The Nikon CoolPix 990 - The Future of Photography 20 Years Ago
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- Опубликовано: 24 июл 2024
- I'm waxing nostalgic in this episode with my CoolPix 990 - the camera that made me abandon film (though not forever) and embrace a brave new century of digital photography. Enjoy!
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"Working at Walmart" Dang - you know how to pull the strings. I'll up my contribution again to keep you out of Walmart, Fran. ;-)
Man this brings back memories. I had one of these at a previous job when they first came out. Great Camera!
That camera has a "macro" mode, that allows you to take very good close-ups -- you can really zoom in to tiny objects and get great, clear and focused images.
On the down side, that camera had a veracious appetite for batteries.
That was another reason why the display could be turned off and just use the optical lens. Battery life was likely still horrible... just slightly better
Remember NiCd batteries don't have nearly as much capacity as modern NiMH batteries. Typical NiCd AA cell is 700mAh, NiMH AA cells are available with 2500mAh
The Nikon 990 was my first digital camera and used it a lot for selling tons of stuff on eBay. It was easy to use and I didn't have to worry about leaving film in the camera for a year or so . Only complaint was the consumption of AA batteries when used outside. I still own the camera and I think it still has all the pixels (never noticed any loss of pixels). It's difficult to throwaway a camera that cost about $1K brand new. Eventually replaced it with a Nikon SLR.
Great ground breaking camera, sought after for microscope and telescope, my first digital was the Coolpix 880 ( still have it of course)
Thanks for sharing and may I wish you a healthy and prosperous new year.
I used this in my highschool photography class a few years ago! We had a really cool fish eye lens for it!
tylerrip11 hey i just found mine how do you recored a video on it
Fran, in the lab.. with an old frand.. :D I love it!!
Had one of those. LOVED IT! Great for doing elevated 'over the crowd' pics. Also one of the 1st for doing Selfies; long before the craze.
This was my first digital camera too! Loved this design which allowed unusual perspectives! What a great camera this was! 😍👍
Dear Fran!
Very interest video about this camera. Thanks.
I still have a Sony Mavica that stores it's pictures on a 3,5" disk. I think it's from late '90s
It makes a hell of a racket. Not as much options as your CoolPix. Awesome!
My neighbour just gave me this camera. Couldn't believe it was that old when I googled it. Lovely quirky review!
Nice review, thanks for sharing this cool camera with us! I have a Kyocera Finecam SL400R from 2004, which is much smaller than your nikon but also has articulated optics.
I've watched every conceivable guitar/amp/woodworking..etc...vid in the world and only yesterday were you suggested...I'm binge watching currently, I thought how can any girl like so much cool stuff...there is an answer...love your work, don't go changin'
I had this camera, and I remember it was way ahead of its time, even for video
The first digital camera I remember seeing was Xapshot back in the mid '80s. It took grainy B/W photos, stored on floppy discs.
I think it was intended for newspaper reporters.
Cool video...!
Very cool feature! Thanks for sharing. 🙂 I had an Apple QuickTake my self around that same time. The resolution (640x480) was the reason I stopped using that. 🙂 Nostalgia FTW! 👍
Would have been great if you showed us some of the photos taken with your camera back in the day! Oh well, still an interesting video Fran.
Neat camera, thanks for showing it. 3 megapixel was a lot for the time. My first digital camera in 2003 was a 3 megapixel Samsung - it took great photos too.
Boy, this brings back memories. One thing I learned from this camera that I've kept to this day is to hand the strap all on one side, so it hangs down vertically from my neck. For some reason, I still prefer that to the standard method, but I picked that up from this camera.
I used one of these cameras to shoot pics for an instruction manual. I liked it so much that I bought a Coolpix 300 for personal use. Like you, I thought the form factor of these cameras was great, and I loved using it.
Even though I'm really into early digital cameras I never heard of or have seen one of these. Very cool I have to say.
