LGR - My First Digital Camera! Intel CS630
Added 2024-04-24 01:04:51 +0000 UTCHere's one I've been meaning to do for ages, and now that springtime is here and has me outdoors quite a lot again, I felt inspired to go out and shoot with this thing. For the first time in like 23 years!
The Intel Pocket PC Camera is a deeply simplistic, glorified webcam with batteries, when it comes down to it. There truly isn't much going on at all, but that kinda made it an ideal introduction into shooting digital for 14-year-old me back in the day. It's also what first set me on a path towards working with digital media at all, a path that eventually leads to me doing LGR today when I think back on it.
And it's also a bit of a different video when it comes to these camera retrospectives since I actually have a lot of hands-on experience with the thing for once! So I hope you enjoy the photo example section in particular, where I go over both modern day and decades-old pictures that I took with the thing.
Comments
Well dang, that's awesome to hear. Thank you, Steve!
LGR
2024-04-26 23:32:49 +0000 UTCOddly comforting that they're still around. And man I miss *all* old Arby's locations! They're so bland now.
LGR
2024-04-26 23:32:14 +0000 UTCAs a photographer, I've often said how much your old camera videos mean to me. Especially with your personal connection here, this is far and away my favourite video that you've ever made. Thanks for this!
Steve Skafte
2024-04-26 17:24:21 +0000 UTCForeign cars Italia is still there off the highway and seeing these Winston Salem pics and putting them to their places in town today is so interesting. Miss that Arby’s :(
Matthew Taylor
2024-04-26 14:08:42 +0000 UTCHeck yeah, digicams of this era are like a cheat code for that.
LGR
2024-04-26 02:34:44 +0000 UTCThe pics are a total liminal space vibe...which i love
Brandie Drown
2024-04-26 01:51:57 +0000 UTCThank you, I'm glad you enjoyed! And jeez yeah, that really would've felt like a proper leap into the future going from a P100 to experiencing a P3 like that.
LGR
2024-04-25 13:47:24 +0000 UTCMy pleasure, genuinely! It was a trip revisiting those in this context, just a special kind of time travel.
LGR
2024-04-25 13:43:31 +0000 UTCReally cool video :) It's fun to learn more about your past, and the beginning of digital cameras was so exciting. When I had a pentium 100, my brother got a P3 700, 19" monitor, GeForce256, racing wheel, photoprinter and a 1 megapixel digital camera. Visiting him was visiting the future. The camera and printer was also so impressive. Actually printing out your own photos! It was wild :) The camera my brother had was the HP c200 I saw in the ad you showed in the video.
Uncleawesome
2024-04-25 03:53:19 +0000 UTCThanks for sharing all those wonderful pictures from the past! It's so hard to recapture the feeling of using old tech when it was new but you really captured that here.
Tyler Compton
2024-04-25 03:30:12 +0000 UTCThat's awesome the camera could do that, I don't think that's a feature I've seen before! The JVC VHS-C camcorder we had let you do freeze-frame recording of a still image on tape, but there was no way to connect to a PC.
LGR
2024-04-24 23:13:45 +0000 UTCThat wouldn't surprise me at all! All kinds of companies were invited to license the camera tech from Intel. Looking it up I see that the 300 even has what appears to be the same LCD information screen, just on the back instead of on top.
LGR
2024-04-24 23:10:15 +0000 UTCThanks, I'm glad someone else appreciates it! It's a rare thing indeed and I was always afraid to take photos in stores with my full-size Pentax 35mm camera back then. The Intel was tiny enough that I felt I could get away with it, and I'm glad I did.
LGR
2024-04-24 23:08:34 +0000 UTCOh hey, I think that's one of the variants of the Agfa CL30 that I covered a while back! While researching that camera I discovered there were three or four companies who made cameras using the exact same case/button/LCD design, and the Photosmart 215 was one of them :)
LGR
2024-04-24 23:05:35 +0000 UTCOh nice, this certainly was an upgrade in picture quality from those two! I really wonder if Intel's upgraded CS-780 Pocket Digital Camera from back then had an LCD viewscreen on it. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find photos of the rear, or really much of anything about it other than some low res images of the front and references to it in text.
