Apple QuickTake 100: 1994 Digital Camera Experience
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Jan
Love these old stuff stories, I like to bring some of my own memories, if that-s OK: I worked in a local, small newspaper as a freelanve journalist back then. To save money/time, the tech-interested editor bought a QT100 for mugshots and last-minute stories before printing and so on. The camera was. well, useless, most of the time. Unless we were really, really desperate. Far too soft/blurred, unpredictable exposure and very noisy, especially compared to regular darkroom development and proper repro. Even for small pictures, and even after converting to bw and with a lot of after-work in photoshop, the results were mediocre at best. And the laser printers of the day made it even worse! So, the newspaper went back to 99% film. We later quitted paste-up (just sent pdf-files to the print house) and at the same time switched to colour slides/in house development machine/film scanners. This was more expensive, but a semi-quick process that provided very good quality. Around 2001-2002 the paper went all-digital, with the far superior and very useful cameras of the time. We bought some Olympus E-10 for all-round use (nice, but very fragile, some Nikon Coolpix 5700 (really good cameras, but slow and with confusing menus, and later added the very nice Canon EOS 10D with a 300 mm for sports stories. I, myself, as a freelancer had first an Epson digital (crappy, a couple of other compact cameras (some a bit better, a CP5700 (bought second hand from the paper) before I went back to SLR and Nikon, first a D100 (a bit disappointing, later a D300 (a brilliant, brilliant machine, still very much up to the job) and then a D600 (nice camera but not so well made. QT100? When clearing out some old stuff from the paper around 2002, I took the QT100 home to for my oldest son to have some fun with and learn some mac basics on an older OS9 machine. Also for making stop motion lego movies. But the camera was still almost useless!
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Love these old stuff stories, I like to bring some of my own memories, if that-s OK: I worked in a local, small newspaper as a freelanve journalist back then. To save money/time, the tech-interested editor bought a QT100 for mugshots and last-minute stories before printing and so on. The camera was. well, useless, most of the time. Unless we were really, really desperate. Far too soft/blurred, unpredictable exposure and very noisy, especially compared to regular darkroom development and proper repro. Even for small pictures, and even after converting to bw and with a lot of after-work in photoshop, the results were mediocre at best. And the laser printers of the day made it even worse! So, the newspaper went back to 99% film. We later quitted paste-up (just sent pdf-files to the print house) and at the same time switched to colour slides/in house development machine/film scanners. This was more expensive, but a semi-quick process that provided very good quality. Around 2001-2002 the paper went all-digital, with the far superior and very useful cameras of the time. We bought some Olympus E-10 for all-round use (nice, but very fragile, some Nikon Coolpix 5700 (really good cameras, but slow and with confusing menus, and later added the very nice Canon EOS 10D with a 300 mm for sports stories. I, myself, as a freelancer had first an Epson digital (crappy, a couple of other compact cameras (some a bit better, a CP5700 (bought second hand from the paper) before I went back to SLR and Nikon, first a D100 (a bit disappointing, later a D300 (a brilliant, brilliant machine, still very much up to the job) and then a D600 (nice camera but not so well made. QT100? When clearing out some old stuff from the paper around 2002, I took the QT100 home to for my oldest son to have some fun with and learn some mac basics on an older OS9 machine. Also for making stop motion lego movies. But the camera was still almost useless!
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DocNo27
Ha - Apple ended up having the last laugh when it comes to market dominating digital cameras - and it's not even the primary purpose of the device: )
The QuickTake was indeed revolutionary - as you touched on it, we take being able to instantly see the results of our shutter mashing today but back then even if you had your own photo lab in your home or office, getting the results of taking a picture wasn't quick. Being able to plug in to your computer and download pictures literally in minutes was a huge boon to any workflow that required speed (especially over quality) in having photos. I helped convert a media arts center from chemical film photography to digital in 1995 and those early digital SLRs were wild - it took minutes to import individual pictures on the fastest PCs or Mac's. A lot of high end photography equipment didn't even have Windows drivers - the Mac utterly dominated digital photography early on. When I found a DSP card that would cut import time from the SLRs from a minute and a half or so to about 30 seconds, we thought we died and went to heaven. We had photographers taking the digital SLRs in the field to document training days at a time. We had some of the first IBM Microdrive hard drives in PCMCIA cards that the cameras took. A whopping 350 megabytes ) of storage. Photographers would come back with a handful of those cards (probably over $1K a piece; I forget now it's been too long) and before we found those DSP cards even with multiple computers it could take the better part of a week to import everything - let alone process the photos.
