Toshiba PDR-3330 - 3mp club!
I was digging around in my old photos from 2002/2003 and came across a series of shots taken with my old Toshiba PDR-3330.
I bought this camera new back in 2002. I paid over $300 for it and at the time it was a pretty sweet. It cost me every penny I had! Yes it's pretty bad by today's standards but this was the first camera I bought that was just-good-enough to get me shooting digital over film.
Specs:
- 3 mp CCD senor
- 35-100 built in Canon branded zoom lens
- Full manual controls
The fun thing (or frustrating depending on how you look at it ) was that shooting with a camera like this is all about the composition and subject matter. There is no post processing these files. Best you can do is crop it and fiddle with colors a bit.
Sample shots (from waaay back)
Uploaded files:
The image looks good. It always surprises me how good older sensors still are. I note interestingly it has a Canon lens I'm wondering if there was a brief partnership. However I never knew Toshiba made cameras
Quote from Lim on June 24, 2022, 6:30 amThe image looks good. It always surprises me how good older sensors still are. I note interestingly it has a Canon lens I'm wondering if there was a brief partnership. However I never knew Toshiba made cameras
The digital photography industry was "figuring itself out" at the time. The known camera brands were trying to evolve and the electronics companies were trying to figure out how to make a camera around a sensor. Ultimately I think the established brands survived by way of selling a "system" ( the lens mount, the lenses etc ). The real winner was Sony who, in 2006, bought Minolta... the straggler of the big camera brands during the time. By buying Minolta, Sony inherited a lot of camera know-how, a lens system ( A-mount ) and then combined it with Sony's electronic wizardry which produced cutting edge sensors.
Toshiba was just another also-ran who didn't quite put it all together in the photography department.
I love this. The pictures look great here on the web. I also had no idea Toshiba ever made cameras, and especially interesting they collaborated with Canon to get the lens and maybe some other pieces. Reminds me of Epson and some other electronic businessy companies that tried to get into the digital camera boom but didn't last. Ricoh is a good example of a relatively small player in the camera industry that has survived, even though their main business is printers and stuff. But they have had a history of cameras before digital. Not like they were trying to jump in just at digital.
It's cool you have full manual control, too. Many film point and shoots don't, so it's always interesting to me when you find digital cameras marketed at the consumer photographer that offer that option. I will always try to get a camera that has manual controls over one that doesn't while I'm trying out older gear.
I've found 3mp to be hard in todays terms. Fine for sharing on the internet, but starts to degrade quickly after that. My little Nikon Coolpix 990 that I love so much is 3.34 megapixels (hah, branding on the front makes sure you know that). But much better than my Sony FD5 floppy disk camera at 0.3mp. Even that looks horrible on instagram, haha.
