Macro photography taken with my 2003 Minolta DiMAGE X20.
Subjects are from top to bottom:
Headphones that came with a 90′s Sony Walkman.
Underside of a Chinese Elm Bonsai leaf (just under 2 cm in length).
Glass crab ornament (4 cm).
A 1986 Kasparov Pocket Chess computer (Pieces are 5 mm high).
A 90′s AT-ST Star Wars Micro Machine (4 cm high).
Since I've been doing a lot of macro photography lately, I remembered that my old point and shoot was pretty good for this type of thing back in the day. So I decided to dig it out of a drawer to see what it could do.
I obviously like using old digital cameras, but can a 2 megapixel digicam from 2003 really still cut the mustard nearly 20 years later? I think the answer is yes!
OK, so truth be told, I wouldn't want to use this camera for anything else (it’s not at all bad for a point and shoot of this vintage, I just have better options these days). But for the very specific purposes of sharing macro photography on the web, I think it's still excellent.
I did heal a hot pixel or three in GIMP, some very minor level adjustments, some extra sharpening for the bonsai leaf and I cropped the AT-ST and bonsai leaf images (not that there’s much to crop!). Otherwise, these images are more or less straight out of the camera.
I plan to write a little more about this camera as I’m currently putting together a favourite cameras page for my website (it takes me a looong time to write things up though, so who knows when that’ll be ready).
