No Products in the Cart
Prepare to wince, all ye photographers of a certain age - for thou art guilty.
But don’t feel too bad - you’re only guilty of being good customers. And you have made many people in the photo trade very happy. You’ve bought us houses and cars, and paid for our holidays. We are grateful.
The eight-track tape was a wonderful way to play music in motor cars in the 60’s. If you were out of reach of the local AM station, you could still plug an eight-track into a player and have stereo hi-fi until the tape snarled. The cartridge was sealed even tighter than it’s successor - the cassette cartridge - and your best way to repair it was with a hammer.
It was just one of the long line of products in the audio world - the records, the wire reels, the tape reels, the cartridges and cassettes and discs and all, that I, we, you, and they kept buying - buying and re-buying as electronic companies kept up the pace of change. If we fancied a certain piece of music - perhaps a symphony or Spike Jones crooning a love song - we might find ourselves buying it on anything up to a dozen formats and platforms.
Were we as bad with photo goods? Well, we went from plates to films to roll films to cassettes of rolled film to plastic packs of film to discs of film and every time we added one more new recording medium we had another catalogue to collate and store. And we had another shelf of cameras and lenses to dust.
Is it any wonder that we open our personal Tech Sheds, look down the long shelves of past machines, and then close the door and go drink?
Somewhere there is a person with a record player - possibly the wind-up type - who keeps filling bound photo books with pictures they take on their Kodak Retinette and has never been unhappy with the results. I take my old hat off to them, as they have won the fight I lost.
