The Search for the Perfect Camera

The addiction – for addiction it has surely become – began in the early 1980s when I was travelling extensively for my job, mostly in Europe but also sometimes to the US.

Olympus launched their OM series of film cameras in the 1970s and in 1979 the OM10, an entry-level aperture-priority automatic exposure SLR (single-lens reflex) camera, a thing of rare beauty, was created. It was infatuation from the word go. The camera was light, comfortable to hold, easy to use and produced perfectly exposed pictures. It accompanied me to much of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the US and a tour to Japan and Hong Kong in 1983.

Camera technology leaped ahead and in the late 1980s Canon brought out their EOS system whose electro-focus lens were a huge novelty; the mechanical links and levers between the camera body and the lens was replaced by electronic magic dust – focusing became fast, accurate and virtually silent. All the other camera companies copied Canon, which became the market leader for the next 20 years, introducing 40 different models in that period and innovations such as eye-controlled focus. Suddenly, good photography was both much easier and quite a bit cheaper. Since I lived in Hong Kong for three years from 1987-1990, you can imagine that the local camera dealers saw a lot of me!

Digital cameras technology arrived in the mid-1990s and Canon collaborated with Kodak to introduce its first digital camera, the EOS DCS 3 with its 1.3 Megapixel CCD sensor and a price tag of 12,000 euro.

Like many, it was a step too far for me and I found it hard to believe that much-loved film stock like Velvia would yield to electronic wizardry. Kicking and screaming, I was dragged into the digital age (although in a brief show of rebellion I bought a medium format Pantax 645 – however, it proved too unwieldy and I sold it on for rather less than it cost me, a situation that was to become distressingly familiar as the years went by).

In one of my drawers at home there is a motley collection of early digital camera s acquired in the last 20 years. Their small sensor size reveals their age, many are in single digits – the dinosaurs of modern photography.

And a few years ago I left Canon and took up with the other Japanese giant, Nikon, whose products were flashier but often better, producing more appealing image quality. Today, I’m mostly using two Nikon SLR bodies, the trusty D7000 and the new D7100 with its 24 megapixel sensor, plus a bunch of Nikon and Sigma lenses.

Of course the SLR is only one type of camera. There are also compacts, bridge cameras, rangefinders, full frame cameras – and we haven’t even mentioned mobile phone cameras or video capture. It’s all too easy to accumulate a variety of camera tools since there isn’t such a thing as the perfect all-purpose camera. But the search for the mythical perfect camera is truly addictive and full of the joys of discovery on the way. What about the tiny Canon S110, the perfect sneaky camera to take to dinner with its low-light capability, or the Canon SX50HS with its huge fixed zoom that can make a bird fifty feet away fill the screen?

I have not counted but I would imagine that I have owned (and mostly traded in) well upwards of 40 cameras in the last 30 years, many not particularly expensive but embodying an idea or a feature that was important or attractive at the time. They have all left marvellous memories.

And the future? Well, digital full frame cameras, with sensors as large as those in the old film cameras, have recently become much cheaper. The image quality, if only because of the larger sensor, is rather better than that of the APS-C sized sensors employed by most current SLRs. Now, if only good quality full frame lenses also start to fall in price...ah, dream on!