“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
Random story: I went to the first ever digital imaging and technology film program to run in Canada, first cohort, 20+ years ago. There was one dude in our class that, in spite of the fact that our program didn't allow analog submissions, shot super16 all the time for his "personal projects and art", fine. So he kinda bothered me a bit, but did inspire me to, for the first, time grade my film to look like analog. I sucked all the contrast out, flattened it down and split toned it heavily. Submitted it to class and got the top grade for it. The guy was furious and went to the teacher to complain I shouldn't have submitted film, teacher came back to me to confirm I'd just graded it to look like film, and then told the dude my submission was accepted and my grade stood, but didn't tell him I shot it digital, so the guy goes and submits a 16mm short for his final because he thought I got away with it, ha.
After I graduated, I stuck to the all digital stuff and a couple of folks from my program and I went on to start a film company, and win 3 Emmy awards, over the years I was still in film I saw people bring various analog film things to set to try and see if they could somehow include it, be it some film type, some vintage light panel or whatever, but it was always just fad, there was a period of time everyone brought 35 to set just to "see if we could fit it in later" - it never got cut in, it was too difficult to match it to the digital.
It was always a fad bringing film to set, but those that did, I always admired they wanted to make that statement, no matter how foolish they seemed to many on set, I always appreciated the art they brought to the table.
I recently bought a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P5 with a broken back screen, honestly I've had so much fun with it, I went out with my wife this last weekend, left the phone at home and brought the Sony, had a blast looking at the frames when I got home, do recommend it.
Sorry for this random ass post, just this is my fav kinda HN content :D
20 years ago HBO made the tv show Rome. They filmed it on analog film. I’ve recently been watching it for the first time and it’s absolutely amazing how well it looks compared to shows shot on digital from the same time. It looks good even compared to modern cinema and because it’s film they could do 4k captures.
For a recent movie, Strange Darling was filmed in analog. Great movie and looks unparalleled.
Dune was filmed on digital, transferred to analog, and the scanned back to digital for distribution.
I guess my point is, that there is some magic in analog. Whether the inherent limitations of the form, or by introduced randomness of the chemical process, or by placebo assumption of “realness”.
We live in an age of Netflix enforcing all shows to look exactly the same and even adding de-aging filters to actors. The gulf between the perceived reality of analog film and digital has never been larger. So yeah, analog excites me.
Random idea about “the look”. Doing an analog transfer might kill the gradation banding that digital images suffer from, especially those that have gone through lossy or low bit depth edits to brightness values in large flat color areas like sky. Analog transfer may add dithering to the bands to make them look more natural.
I think about this Brain Eno quote often. It’s always surprising when old worse formats resurface, yet it happens everytime.
> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
This is a big thing for early synthesizers. Many of them tried quite hard to accurate emulate real instruments - pianos, horns, strings - but inevitably failed due to limitations of their time. But many of them became classics in their own rights, to the point that later synths emulated them. And now, of course, you can get software versions of the same synths which do an incredible job of reproducing every last detail of a hardware instrument that did a bad job of emulating an analog one!
An account called Natspone plays with this idea in shortform vertical videos, I find it incredibly bizarre and unsettling. I should forewarn - you're probably not going to enjoy the style at all.
Good questions. CD distortion include hard clipping from amplifying too much, whereas vacuum tubes and magnetic tape have soft saturation (still a distortion, just a different kind). Another distortion is that dynamic range compression is used, bringing up the volume of quiet parts of a song.
As for digital video jitter, I can think of MPEG compression artifacts, both spatial (e.g. DCT mosquito noise) and temporal (e.g. motion compensation errors, periodic keyframe refreshes).
There is something in CD that is noticeable by listening to vinyl, CD, and optionally mp3. I'd say CD makes everything sound like a harpsichord, but just ever so slightly. Maybe it's encoding or maybe it's decoding. Or something else. It's a first generation digital format, after all.
Analog videos never stutter but digital formats tend to have non-constant processing cost and do stutter occasionally. Maybe he's referring to that?
Absolutely. Like those terrible filters that are supposed to make video look like it was recorded on VHS. They always make the results far worse than VHS actually was in practice.
VHS didn't always look noisy and distorted, but it always looked blurry and had horrible color bleeding. I disliked it even though it was the "only" technology at the time and we didn't have it at home.
