that up… it has a SuperCCD badge on the front… maybe!
Super CCD - Wikipedia Not entirely sure, although the S5600 is mentioned on this page. Pixels at 45 degrees apparently… (scratches head!)

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My first digital. The first finepix. MX-700. 1MP.

Film. Random point and shoots, disposables, champagne mju ii (gone who knows where), an EOS 5 that still works. One of the press photogs who worked at the newspaper I was at wanted to sell me his 1v when I was looking to buy the EOS 5 and as the paper was transitioning from film to digital. I turned it down for some reason.

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The ‘free’ memory card that came with my Powershot was a whopping 16 MB!

I still have, and sometimes even still use, this camera. It has great sentimental value — it belonged to my late father who loaned it to me when I went on vacation; by the time I got back, he’d upgraded to a different one and let me keep it. I miss you, dad. :heart:

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My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 11.

My second camera was the beautiful Kodak Disc 4000, which used disc film.

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I’d completely forgotten about that

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My first digital camera was the 2.1 MP Canon PowerShot S100 Digital Elph,


which I got for free when I bought its optional GSX-R600 accessory attachment:

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This is neither my bike nor my photo.

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I believe the first digital camera I had was a CoolPix 900: https://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/coolpix/others/900/

The swivel design was interesting. 1.3MPix. Wow.

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That’s swivel thing must’ve seemed like it was the future at some point. Now almost all cameras look like late era film SLRs

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I just looked at how much my old film cameras are selling for. It may be time to clean out the cupboard.

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My first digital camera was a Panasonic rangefinder style camera, 6MP sensor (IIRC), and a really neat folding shade for the (non-flip-out) screen that attached via the tripod screw but gave you another nearby. Relatively large and heavy, it was well-made.

A local camera store had a promotion on with the cameras allegedly being shipped overseas for less fortunate folk. (There hasn’t been anything in the news contrary to this, so I presume it was on the up-and-up.)

My first camera though, was a Yashica Minister-D rangefinder with parallax correction and a tiny overlay in the viewfinder that told you when you were in focus. My father bought it for me when I was 14 or so. I still have it, and think of him each time I pick it up.

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It’s really great to hear about the all the “early” cameras you’ve had - thanks for the great response! :smiling_face:

I discovered something interesting about the RAF files from the S5600 . Most files open perfectly in DT 4.3, and it all works perfectly except there’s no noise profiles (no big deal).

But long exposure images, I think it might be 1 second or over open with really weird colours. I don’t have one to post atm, but I could later if people are interested. It looked to me like a channel swap, so I fiddled a bit with the CC channel mixer, and sure enough, swapping the R and B channels gets it looking a lot better. Still not perfect though, but a little more tweaking gets it the rest of the way. But the WB module sliders work sort of backwards! Logical, yes, but I was still surprised. :laughing:

Anyone know why all this, only on long exposures? Maybe it’s something to do with that mysterious SuperCCD.

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My first digital camera was a Kodak DS200 in 1998, with almost 1 MPixel :slight_smile:
Followed by a Nikon d950 (or 990?), D70, D90 and finally a D750.

My first analog was an Agfa something (with the square 24mm format) in 1976, on my 10th birthday. Followed by a Praktica stl3 in '79. When that one broke down in 1998 I went to Nikon.

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