Introduction
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As we approach both our 25th anniversary and, it seems, the end of the site, we thought it would be appropriate to look back at the landmarks we’ve seen in camera development, the breakthrough cameras released during the time we’ve been covering the industry.
If the following list feels incomplete, it’s because we’re not trying to call out every noteworthy camera, but instead highlight the models we felt represented a significant step forward for digital camera capability. It’s a mixture of cameras that were the first to offer features that went on to become popular and models we felt were the first to do things well (a lot of those ‘firsts’ weren’t necessarily great cameras).
We’ve tried to avoid focusing solely on range-topping flagships that rarely ventured beyond the hands of professionals, both because it’s obvious that they’d represent the most that money can buy, and because we want to recognize those cameras with exciting new powers that made their way into people’s hands, and delivered enjoyment in return for a personal outlay.
In Part One we’ll look at the years 1998-2006, when digital photography was a rapidly changing landscape of experimentation and progress, with occasional peaks marking new solutions that would continue to this day. Part Two will follow the trail from 2008 to the present time.
Canon PowerShot Pro70 (1998)
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It’s impossible for us to be objective about out how significant the Canon PowerShot Pro70 was, because for us it’ll always be the first camera DPReview ever covered. It was an ambitious, enthusiast-targeted compact camera with a 3:2, Type 1/2 sensor and a 28-70mm equiv. F2-2.4 lens, which the crop factor implies actually measured around 7.7×5.1mm. The sensor was a 1.6MP CCD chip with a Cyan/Yellow/Green/Magenta color filter array. Though incredibly simple by modern standards it did feature a flip-out, fully-articulating screen and took remarkably decent JPEGs, despite lacking anything so complex as white balance control. For us, at least, this is where it all began.
Read our Canon PowerShot Pro70 review (or our reassessment of it, when adding it to our studio scene)
Nikon Coolpix 950 (1999)
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The Coolpix 950 helped bring the historical rivalry between Canon and Nikon into the digital era. 1999 was the same year Nikon introduced its first in-house DSLR, the D1, following years of collaboration with Kodak, a significant camera in its own right (see next slide), but in this article I also wanted to give space to mainstream cameras, since DPReview’s focus was never really on pro-grade exotica. The Coolpix 950 featured the then-common split body design and brought the magnesium alloy build, the P,A,S,M modes and the command dial that existing (film) photographers would expect. It had a 2.11MP CCD sensor with the now familiar Red/Green/Blue Bayer array. It was also nominally a Type 1/2 sensor but the crop factor implies much closer to the 6.4×4.8mm size that would usually entail. Its 38-115mm equiv. zoom was less bright than the vast lens on the Canon Pro70, but its F2.4-4 maximum aperture range still showed ambition. Phil shot the two cameras side-by-side in August 1999, in an article we’ve recently restored to the site.
Click here to read our Nikon Coolpix 950 review | Click here to see Gordon Laing’s Dino Bytes video looking back at the camera.
Nikon D1 (1999)
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Kodak had spearheaded the creation of the DSLR and, focusing its initial efforts on pro photographers, had made models with both Canon and Nikon, to ensure both of the mounts most used by pros were supported. Although we don’t want to get too obsessed with pro-level tech, the Nikon D1 is worth a call-out as the first DSLR developed solely by a single camera company. The EF-mount Kodak Pro DCS 520 was also sold by Canon as the EOS 2000D, but the Nikon D1 didn’t depend on Kodak internals and was built into a body that was designed to be a digital camera, rather than being an adapted film body. The D1 was built around an APS-C sensor outputting 2.7MP images. Years later Nikon revealed that it was derived from an industrial sensor that actually had four times this number of pixels, binned together to give appropriate photographic performance: something we’re seeing again in recent cameras such as the Sony a7S III.