My iPhone has more processing power than the building of 10 Quadra powermacs with those DSP cards. It really is amazing how far things have come in the last 20-25 years. Yikes!
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Ha - Apple ended up having the last laugh when it comes to market dominating digital cameras - and it's not even the primary purpose of the device: )
The QuickTake was indeed revolutionary - as you touched on it, we take being able to instantly see the results of our shutter mashing today but back then even if you had your own photo lab in your home or office, getting the results of taking a picture wasn't quick. Being able to plug in to your computer and download pictures literally in minutes was a huge boon to any workflow that required speed (especially over quality) in having photos. I helped convert a media arts center from chemical film photography to digital in 1995 and those early digital SLRs were wild - it took minutes to import individual pictures on the fastest PCs or Mac's. A lot of high end photography equipment didn't even have Windows drivers - the Mac utterly dominated digital photography early on. When I found a DSP card that would cut import time from the SLRs from a minute and a half or so to about 30 seconds, we thought we died and went to heaven. We had photographers taking the digital SLRs in the field to document training days at a time. We had some of the first IBM Microdrive hard drives in PCMCIA cards that the cameras took. A whopping 350 megabytes ) of storage. Photographers would come back with a handful of those cards (probably over $1K a piece; I forget now it's been too long) and before we found those DSP cards even with multiple computers it could take the better part of a week to import everything - let alone process the photos.
My iPhone has more processing power than the building of 10 Quadra powermacs with those DSP cards. It really is amazing how far things have come in the last 20-25 years. Yikes!
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scottcol23
I remember these when they were new, My school had one they would use in the Library which was also the -tech resource- wing. I thought it was so cool. That they could take a picture and be able to view it on the computer rather instantly. I actually printed my own color pictures using a -BubbleJet- printer they had, It was a HUUUGE 60- plotting printer from cannon. We had to get special permission to use that printer. But I was in the -after school computer club- and we got to do all the fun things. We also had a robotic arm you could program to pick up and move blocks. and we had a laser we could use to transmit sound over extreme distances, All this brought back sooo many memories, The school was equipped with new mac PowerPC's the All in one type. But they even had some ridiculously out of date apple -Lisa- computers still kicking around next to a lab with apple IIgs and IIe's.
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I remember these when they were new, My school had one they would use in the Library which was also the -tech resource- wing. I thought it was so cool. That they could take a picture and be able to view it on the computer rather instantly. I actually printed my own color pictures using a -BubbleJet- printer they had, It was a HUUUGE 60- plotting printer from cannon. We had to get special permission to use that printer. But I was in the -after school computer club- and we got to do all the fun things. We also had a robotic arm you could program to pick up and move blocks. and we had a laser we could use to transmit sound over extreme distances, All this brought back sooo many memories, The school was equipped with new mac PowerPC's the All in one type. But they even had some ridiculously out of date apple -Lisa- computers still kicking around next to a lab with apple IIgs and IIe's.
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cisko3000
One of my elementary school teachers had one of these and she used it to take our headshots for our unofficial yearbook. Hadn't thought about how much of a tech enthusiast she was until this video. I see in the video you mention no one really had a use for it, but I guess if you're making a yearbook for your students and don't have time to get film developed, that's a pretty good use case haha, not everyone is a teacher like that though. She was into tech, described to use how computers could send signals and talk to each other, and that was called the internet.
I remember the low-res images looked even more low res when ink jet printer. One thing I think has aged well is the color reproduction. Most may disagree, but the color reproduction is pretty unique and quite consistent across the images you took, it would def make for some cool art collection / concept photoshoot.
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One of my elementary school teachers had one of these and she used it to take our headshots for our unofficial yearbook. Hadn't thought about how much of a tech enthusiast she was until this video. I see in the video you mention no one really had a use for it, but I guess if you're making a yearbook for your students and don't have time to get film developed, that's a pretty good use case haha, not everyone is a teacher like that though. She was into tech, described to use how computers could send signals and talk to each other, and that was called the internet.
I remember the low-res images looked even more low res when ink jet printer. One thing I think has aged well is the color reproduction. Most may disagree, but the color reproduction is pretty unique and quite consistent across the images you took, it would def make for some cool art collection / concept photoshoot.
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Orkan
Hi Clint i just want to say that ive seen almost every video of you(mainly the odware and game videos) and i love them, they even have rewatch value(good to know in these times) keep up the good work! i hope you are safe and have a good health
to add to that, im a huge dangerous dave fan and tried to beat it in these -stay at home- times(withouth good luck i die at level 8. i dont see a lot of people reviewing that game while it had a huge backstory and lead to a lot of games(if im correct designed by john romero) i would love it if you made a video about it
also want to say that i recently started playing duke nukem forever because i saw your video and thought why not? i love it, its bad but in a good way and i love john st. johns voice! also love your voice
like i said stay safe and GET SOME!
