Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing!
And this is the Epson PhotoPC, first introduced a the tail end of 1995 and
marketed into and throughout 1996 at a suggested retail price of $499 US dollars.
Making it not only the first digital camera from Epson but the first color
digital camera under $500 on the consumer market.
Intriguingly this was actually developed by Sanyo and then just licensed out
to different companies, Epson being one of them. And another being Sierra Imaging
releasing it under the SD640. But yeah this Epson is the one that we'll be taking a
look at throughout this video because I. Found it at a Goodwill a while back and
found it instantly intriguing.
I probably just haven't paid much attention but you
know, whatever: I think Epson, I think printers. And you know, that was maybe why they wanted to get into this in the first place. I mean why not sell you a
digital camera to go along with your Epson printer! And yeah they were
advertising them side by side with their color inkjet printer selling for $449.
And yeah, digital cameras, they were just super new and exciting and crazy at the
time. The fact that you could take pictures and have them go directly into
your computer -- you don't have to like, get them developed and scanned and whatever
else, it was just amazing to me.
I was like 10 years old when these things we
were coming onto the market, and first time I saw them displayed at like a Best
Buy I was just like "whoa how does that even work?" As a result these earlier
digital cameras and intrigue the crap out of me so let's take a look at this one.
After all it's "the quick easy way to bring pictures into your computer!" Yes
*into* your computer. *Zoolander clip plays* And the system requirements were pretty modest: just needed a 486 with Windows 3.1 Or higher and the most standard of standards the
RS-232C serial interface. And man this mid-90s digital camera marketing: "just
imagine what you can do!" Seriously, you've got to imagine it because this is new
territory for most people. "It's as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5" but like, what
do you do with a digital camera? Well they provide a handy list of ideas
on the side of the box: letters, presentations, reports, proposals, flyers,
invitations, desktop and internet publishing, holy nuts.
For half a grand I mean, that's a bargain! And check out these specs: 24-bit color
images, 640x480 or 320x240 resolution, and it could hold up to 16 or
32 of those images, respectively.
And yes this has its own internal memory, one
megabyte of storage. As you can see on the other side of the box here, this is
the one megabyte memory version. This could actually be expanded with memory
modules up to 4 megabytes, and we'll get to that in a little bit, but yea. Let's
go ahead and unbox the box itself and see what we get inside here, which starts
out with a nice little plastic bag full of paper goodies.
And of course the
camera and the cable, and in my case some batteries. Back to the plastic baggie
though and inside of that you get a little strap that has seemingly never
been installed on this camera. And I. Don't really care for straps anyway so
it's gonna stay unattached.
You also get a rather substantial instruction manual
here covering everything from how to set it up, to how to take friggin pictures, to best practices for this particular type of camera. Because it mean, it's an
early digital camera, it's mighty restrictive in terms of what you can and
can't do in lighting and shooting conditions and all that kind of stuff.
Next up is a packet of the Photo PC. Software called Easy Photo. And this
comes on two floppy disks to get the actual camera connected and
communicating with your computer, as well as some software to quote-unquote
"develop" your pictures.
And we'll see that more in a little bit. There's also this
little card in here reminding you to remove the plastic cling film, yeah don't
forget to give yourself that pleasure! And there's an important reminder here
about serial baud rate among other things. And yeah that speed in
particular, you do want it to be as fast as possible because serial ain't quick!
There's also this fold-out thingy here showing all of the accessories that they
had provided by Tiffin. And I mean yeah look they've got filters and cleaning kits and UV
protectors and conversion lenses and tripods and cases and holy crap! All
sorts of stuff available for its 37 millimeter lens.
And then there's this
piece of paper which I just love. This is the original receipt from the person
that bought it before me back in the day. Apparently on December 13th, 1997 for $250, mm half price. And they got it from America Online *laughs* Why? I don't
remember them selling digital cameras but maybe they had some sort of
promotion going on.
I mean apparently they did. And enough of the paperwork let's
get on to some of this hardware stuff. So you've got the serial cable right
there, it's just a standard nine pin serial connector and in this case it
came with these old batteries. Yeah they are long dead but it just amused me to
see these again.
I remember those little testers on there that you had to press
ridiculously hard to show the battery capacity. And finally here is the PhotoPC camera itself. It's a little bit bigger than like a standard 35
millimeter point-and-shoot of the time, just a little bit wider. And the on/off
switch is down here in the bottom right which will slide the cover on and off of
the lens.
And it is indeed a fixed lens you can't do any zooming or anything like
that. Autofocus from two feet to infinity with
an ISO equivalent to 130 and an f-stop of 5.6, Not terribly great stuff.
