[Leica] First (digital) cameras

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

My first camera was a Kodak Brownie given to me as a 10th birthday gift back
in the Jurassic era. But my first digital camera was acquired much more
recently. About 1994 as I recall. It was a Logitech Fotoman Plus, a
technological marvel of its time. It took 32 JPG images, 8 bit greyscale,
496 x 360 pixels. File size was 197 KB per image. When the internal memory
was full, you had to download everything into a computer before you could
take more pictures. There was no LCD, just an optical viewer. I used it a
lot but my Brownie took far better pictures.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/Larry+Z/Digital+Fotoman+Plus.JPG.html


A few tears later I got my first digital Leica, the Porsche designed Digilux
Zoom. It was a wonderful little camera with few bells and whistles. The
pictures were very sharp and could make creditable 5x7 prints despite its
1.3 MB sensor. I traveled with it all over Norway and made hundreds of
excellent web quality photos. I may post some of them if you will forgive
the low resolution. In reality Leica had little to do with the camera except
for the red dot. It was made by Fuji. Shown next to the Digilux is its
bigger sibling, a Fuji 6800 with a huge (for its time) 3.3 MB sensor. Leica
rebadged this camera and offered it briefly as a successor to the Digilux
Zoom. Both cameras used the now obsolete Smart Memory cards which were
limited to 128 MB capacity. It is amazing to see how far digital cameras
have come in a mere decade and a half.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/Larry+Z/Digital+Leica.JPG.html


Larry Z