People are now corrupting mpeg video intentionally. They call it "datamoshing". And of course there is glitch art, and the "vhs look" filter being (over) used everywhere.
My kids started asking for vintage digicams about five years ago. At first I wrote it off as a fad. And it is definitely partially that.
But when my kids started taking pictures with these cameras, I realized that the pictures were, subjectively at least, better.
We were in the Rockies and the pictures taken on their iPhones are sharper, more vibrant, but those photos lack perspective. It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.
Something else happens with digital cameras. My kids think more intentionally about the framing of the shot. They move into better positions. They think about light and shadows. With the iPhone it’s click and forget. So that contributes to better photos too.
Even with the point and click models that my kids bring to social gatherings, there’s clearly a sense of posture and special-ness about the photos that changes the dynamic more than everyone posing for a phone selfie or photo.
There are obvious limitations. My kids didn’t fully understand why older cameras perform so poorly in darker light without the flash.
But otherwise they really love their digital cameras. My eldest is studying abroad in France and it’s a real treat to get a batch of digital camera shots of life in Paris.
I now buy digital cameras in bulk and repair them slowly as a hobby and then resell them on eBay. It gives me a little spending money. I avoid the TikTok trend cameras - they’re too expensive to buy - but I make some nice pocket money on selling the in between models that perform really well.
And my kids get to pick their favorite models now and then.
Assuming you're not talking about lens effects (which definitely has a huge effect), you might be reacting to the use of tone mapping in iPhone photos, which tends to make things look "flat". There's a slider called "Brilliance" in the iPhone photos app that you can play around with to get a sense of how this type of processing tends to flatten images. I'm not sure how or whether it's possible to disable this in the default camera app.
Every digital camera I've ever owned takes "better" pictures than my iPhone 15 Pro. The iPhone is fantastic for taking a few snaps to remember a trip or event, or recording an ephemeral "story", but when I am actually trying to take photos there's no comparison to my ~10 year old digital camera.
It's partly about sensor size and tech., partly down the the limitations of tiny smartphone lenses, and partly down to what's added (or should that be taken away) by the "computational photography" software in modern smartphones.
You should teach them to also move into better positions and think about light and shadows when they take phone pictures.
A big difference between smartphones and cameras is the focal lengths. On an iphone, a 48mm focal length is considered tele, and the main cam is 24mm. That will surely take away the perspective from the Rocky mountains, if not your nose.
CCD or CMOS sensors count photons. They presumably have some natural frequency response curve, but the actual colour discrimination comes from the filters (usually some flavours of RGB, but has been other choices too).
It's those filters, and the colour reconstruction algorithms that change colour response, not the underlying sensor.
Welcome to modern "journalism" on the web. The medium (HTML) easily allows including as many high-quality images as you want in an article, but the writers are too damn lazy to bother including any.
It's similar to this whole discussion about CD vs. vinyl in one of the threads here: CD is technically a far superior medium, but the mastering engineers are too damn lazy to use it properly, and instead compress everything to hell ("brickwalling") and eliminate all dynamic range, whereas the vinyl mastering engineers apparently put a lot more effort into their work, so vinyl ends up sounding better.
I hit up a 100gecs concert awhile ago and there were a non trivial amount of people snapping photos with a nintendo 3DS. These pics are stereoscopic 3d so they can only really be viewed on a 3ds unless you want to cross your eyes or have access to one of those vintage picture holder thingies. The sensor in them is also not very great but it is what it is.
The gecs as a music act is a weird cross between extremely scuffed and extremely glossy, so the 3DS is somehow the perfect way to capture it imo.
The film secret sauce is usually varying temperature/hue in different regions/brightnesses of the image. The 2005 digital example exhibits this via red/magenta being excessive in the shadows, but falling off in brighter areas
Was "digicams" a word people regularly said in the 2000s and I just somehow didn't notice? I only remember these being called cameras or, when necessary, digital cameras.
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– Brian Eno
Nobody is nostalgic for ADAT.
After I graduated, I stuck to the all digital stuff and a couple of folks from my program and I went on to start a film company, and win 3 Emmy awards, over the years I was still in film I saw people bring various analog film things to set to try and see if they could somehow include it, be it some film type, some vintage light panel or whatever, but it was always just fad, there was a period of time everyone brought 35 to set just to "see if we could fit it in later" - it never got cut in, it was too difficult to match it to the digital.
