Ancient History

It is interesting the way time is measured by modern technology. The cycles are so short that a new product may be almost obsolete on the day it is released for sale. We have become used to a constant flow of goods, sometimes in categories that didn’t even exist in the ancient past of two years ago. So it is with some amusement that I publish this post featuring an image shot with a digital camera fourteen years ago.

I was new to photography when the Minolta 7i was released in 2002. I had started doing photography about a year earlier using an Olympus C2000z 2 megapixel camera. By the time the Minolta became available I was anxious to stretch my skills ‘to another level’. Funny, thinking that I spent nearly a thousand dollars on the 7i without having much of a clue as to how to make a decent photograph. It could be argued that I still am clueless about photography but we’ll have that discussion another day.

The Minolta turned out to be an excellent camera for me. It was slow with pretty bad auto focus and used a proprietary RGB color space. I loved it from the moment I held it on my hand. I even made a few decent pictures with it. It was obsolete even before it was released, being superseded by an improved model within a couple of months. Just a year or two later the entire company became obsolete and was acquired by Sony. Technology marches on and consumers must keep up.