LGR
2024-04-24 23:02:57 +0000 UTCA low resolution moon rising has never been so epic 😄
LGR
2024-04-24 22:55:14 +0000 UTCOhhh I forgot they advertised in there but I do remember now! I'll have to dig some of my late 90s duPont issues out of storage and see what I can find :)
LGR
2024-04-24 22:54:53 +0000 UTCNone that I have found! I've seen a few posts about people trying to reverse engineer drivers and create their own 64-bit variants, but no successful results.
LGR
2024-04-24 22:53:18 +0000 UTCHe used to do so professionally but he's since gotten a steadier job and photography has returned to a hobby for him. I'm actually unsure of what happened to our original cam! If I had to guess I'd say that it was given away to someone who didn't have a digital camera. We typically handed off older tech to friends and family.
LGR
2024-04-24 22:52:17 +0000 UTCThanks, Tim! I had it in the script but ended up cutting it, but yes Intel made a whole range of "Play" devices like that. I wonder if it was the same image sensor inside as these webcams!
LGR
2024-04-24 22:49:30 +0000 UTCOof, MouseKeys for over a year... I wouldn't wish that suffering on anyone! Nice that you Presario 5000 lasted that long, too. Mine didn't make it but a couple of years before just growing very unstable and eventually refusing to boot
LGR
2024-04-24 22:48:28 +0000 UTCAw that's unfortunate. Lost media, head hard drive?
LGR
2024-04-24 22:40:14 +0000 UTCThank you Udo, I'm glad you enjoyed! No injury sustained from the anvil, haha
LGR
2024-04-24 22:39:25 +0000 UTCUnfortunately that's just my face. When I'm enduring badly-made games, I truly can't help but react accordingly! Putting on a faux smile or faking enthusiasm is definitely not my thing :)
LGR
2024-04-24 22:31:39 +0000 UTCI love the old camera reviews and this is a good video - but I did wanna give some feedback that there is a cynical streak that starts to show during the camera-games section that could use a rethink. I know it might be old news to you, but for a lot of people watching; it's the first time (or like me we've just forgotten) and seeing you so unhappy/uninterested was a downer. On the flip side, the audible bit was great, the 90s videos were a wonderful find, and the overall research is super! Just keep an eye on the cynicism and take a break if you need one!
Melonking
2024-04-24 21:16:14 +0000 UTCI wish I hadn't lost all the pics and videos me and my sister took back in the day on our Logitech camera (same thing as the Intel) would be so fun to revisit.
Aidan Munro
2024-04-24 19:50:20 +0000 UTCAs a hobby photographer I love these blasts from the past with old digicams. Yours and DinoBytes by Gordon Laing are the best out there. My first ever digicam was some odd Praktica device, which is still physical existing but ceased to work years ago because of the flimsy On/Off-switch. No LCD, inly viewfinder, pics stored on SmartMedia, a now long obsolete medium, and on a PC it was always shown empty - so transfer was only possible with the obscure software provided, to view the glorious 0,9MP files! The upgrade to a Konica Minolta Dimage Z2 in 2004 or 2005 felt like a totally new dimension in every aspect... BTW I hope the anvil bonking on your head didn´t hurt, hehe! 😂
Udo Krawallo
2024-04-24 17:23:10 +0000 UTCI immediately recognized the Presario 5000. A couple years earlier, my mom had purchased some Acer desktop that had no PS/2 ports. The Windows 98 install did just fine with the USB keyboard, but shortly after we upgraded to a fancy Belkin mouse with scroll wheel it stopped doing any USB mice. Spent over a year using MouseKeys for pointing --- gaming was rough. I was so happy when we got to replace that with the Presario, which came with ME, was very quickly wiped and got a totally 100% legal copy of Windows 2000 Professional, and years later became my FreeBSD server until something in it finally croaked and I let it go peacefully.