I used to work at a Redlake MASD, company that made industrial digital video cameras. It was formed when Kodak sold their MASD group, and investors bought both it and Redlake, then combined them into a single company. I got to help develop the HG-100K, an ultra-rugged ultra-high-speed digital video camera that could take 100,000 frames per second while experiencing 100 G shocks. It was the camera that went inside cars during crash testing, or was 30 feet away from missile warhead tests. I had several roles in that camera, including correcting many sensor defects and nonlinearities, some in real-time and others in post-processing.
Your CoolPix 990 camera needs only a touch of post-processing to **completely** heal those bad pixels! If you'd like to do a project in that direction, let me know and I'll send you some great reference material. The science of image correction is surprisingly accessible, and is a great reason to learn the basics of Python, which has libraries that do all the heavy low-level math and file handling for you.
Edit: For best results, you will need to capture your images in RAW format.
I really appreciate the camera angle in this video 👍👍👍
You should consider getting into streaming. Seems like you already have a proper setup. You could live stream your work on projects.
I had a later version of that camera, got it in 2002,had 5 mega pixels by then. I found the view finder very useful in bright light.
I still have mine too! I loved it as my first digital camera, but got a Canon SLR just a couple years later. I've got some great spider-on-flower macro pics from it. Focusing was very slow and lots of shutter lag. It was a great design for the time..... would be great for video today.
This was my first digital, I still have it, and the Pentax Super Program that preceded it. I waited for a 3 mp camera before buying. I eventually bought a Canon Rebel XSi, still have it, too. Now have a Canon R6 Mark II.
My dad gave up film about the same time, then about 8 years ago I picked up his old SLR and a roll of Ektachrome that expired in 1996, and I've been shooting film ever since.
I have one of those 990's, loved it. Got me into digital fotos. The problem I had was you could look into the viewfinder, compose the shot and still have the lens cap on.
I had a Kyocera camera that also featured the articulated optics, I really loved it for street photography or odd lens angles
Another super cool blip on the camera timeline is the Coolpix E300, had a pda stylus and you could annotate your pictures! I had a Canon powershot S3 which had a fully articulated screen so you could still do the top/down/selfie angles! Even shoot around a 90 degree corner like a proper spy!
My dad had one of these! He had it as a "work camera" and used it in his job (it was company property, but he ended up keeping it) quite a versatile piece of kit. It unfortunately got stolen, when his car got stolen.
Was my dream cam but i got 2 canon and also suffered a ccd problem it was faulty chips back then from sony to most old cams and they offer free repairs to all of them thanks for the video
Most of the digital cameras of the late 1990s/early 2000s would not have a live view on the LCD hence explaining the preference of the optical viewfinder. I am impressed by the low latency which is visible in your video.
We had one of these at school, it was much better than the camera it replaced. It was a great introduction to digital photography for a high school student. The computer department at my school was very multimedia focused, and after finishing school a couple of my friends ran a small photography and website development business. Only lasted a couple of years though, but this camera would've contributed to getting them into it in the first place.
I bought the Nikon CoolPix 4500 when it first came out. Still have it. Still use it occasionally. My current Canon M50 doesn't have articulating optics but it achieves the same thing with the articulating view screen on the back.
3:55 I think people do appreciate having the ability to shoot in different directions relative to the user - however the concept of a rotating optical portion has been replaced by articulating screens on mirrorless cameras
I can't remember the name of if now but I had a 8mm tape camcorder that had a similar setup and I loved that thing, it was from the mid 90s
Nice touch for the little CF card stand :)
LOL - yea... DOH!
Hi Fran, my first digital camera was the Kodak Easy share DX3700 with the docking station.
A whopping 3 megapixels..❤❤❤
I remember a utility for re-mapping stray dead or stuck pixels on the CoolPix cameras. I forget if it was third party, of just in a special diagnostic mode. I used it successfully on a few Nikons from that era, and it's probably still out there with a little google-foo, if you are into renovating your classic.
Oh man i had a startac phone back in the day , it was so cool .
Fran this was also my first introduction into digital photography. I enjoyed it but was always disappointed about getting good prints. How things have changed.
I used to have one of those. It was a nice camera until the stepper motor gave up the ghost. I seem to remember that a couple pixels along the edge failed, but they didn't bother me. Thanks for the memory!
