How good are old cameras?

Rootling in the basement last night I happened upon an old digital camera – the first I had owned and purchased back in 2011/2012. It was, still is for that matter, a Nikon Coolpix 995 and was my faithful digiscoping companion for  a few years before I moved into Canon DSLR cameras and finally ended up with a cupboard full of Sony mirrorless cameras that I am using today 17 years further down the line.

Rather surprisingly, this old Nikon still works so of course I had to take it for a test run against a couple of my current cameras and see if it is still as a good as it “seemed” to be almost two decades ago. It produces 3.34 megapixel images which was a leader of the pack in its day and stores them on, very expensive at the time, flash card having all of 128MB memory … the ones I use today are a fraction of the size and hold 32 GB for about the same price.

I photographed a corner of the garden in fairly bright afternoon sunshine. Each picture is presented here as a 72 pixel resolution image sized at 1024 pixel maximum width, the sort of thing you would use for a Facebook or a not very important blog post today.

Cameras tested:

  • Nikon Coolpix 995 – 3.34 megapixel image on a 1/1.8″ sensor. Only capable of producing jpeg format pictures – the image here is straight from the camera with no editing other than a slight lightening of the midtones in Photoshop. Downsized to 1024 px maximum width.
  • Sony RX100 – small pocket camera – 17 megapixel image on a 1″ sensor.  Zeiss f1.8 lens. Takes RAW format images but here created a jpeg format picture in the camera – the image shown here is straight from the camera with no editing other than a slight lightening of the midtones in Photoshop. Downsized to 1024 px maximum width.
  • Sony alpha-7ii – 24.3 megapixel image on a full size (35mm equivalent) sensor. Zeiss 35mm f2.8 lens. RAW format image converted to jpeg using Capture One Pro software – no editing other than a slight lightening of the midtones in Photoshop. Downsized to 1024 px maximum width.

So – what do you think?

Sony-alpha 7ii

Sony RX100

Nikon Coolpix 995 – surprisingly goo though I find the colours somewhat muted and the detail is sorely lacking compared to the other two. You wouldn’t want to make ma print much larger than a snapshot but good enough for blogs and the like … still !!

And … the cameras:

17 years old and still working