Ross Nelson
2024-04-24 16:13:58 +0000 UTCOP Taylor’s is the toy store I showed here! The Hendersonville location is much smaller though and doesn’t have nearly as many cool displays as the one in Brevard :)
LGR
2024-04-24 15:41:52 +0000 UTCHey Clint, if you’re ever in Brevard with one of your retro cameras then you should consider swinging by OP Taylor’s Toy Store. If you haven’t been, it’s an old fashioned style toy store that would look great through the lens of an old camera.
Alex Weiss
2024-04-24 12:31:27 +0000 UTCDude, this video is an absolute delight. Love the enthusiasm going through those old photos, it really made me smile. I remember having a similar device, probably around 2003-4, but rather than a webcam it was a microscope! You connected it to the PC, and I believe it came with a bunch of slides you could stick underneath and ogle using the appropriately blobby software. Looking online it looks like we had the Intel Play QX3.
Tim
2024-04-24 12:26:49 +0000 UTCIt's so wholesome to see that birthday photo with Luke in the back, it's like the moment was just captured when he decided he wants to be a photographers. Is he a photographer or just really enjoys it as a hobby? BTW, it seems like this is a new-old stock and not your original. What happened to your OG camera?
Dukefazon
2024-04-24 11:02:01 +0000 UTCThese old cameras were left in the dust when 64 bit OS became the new, cool thing. There was a strong incentive not to provide 64 bit drivers, encouraging consumers to buy new peripherals. Anybody find a 64 bit driver for this one by any chance?
Mel Ancholy
2024-04-24 04:50:35 +0000 UTCForeign Cars Italia! I think I begged my dad to take me there after seeing ads for it in so many duPont Registry magazines, that was a real trip down memory lane. Must have been at least 20 years since I thought about it.
TORQUENDB
2024-04-24 03:32:08 +0000 UTCThose 90s video clips ... each one was more absurdly 90s than the last. I was laughing all the way through!
Jason Olshefsky
2024-04-24 03:14:10 +0000 UTCWild. My first "digital camera" was the feature built into our Panasonic VHS-C camcorder. It took up to 8 digital pictures at 640x480 or 16 digital pictures at 320x240 and dumped to a PC over a Serial cable. It also supported "stills" on VHS where it would record a freeze-frame for 2 seconds on the tape and with the computer you could extract the frame and save the resulting jpg. Neat story, thank you for sharing!
Michael A Berry
2024-04-24 02:30:17 +0000 UTCNice. Mine was a Creative PC-CAM 300, and the specs were surprisingly similar. That thing was built to last. Even the beeps and "take a picture" sound effects were strikingly like the Intel one so I wonder if maybe Creative just did a deal and made a different enclosure for it?
Beegotron
2024-04-24 01:58:41 +0000 UTCIt seems silly but I really love the shots of the random store displays. It sucks that stuff like the look of stores and product packaging are almost always lost to time, since nobody ever thinks to document it. Seeing old stores stocked with crts and old video games brings back so much nostalgia
Zachary Outen
2024-04-24 01:45:57 +0000 UTCIt's wild how similar my experiences were with my first camera at 15, the HP Photosmart 215. Upgraded quickly to a Sony DSC-P30 but you never forget your first
Steve Schmid
2024-04-24 01:42:45 +0000 UTCOh man.. I had one of those too. This was basically my upgrade from the Casio QV-10 for my portable camera, and a Connectix Quickcam for my webcam. This replaced both. And I was thrilled to have color 640x480 pictures. It was a pretty decent camera for the price. I missed having the LCD viewscreen, but it was worth the sacrifice considering the improved picture quality.
The 8-Bit Guy
2024-04-24 01:39:07 +0000 UTCDefinitely not a printer this time 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Blair Harrison
2024-04-24 01:34:16 +0000 UTC