I never had anything so big until an SLR...a Kodak Easyshare C613 that's still my daily workhorse!
Fran, I'm new to your channel. Could you possibly go through your soldering station and settings? I noticed your eye for detail with your solder joints. Thanks!
Gods - I remember this one..... My first was the Fuji Finepix 4900Z - which I still have..... and occasionally I’ll still charge it up and take it for a spin! They’re still useful cameras!
I'm sure I used one of these in college around the millennium! That and that Sony mavica with the floppy disks!
Hiya, thanks for the video! What SD card for you use for this camera??
My Sony Mavica FD91 took 1.44 floppy disks and shot 640x480 photos I believe. I could get about 13 photos on a disk. Around 0.7 MP if I remember. I had the camera out on vacation in Hawaii right after I bought it for $1000 at Camera World of Oregon and a park ranger saw it from across an entire parking lot, sprinted over, and wanted to see it in the flesh as he'd never seen the FD-91 before which was Sonys highest end Mavica. It was like carrying around a RED camera. I thought I was a rock star while folks were still shooting photos with Kodak film camera (lot of disk cameras).
I still have my COOLPIX 990 . Can't give it up, even though it's basically useless these days. It was also my transition from film to digital and I loved the zoom and macro features of that camera . I once did a bunch of time lapse photography with it . Built a timer mechanism that push the solenoid down on the shutter button to take pictures and had it all connected to my studio strobes to get a consistent exposure. But that was over 10 years ago now.
Well that explains where some of the features in my Nikon P600 bridge camera came from, including the articulated screen - a very useful feature indeed. It's also a camera I love to bits, whether for technical photography, or purely artistic. I also have a Coolpix L810 which has a similar battery door to yours, and is also quite fragile. Unfortunately, the clear screen covering the LCD is beginning to delaminate, so no longer ideal in wet conditions, but very handy since it too uses AA batteries, as opposed to the P600's dedicated Li-Ion pack.
It's nice to see that some "old"(er) cameras are still loved, and kept for their sentimental value. . . . I must see if I can find my AGFA CL-20 (1 megapixel) camera. It was a flimsy effort, with the battery door that fell of in a matter of weeks! It used compact flash as well. Being low megapixel, it was a good choice for artistic effects on the PC, my favourite effect being to "water colour" certain pictures - a very pleasing effect for photos of flowers, or pets, or landscapes. . . Haven't seen that camera in years.
makes me hug my Nikon D3X and D700 tight
Nice cameras, keep hold of them!
I used a Minolta Dimage V, that had the similar articulated imaging head. The head was also removable and could be used on an extension cable to get the camera optics into small spaces, etc.
Hi i just found one and im having difficulties with the compact flash card. It wont allow me to use a modern sandisk 4 gb compact flash card. I've tried formating it many times and it still says " card cannot be use ". I dont know what to do about it :(
The 4 gb size is too large for the camera controler to handel. I think 1 gb was the largest size for this camera.
Just got a coolpix 950 today . Second hand shop. $4.99 . Cool camera . Hard on Batteries . Great Find for My collection .
Do you have difficulties with the compact flash card?
Went from communicators to PADDS 😁
Early digital cameras are very interesting! Really cool camera. I wish cameras were built like this today due to how versitil the optics are.
Also LGR would love this camera
My first digital camera was an Olympus D-620L, a DSLR. Although limited to 1280x1024 pixels and a 3:1 zoom, it took very nice pictures for the turn of the millennium.
I bought mine 12/21/2000 from Ritz Camera. Up to that time I used a Cannon F1 and a Cannon EF (still have them). This was our first digital camera and bought it for the 3 megapixels. We used it for everything from road trips, vacations, dog shows (we showed Siberians at that time) and going to races. Never had a bad pixel. When we were building our new house in 2006, it finally quit working after taking hundred of pictures during construction. Why it quit, never figured out. Bought a Cannon digital SLR and been using it ever since. And it uses the same compact flash card.