It was always a fad bringing film to set, but those that did, I always admired they wanted to make that statement, no matter how foolish they seemed to many on set, I always appreciated the art they brought to the table.
I recently bought a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P5 with a broken back screen, honestly I've had so much fun with it, I went out with my wife this last weekend, left the phone at home and brought the Sony, had a blast looking at the frames when I got home, do recommend it.
Sorry for this random ass post, just this is my fav kinda HN content :D
For a recent movie, Strange Darling was filmed in analog. Great movie and looks unparalleled.
Dune was filmed on digital, transferred to analog, and the scanned back to digital for distribution.
I guess my point is, that there is some magic in analog. Whether the inherent limitations of the form, or by introduced randomness of the chemical process, or by placebo assumption of “realness”.
We live in an age of Netflix enforcing all shows to look exactly the same and even adding de-aging filters to actors. The gulf between the perceived reality of analog film and digital has never been larger. So yeah, analog excites me.
> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
https://www.instagram.com/p/C3HtsLXOgui/?hl=en
I'm also not super clear on how digital video would have jitter in a way that analog video wouldn't?
I totally agree with his overall sentiment, I'm just a bit confused on the specific examples.
As for digital video jitter, I can think of MPEG compression artifacts, both spatial (e.g. DCT mosquito noise) and temporal (e.g. motion compensation errors, periodic keyframe refreshes).
Analog videos never stutter but digital formats tend to have non-constant processing cost and do stutter occasionally. Maybe he's referring to that?
Some people might even be nostalgic for Bing. (People are nostalgic for Clippy after all.)
In other words.... you are not nostalgic for the thing itself. (The thing kind of sucks.) You are nostalgic for your childhood.
But when my kids started taking pictures with these cameras, I realized that the pictures were, subjectively at least, better.
We were in the Rockies and the pictures taken on their iPhones are sharper, more vibrant, but those photos lack perspective. It’s not just aesthetic. The mountains feel more like massive objects on these older cameras than they do on modern iPhone cameras.
Something else happens with digital cameras. My kids think more intentionally about the framing of the shot. They move into better positions. They think about light and shadows. With the iPhone it’s click and forget. So that contributes to better photos too.
Even with the point and click models that my kids bring to social gatherings, there’s clearly a sense of posture and special-ness about the photos that changes the dynamic more than everyone posing for a phone selfie or photo.
There are obvious limitations. My kids didn’t fully understand why older cameras perform so poorly in darker light without the flash.
But otherwise they really love their digital cameras. My eldest is studying abroad in France and it’s a real treat to get a batch of digital camera shots of life in Paris.
I now buy digital cameras in bulk and repair them slowly as a hobby and then resell them on eBay. It gives me a little spending money. I avoid the TikTok trend cameras - they’re too expensive to buy - but I make some nice pocket money on selling the in between models that perform really well.
And my kids get to pick their favorite models now and then.
It's partly about sensor size and tech., partly down the the limitations of tiny smartphone lenses, and partly down to what's added (or should that be taken away) by the "computational photography" software in modern smartphones.
Can you post a representative mountain photo from each camera? I'm very curious what generates this feeling for you.
https://postimg.cc/gallery/g8kzGHB
https://postimg.cc/gallery/ChSgbdd
Might be due to a combination of sensor size, focal length on the older camera, and the distance to the subject.
A big difference between smartphones and cameras is the focal lengths. On an iphone, a 48mm focal length is considered tele, and the main cam is 24mm. That will surely take away the perspective from the Rocky mountains, if not your nose.
They get confused, because one tends to / has to adjust one's position to obtain the framing one wants given one's focal length choices...
It's those filters, and the colour reconstruction algorithms that change colour response, not the underlying sensor.
I'm in love with this phrasing.
It's similar to this whole discussion about CD vs. vinyl in one of the threads here: CD is technically a far superior medium, but the mastering engineers are too damn lazy to use it properly, and instead compress everything to hell ("brickwalling") and eliminate all dynamic range, whereas the vinyl mastering engineers apparently put a lot more effort into their work, so vinyl ends up sounding better.
The gecs as a music act is a weird cross between extremely scuffed and extremely glossy, so the 3DS is somehow the perfect way to capture it imo.
Certainly they can have a pretty special and endearing look.