Canon Digital IXUS / PowerShot S100 Digital ELPH (2000)
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The original PowerShot S100 wasn’t the first genuinely compact camera Canon had made, but it was the first to earn the right to use the IXUS/ELPH branding from the company’s style-focused APS film models. The 2.1MP Digital IXUS featured the same relatively minimalist stainless steel body as their colloidal silver shooting siblings. Phil’s review seems amazed by the size, and it’s still impressive how small it was given that the IXUS took Compact Flash cards (which, despite the name, are not especially compact as memory cards go). It would be another year until SD started appearing in cameras and another three years before Canon would adopt them into this series. The fairly small Type 1/2.7 (~5.4x4mm) CCD sensor is what allowed a 35-70mm equiv. F2.8-4.0 lens to fit into such a small body. It’s tempting to blame some of the blandness of future compacts on the IXUS (it’s fair to say it’s no Coolpix 850), but I remember how desirable this series was considered, back in the early 2000’s: a digital camera you could take out with you, socially, without being that guy. Its carefully considered angular attitude is the antithesis of the brightly-colored soap bars that came in its wake.
Read our Canon Digital IXUS / PowerShot S100 Digital ELPH review.
Olympus C-700 UZ (2001)
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The Olympus C-700 UZ (ultra-zoom) wasn’t the first superzoom camera (the Sony Mavica FD91 that Phil covered in his second-ever review had a 14x lens), but it was one of the first to be usefully compact. Another 2.1MP Type 1/2.7 (~5.4x4mm) sensor (don’t think that a limited number of sensor suppliers is a new phenomenon) allowed Olympus to fit a 38-380mm equiv. F2.8-3.5 lens into a relatively compact body. It was a tremendously useful combination of size and flexibility, on which Olympus founded a successful series, one of which I’m pretty sure became my first experience of a decent digital camera when the office camera at Professional Engineering magazine fell into my hands. Olympus went on to develop the Wide Zoom range, which were unusual in providing something wider than the 36 or 38mm equiv. angle of view offered in early compacts. In turn these paved the way for the really compact wide 10x travel zoom category that Panasonic dominated for a time. With the gift of hindsight, that makes the C-700 US the antecedent of the compact camera segment that held out longest against the smartphone onslaught. Though, as Phil pointed out at the time, 380mm equiv. without stabilization was a challenge.
Read our Olympus C-700 UZ review
Sony DSC-F707 (2001)
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There’s a lot of love for the series of cameras begun with Sony’s DSC-F505 from 1999, where a large lens barrel hinged around the camera body. Cleverly, the tripod mount was on the barrel, meaning you could mount it on-axis and move the controls freely. The founding F505 used a 2.11MP Type 1/2 (6.4×4.8mm) CCD sensor (sound familiar?) behind a 38-190mm equiv. F2.8-3.3 zoom. In 2000 the DSC-F505V moved to a larger 3.34MP CCD, but because it used the same lens as before, could only make use of the central area of it, meaning in practice the jump was only to 2.58MP.
The DSC-F707 was a much more significant overhaul, using the full region of a larger Type 2/3 (8.8×6.6mm) 5MP CCD chip. It was paired with a larger lens, still offering 38-190mm equiv. coverage but now with a maximum aperture range of F2-2.4. The increase in sensor size and maximum aperture together account for a 2EV improvement over the previous model. The F707 also brought ‘Hologram AF’ (presumably named by the same people responsible for Sony’s ‘4D Focus,’ etc. branding today). This was a Class 1 laser that emitted a cross-hatched AF illumination pattern to allow the camera to lock its contrast detection AF in low light. The camera also had a mode for composing in really low light that removed the sensor’s IR filter from the optical path, minimizing light loss.
The series concluded two models and two years later with the 8MP DSC-F828 that replaced one of the green elements in its color filter array with an ‘Emerald’ filter. Again, it’s hard not to be impressed by the originality.
Sigma SD9 (2002)
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Sigma had made film SLRs before the digital era but the SD9 was its first digital camera. It was also the first camera to make use of Foveon’s innovative multi-layered X3 sensor. The technology is quite unlike any other sensors on the market: instead of generating color information from a filter it uses the fact that different wavelengths (colors) of light can penetrate silicon to different depths, reading out the photoelectrons generated at three depths in the sensor. This means that it isn’t limited to capturing a single color at each pixel and hence doesn’t need to demosaic the image to derive the other color values. Thanks to this the SD9 was able to product very sharp, detailed images that looked unlike those from any of its rivals. Its 3.4MP pixel count was quite low, even for 2002 – 6MP was increasingly common by this point – but its detailed images earned the technology a loyal fanbase.