I also STILL have the '990'. However, it was not my first digital camera. My transition from film cameras was via a Minolta Pocket (half frame -- 18 by 24 mm) ans a Polaroid SX-70 to a 980 kilopixel Kodak digital camera. After less than 1,000 photos on that I updated to the Nikon 990. I liked all the items you listed and hated the battery drain. I did not have the lens cap lanyard, though. As a result, I lost the cap in an airplane. Although I noticed the mishap immediately, I could not find the cap.
An accessory you did not mention (and I guess you did not have) was a Slide Converter. With the macro close-up it worked fine EXCEPT I did not have a proper backlight, nor white balance correction. So my converted slides are a bunch of crazy red/orange tinted no-goods.
I am missing some shots made with the camera. Some "vintage" pictures/videos of 1999 or some newly made ones for comparing quality of that time to today.
Your camera likely has a bad pixel map and a maintenance mode that can update it. But if it's like my CP5700 you either need the maintenance remote or some very clever wiring. Or you can take frames at different exposure settings with the lens cap on, and take the pixels out in post. I have to do this for low-light conditions, such as photographing glow in the dark.
Interesting, could you elaborate the process ?
Remember the one you put a floppy disc in?
My second digital camera. Slow focus but when you got them they were good
I had the 950. 2 mega Pixels ! 1999 ... cost a fortune. chewed through batteries like crazy, even NiMH
The standard view finder was best used for avoiding having the screen on to save battery power. Mine has no bad pixels yet, but with the main button screwed up it is hard to use.
I had two of those series of cameras. One was a slightly newer version. I also had some of the extra lenses, semi telephoto and wide angle lenses.
The dreaded lion system happened on the newer one and I lost it when the person died.
Never ever lend.
cmon baby lets party like its year 1999 !!!!!!! 8)
Go out and do some street photography with it! Go Retro! You can always Clone Stamp out the bad pixels on any of the photos that you like.
I still have mine from back in 2001. Mine has a button problem though. It always bugged me that it had a very limited video recording ability.
I still have my first digital camera - a Coolpix 5700. I also have my compact flash cards the largest is 256MB. I also still have my PCMCIA adapter (remember them?).
First digital camera I got was the QuickTake 150 from Apple. A lot has changed since then!
My newish Sony camera (RX100 MK4) has an optical viewfinder so they're still out there!
The camera that made me abandon analog was the Sony Cybershot P52.
I had the same camera (and the same phone!). It was a great entry point into digital photography for me (I eventually sold it and bought a Canon Digital Rebel - the original silver one). I made a custom mount for my tripod so that the CP990 could rotate around its focal point... handy for minimal distortion when taking panoramas. It was also the first camera I used for IR photography. One benefit of the form factor was that filters were small and therefore cheap-ish.
Is this one infrared capable too? I thought it was just the 950
@@stolenorange Just barely. Although there was an IR cutoff filter on the sensor you could get images of bright objects like trees and grass with long enough exposure times.
I still have a monster sized VHS camera that I pulled out occasionally to show my grandchildren. I had to hard wire the charger to it because the batteries were shot and it wasn't worth having them rebuilt again for a few minutes of nostalgic pleasure. I'll have to pull it out again for the younger grandchild.
I had the Coolpix 950. I do miss the rotating lens.
I wanted to see some of the pictures it took but didn't see any.
The existence of the viewfinder is probably because the screen was too dim for use in bright sunlight. My first digital camera was the Coolpix 885 and I really liked it.
Optical viewfinders are great outdoors. Have you ever tried to use the LCD screen in bright sunlight? My current mid-range (not high end) Olympus camera has a tilting view screen which has the same effect as a tilting optical system. I can hold the camera high over my head and shoot from above,or tilt the screen 180 degrees and use the camera for a selfie.
I faintly remember this camera back in the day, although I was more of a Sony Mavica fan myself.
I hope you gave the camera a Dramamine before the video. That thing got flip-flopped and gyrated around more than the Mercury 7.
It's interesting how as technology advances, some things go in reverse. Like phones getting bigger instead of smaller, cartridge based consoles (zero loading times and no moving parts) becoming disc based (loading times and moving parts, which means more things to go wrong), LCD TV's being much worse than CRT's in some ways.