But you know it works. Along the top here is where you have the so-called "easy
touch LCD," and no it's not a touchscreen, just silly marketing. And on the side
here you have this little door.
This slides down to show the serial
connection as well as somewhere to plug in the optional power adapter. Along the
bottom yeah, it's pretty much what you'd expect. Just a place to screw in a tripod
and some model and product information codes and numbers and things. And along
the back you get a viewfinder and a place for your thumb and that's it!
There's no screen to look at what you're shooting on this thing.
And then there's
this little rubbery deal on the side which completely comes off in a couple
of different ways. The first way is to get to the battery compartment and
that's why it has such a wide area here on the front: to fit four AA
batteries. And then another compartment opens up and here is where it gets a
little interesting. This is the spot for the expandable memory.
And this is flash
memory, in this case one megabyte is permanently installed in there, and
there's a slot for another stick of flash memory, from two megabytes to four
megabytes. Epson was really pushing this at one point. They called it
the PhotoSpan memory module. The thing is this was ridiculously expensive! From
what I can gather the two megabyte module was like $300 and then the four
megabyte one was around $600.
Well I don't know about you but I'm more ready to try
this thing out. So you power it on right there and the little LCD at the top
turns on. And this basic little display it's like an inch across and it just
tells you a few different things, with these buttons that can be used to switch
between "high res" quote-unquote and low res, and then a button for the self timer.
This right here just lights up a little red light in the front of the camera to
let you know that it's about to take a picture. There's another button here to
switch between the flash modes.
That would be the flash in the front of the
camera, not the memory. And then there's a button to delete the last taken picture.
That's right, only the most recent picture. If you want to do anything more
than that you've got to plug it into a computer. And of course you have the
shutter right there so you just press that down to take a picture, and it
takes a picture.
And notice that nice little gold reflective bit on the front
of the viewfinder there, you can actually see your reflection quite well and take
selfies that way. And yeah once you take a picture it will show the number of
pictures currently stored on there. And as you can see, pressing it to take a
picture and then the time it takes to actually store it to the flash memory is
a little substantial, especially on the "high-res" 640x480 mode. And yeah it really is just that simple.
Point and shoot. The viewfinder itself
even doesn't give you much of any information at all. There's no
range-finding. It just gives you those little brackets to kind of give you an
idea of what is going to be in frame for your picture and that's all you get.
Then
when you're ready to get your pictures onto the PC, turn it off, flip that
little thingy down, and plug in the serial cable and then you're ready to go
and plug it into your COM port on your PC. Yeah gotta love that traditional serial
bus. This is the days before the universal serial bus, so no USB when this
thing launched. Most cameras were using plain old serial.
Once you get the PhotoPC software installed you can go into this camera controls settings program
here and well. Here's where you do all the other stuff that you can't actually
do on the camera itself, like use it as the world's slowest and crappiest webcam!
Change the auto shutoff time, the shutter speed, and the date and time of the
actual pictures you're taking, as well as the connection speed for your serial
port. And yeah the Photo PC software itself is also very simple, you just
click the button and as long as everything is configured correctly it
will grab the photos from the flash memory of the camera and then very, very
slowly copy each one of them over to your hard disk. And there you go! You're
free to do whatever you want to do with your brand-new digital photos, ooh.
What are you gonna do with all those non megapixels?! Anything you want, including
some basic brightness and color correction and even spot removal tools
in this program.
And yeah I've had a lot of fun just taking this around and
shooting photos. I especially enjoy using older digital cameras like this to take
photos of things and environments where you can't really tell when the photo was
taken. Finding things from the mid nineties, the eighties or whatever, really
gives a convincing effect when you take photos with this thing. There's something
about its particular noisy low res washed-out style that I quite enjoy.
And
the fact that this one in particular actually does have some pretty decent
color reproduction for a digital camera of this time period? Ah you know it's neat.
Not bad Epson and Sanyo from the mid 90s, not bad at all. And that's pretty much it for the Epson PhotoPC. I hope you enjoyed this look
back at one of these earlier digital cameras. It's certainly not the oldest
thing around, heck it's not even the oldest digital camera that I have.
But
it's one that I find really easy to use and kind of fascinating with its
built-in flash memory. There were many more PhotoPCs later on, I haven't used
any of those so I don't know. I'm assuming they only got better or
whatever, but this one in particular being the first of its kind stands out
to me because of that. And I hope that you enjoyed watching and if you did then
perhaps you'd like to stick around and see what else is coming along here on
LGR.
There are new videos every Monday and Friday on all kinds of topics: retro
tech and software and gaming related. And who knows what else because I'm always
trying to evolve what the heck I'm even doing here because I don't know. With
that being said as always thank you very much for watching!.
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