Canon Digital Rebel / EOS 300D (2003)
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The first digital installment in Canon’s already popular line of EF-mount DSLRs, the EOS 300D / Digital Rebel was the first DSLR to be launched, with zoom lens, for under $1000. For that money you got the same 6.3MP APS-C sensor (CMOS, no less) as featured in the EOS 10D, which had launched for twice as much money just six months earlier. Various features were omitted to maintain a distinction between the two models, with the cheaper camera having only a single command dial, much less substantial construction and a pretty tiny viewfinder, but it represented a major milestone in bringing high end digital photography to within the reach of a wider number of photographers.
Read our original Canon EOS 300D / Digital Rebel review
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D (2004)
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The Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D (Dynax 7D in the US) was the first interchangeable lens camera to offer in-body stabilization. Up until that point, stabilization had been lens-based (as it’s not especially practical to shake a strip of film), but Konica Minolta instead mounted its sensor on a platform that could be shaken up/down and left/right to compensate for hand shake and camera motion. This meant that any lens mounted on the 7D could benefit from a degree of image stabilization. The camera earned our ‘Highly Recommended’ status, though Phil expressed concerns about the startup times and the price. His other concern was the very capable competition and that proved prescient: within a year Konica Minolta had announced a collaboration with Sony, and it left the industry completely not long after. And, while the A-mount was eventually abandoned and little, if any, KM DNA has made its way into Sony’s modern ILCs, the idea of in-body stabilization went on from strength to strength. One by one every major manufacturer adopted and developed the concept, from Pentax and Olympus to, finally, Nikon and Canon in recent years.
Read our review of the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D / Dynax 7D
Canon EOS 5D (2005)
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Just as the first Digital Rebel brought large-sensor image quality to a wider audience, Canon’s original EOS 5D helped expand the ‘full-frame’ format beyond the preserve of professional photographers. It put a large 12.8MP sensor in one of Canon’s mag-alloy, twin-dial bodies, rather than the hefty two-grip EOS-1D format. At $3300 body only, the EOS 5D wasn’t inexpensive by any means, but the price was low enough that really dedicated enthusiasts gained a (somewhat) practical way to use EF lenses with the angle of view they’d been designed to give. We’ve known many of these cameras that soldiered on for a decade or more, right up until the point their mirrors came unglued and fell out.
Read our original Canon EOS 5D review
Olympus E-Volt E-330 (2006)
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The E-330’s live view systems were complicated. Sony would try something comparable in its rather unlovable a350 and a380 DSLRs, some years later.
The E-330 wasn’t technically the first DSLR to have live view – Canon’s astrophotography variant of the EOS 20D got there first, in a short-duration mono mode that could only be used in the dark – but it was the first credible attempt. In one of the most-quoted lines in this site’s history, Phil Askey described the E-330’s complex two-mode live view system as ‘a solution looking for a problem,’ which sounds like a quote rendered ridiculous by history. But read in full – ‘I found it to be (a) a solution looking for a problem and (b) poorly implemented’ – and put in context of the camera’s peculiar operation, time is a little more kind. The E-330 used a system that can be seen as ingenious or convoluted to offer live view either through a small CCD in the viewfinder, or by flipping its mirror out of the way and using its main LCD, only to flip the mirror back in and out again to acquire focus. Both modes had significant downsides. Still, while modern live view (which focuses using the main sensor) arguably owes as much to the compact camera as to the E-Volt, the Olympus was unquestionably a landmark in digital photography.
Read our original Olympus E-Volt E-330 review
End of Part One
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We leave Part One having covered eleven cameras from the first eight years of the website’s history. At that point we had started to see the industry’s focus shift towards larger sensor cameras, perhaps because looming over Part Two is the arrival of the smartphone.
I’m glad to be able to invite you to join me tomorrow to look at the years 2008 to the present day, which continued to be a period of great change both for the industry and for DPReview.com. The reviews in Part Two start to include a wide ranger of names, my own among them. Please return for more on our look back at the most significant cameras in DPReview’s history.
Special thanks to Gordon Laing of CameraLabs for his help making these selections. If you’d like to learn more, his Dino Bytes series on YouTube looks back at the electronics of this era.
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This article comes from DP Review and can be read on the original site.