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Hi Clint i just want to say that ive seen almost every video of you(mainly the odware and game videos) and i love them, they even have rewatch value(good to know in these times) keep up the good work! i hope you are safe and have a good health
to add to that, im a huge dangerous dave fan and tried to beat it in these -stay at home- times(withouth good luck i die at level 8. i dont see a lot of people reviewing that game while it had a huge backstory and lead to a lot of games(if im correct designed by john romero) i would love it if you made a video about it
also want to say that i recently started playing duke nukem forever because i saw your video and thought why not? i love it, its bad but in a good way and i love john st. johns voice! also love your voice
like i said stay safe and GET SOME!
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Chris
i took a computer class in high school my sophomore year, this was in 1995. The class basically taught you how to make presentations and other multimedia things on computers. We had this exact camera in that class and I remember how foreign it was to all of us. We were blown away with how good the pictures looked and how they were ready instantly. I always remembered that camera for some reason, it stuck out in my mind as a pivotal piece of technology for me. To be honest I never saw another one ever again, but i remembered what it looked like all these years later. The second I found this video I knew this was the camera and it bought back some great memories of what is now 25 years ago. wow! Thanks for posting, great video
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i took a computer class in high school my sophomore year, this was in 1995. The class basically taught you how to make presentations and other multimedia things on computers. We had this exact camera in that class and I remember how foreign it was to all of us. We were blown away with how good the pictures looked and how they were ready instantly. I always remembered that camera for some reason, it stuck out in my mind as a pivotal piece of technology for me. To be honest I never saw another one ever again, but i remembered what it looked like all these years later. The second I found this video I knew this was the camera and it bought back some great memories of what is now 25 years ago. wow! Thanks for posting, great video
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scottcol23
You have to understand that digital cameras back then were not designed to replace film cameras. They were for taking quick photos that you needed to use digitally. Its way faster than developing film and scanning the photo in. We actually had this exact camera at my school back in 1995 and it was used for taking digital photos for the school administration and was used by the AV team to capture stills they used for the school news.
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You have to understand that digital cameras back then were not designed to replace film cameras. They were for taking quick photos that you needed to use digitally. Its way faster than developing film and scanning the photo in. We actually had this exact camera at my school back in 1995 and it was used for taking digital photos for the school administration and was used by the AV team to capture stills they used for the school news.
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psycosoft1
At least half your 'retro' videos are things I used new. Fun to watch. My first digital camera was in 1989 and had a japanese name. It came from japan. Cost $4000 and took 22 pictures between downloads. I bought a fantastic portable tandy laptop when they came out to download pictures. Someday I'm gonna dig out my retro stuff and let you review them. Not the first wax color printer though. 77 lbs too much to ship. Grin
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At least half your 'retro' videos are things I used new. Fun to watch. My first digital camera was in 1989 and had a japanese name. It came from japan. Cost $4000 and took 22 pictures between downloads. I bought a fantastic portable tandy laptop when they came out to download pictures. Someday I'm gonna dig out my retro stuff and let you review them. Not the first wax color printer though. 77 lbs too much to ship. Grin
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Onyx
It's interesting that this was: _-In conjunction with Kodak. -_ I had a Kodak version of that camera that I used for all of my pictures from Junior and Senior year of high school (1999) and a Vegas Vacation. LOL! I never used the flash. (It made pictures yellow) It had a serial port, and stored 45 640x480 shots. The two options for images were. BMP &. JPG.
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It's interesting that this was: _-In conjunction with Kodak. -_ I had a Kodak version of that camera that I used for all of my pictures from Junior and Senior year of high school (1999) and a Vegas Vacation. LOL! I never used the flash. (It made pictures yellow) It had a serial port, and stored 45 640x480 shots. The two options for images were. BMP &. JPG.
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Hawk
My Fuji FinePix S1 a 16mp 50x zoom all weather bridge camera has 37mb of internal storage. It can store about the same number of high resolution images as the Apple camera (when you forget to reinstall the memory card. And that's still better than my Fuji X-E2 a glorious APS-C sensor mirrorless camera which has no internal storage for images whatsoever.
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My Fuji FinePix S1 a 16mp 50x zoom all weather bridge camera has 37mb of internal storage. It can store about the same number of high resolution images as the Apple camera (when you forget to reinstall the memory card. And that's still better than my Fuji X-E2 a glorious APS-C sensor mirrorless camera which has no internal storage for images whatsoever.
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