My first digital camera was an Aiptec Pen Cam. The camera itself was just about acceptable for what it was, but the software was absolutely horrible. You sorta had to download the pictures to a certain specific program, and from there you could export them to standard software.
The camera software, however, worked only half of the time.
The camera is still in a box somewhere in my parents' attic.
My Agfa ePhoto 1280 I got in ‘97 had the same articulating screen setup.
I believe it was only 1MP though.
The main downside to the 990 was no audio on video mode. The lens quality kept it going even when other cameras had higher megapixels. I rolled the counter over several times on my 990.
How do you shoot video on it?
@@Boog0 There was a mode on the selector dial which is around the main shutter button. It was in .mov format IIRC
You're reminding me of my pair of Rio500 MP3 players... love those things :D and a lot of other old tech... might have to get a CoolPix 990.
BTW, @Fran - CompactFlash cards are still made. The interface, interestingly, is basically IDE/PATA, so you can use 'em as hard drives, if you can get your OS to run from a RAMdrive (the wear-leveling algorithms, sadly, aren't exactly SSD-quality... it's RAMdrives, or ~2wks to burnout, sadly...). Good for rehabbing thin clients, if you play your cards right ;)
Yeah, the first Digtial camera in my life.
If the CCD didn't go out do you think you would still have a use for it? or are the pictures really bad to look at knowing what youc an do with likely yoru cell phone telephone?
An FYI, The CCD in the Nikon back then was made by Kodak, whereas the lenses bodies of Kodak Cameras were made by Nikon. I still have a Kodak DC290 that works well. I find the color rendition of my older Kodak Cameras better than my newer Canon, Nikon and phone cameras. The doors for my batteries and compact flash card are identical to the one on your Nikon camera. Strangely enough they have the same plastic hinges and have to be handled with care. I love the 990 and wish I could find a good one. My favorite camera just died, it was a Kodak DX7590 5 megapixel camera. I am still using an old Canon SX30is with decent results, though the auto focus is not reliable and the manual focus is almost impossible to use.
SPACE 1999
Now THAT'S a flashback.
The camera I miss the most is the one I got from my dad, an Argus C3. Some of my best photos came from "The Brick". Shutter stopped working.
I also miss having a flip / slide phone. So easy to carry and damn durable. 4+ days on a charge was the norm. Did you see Motorola was hinting at the return of the Razr? If they can get the foldable screen right, they just may be onto something.
That's pretty cool. I had never seen that model.
Did you ever check into repairing and upgrading that device?
That may make a good video if you repair it yourself.
I would like to see this design come back. I like DSLR's when I out with the sole purpose of taking photos, but they are not something that can be carried around all the time. Small point and shoots are ok, but they are really no better than phone cameras, now. Something like this is a good middle ground that could offer the larger sensor and lens with good manual controls, but still be small enough to carry around for those unplanned shots. These would also likely still be aloud to use at concerts, whereas DSLR's are usually prohibited without press permit.
One or 2 dead pixels wouldn't bug me when I can edit my images before printing them.
Where did the Star Trek stuff go? People were working hard to make it all real! 😉
Can i buy sd cards that work for this camera?
I'd forgotten about those swivel-y lens Nikons. About that time at work we had a digital Fuji camera that was about the same size, but with none of the Nikon's futuristic features - it still seemed wonderful though, back then :o) Yeah, holding a paperback to your ear to communicate - where _did_ we go wrong ? Star Trek it ain't...
I remember looking at one when they came out and wish I had the spare cash for one
Michel Girard
J'ai trouvé et acheté une Coolpix 990 ainsi qu'un Nikon ES-E28 Slide Copuing Adapter. Je n'ai pas encore réussi à copier une deule diapositive correctement paracerque je n'arrive pas à faire les réglages de l'appareil à utiliser avec le duplicateur de diapositives. Savez vois comment faire. Merci
I have a Fuji camera from a little bit later that used strange media and had an amazing lense but this kind of haunted super slow shutter speed that was quite horrific at taking a picture of anything that wasn't still.
I miss the flash cube cameras!