Nostalgica

Here’s hoping everybody had a good Christmas. I know we did, although it was a bit exhausting, what with visiting family and playing with the Ape. Our house is interesting in that we celebrate Christmas, but only one of us is Christian, my wife being Bhuddist. Japanese celebrate Christmas regularly same as in the U.S., though not in as an elaborate manner. For them it’s more like New Year’s here – a time to gather with friends and celebrate with a party usually, though they do give gifts same as us. For them, New Year’s is the main year-end holiday, and carries the same weight as Christmas here. It somewhat of a reversed importance when you think about it, actually. I will say though, I like the holidays in Japan better, mainly because I used to get two weeks free paid vacation from work to celebrate. You’ll never see that here.

Now, surprisingly, I got no photo gear for Christmas. Well, almost none. Today, a little gift to myself from the eBay fairy showed up on my doorstep, all set for a new life of fun with Eric. And that gift is? A “new” old Nikon Coolpix 880 P&S camera, as seen above. Wow, good days ahead, ne?! Probably for most people not really, but for me a bit of nostalgia. I bought it after reading a thread at DPReview about using old digicams and the fun to be had with such antiques. In my case, the Nikon 880 was the second (technically third, as I had an Olympus for 2 days prior before exchanging it for the Nikon) digicam I ever owned. I bought it in September 2000, along with its rechargeable battery and charger, and a CF card, for $1300, about the same price as many mid-level DSLRs nowadays. Money well spent though, as it lasted me until ‘07 when I sold it after buying a Canon XTi and getting back into the SLR side of photography. Gotta love that the Canon was cheaper buy far and a whole new level in photographic technology to boot. Things move fast these days for sure.

In any case, I always liked the Nikon despite its limitations, and often regretted selling it, as I only got $45 for it and the charger, in mint-in-box condition. Compared to my current gear, it’s almost a joke — 3.3 mp, sloooow to startup, even slooooooooooower to save a 9 MB .tif, ISO 400 max, but actually fairly clean noise-wise and with a surprisingly decent optical viewfinder (probably necessary then b/c the battery life was so poor if you used only the LCD like now). The one that just arrived was $60 in excellent shape, very close to the one I had. I intend to just use it as a snap cam or for novelty more than anything else. I like the B&W pics it puts out, and it’s so small no one notices often if you snap a candid here and there too.

If you’re insterested in older cameras, it’s a decent cheap find and still puts out good pics all things considered. Here’s just a few, out of many, of my faves from years past. Maybe I’ll post some new ones in the near future, too.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 1:34 am and is filed under Personal and tagged with 880, Coolpix, Nikon, nostalgia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.