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Isn’t showing how to use the camera just a common courtesy if you’re asking them to take a photo for you? It’s not really specific to a disposable camera, nor today. Even back in the day, people would do the same, despite cameras generally having a big clear button to take the photo with.
Two teens asked me if I would take their picture and I said sure. One of them handed me her phone and I ran away with it. Hey, free phone.
(shut up, it’s a fucking joke)
I actually saw a shop that developed film the other day in my local area. Genuinely surprised and delighted me. Got a brief trip through time and space to nostalgia land where I was constantly being told off for taking photos of landscape.
If you’ve ever worked customer service, you know that automatically providing instructions is warranted; half the people you run into in public would struggle to operate a spoon without guidance.
Just try getting a technologically illiterate person to click in next during an install is like finding hens teeth, except if it comes up with an error they’ll dismiss it instantly without reading it.
I used to work tech support during the Windows XP days. One time I had a customer call in and, as part of the troubleshooting process, I asked them to click their Start button. The customer didn’t know what that was so I told them that it was the button in the corner of the screen. The customer said that they did that and the screen went blank. They’d hit the power button on their monitor.
Didn’t the Windows XP button actually say Start on it?
And “you’re scrolling too fast !!!1!1” when on a webpage
And it is me. I am people.
half the people you run into in public would struggle to operate a spoon without guidance.
I wouldn’t. I know how to clean my nose with a spoon!
Vinyl records being popular again is very cool and not a comeback I would have ever expected. What’s really interesting to me is how much better quality they are than in previous decades.
Records had been around for a century (vinyl for about 40 years) by the time they were phased out of mainstream music distribution in the late 80’s. Over time, manufacturers used cheaper and thinner vinyl to the point where they were just complete and utter shit.
The ones they put out today are thicker and closer to audiophile grade than their predecessors.
Same thing happened with casette tapes and cassette mechanisms.
Most people think cassette tapes were terrible, because they remember the bargain basement iron tapes and no noise reduction. A top quality chrome casette when recorded well and played back on the right hardware is very difficult to tell apart from the digital original.
Similar story with VHS to be honest.
There’s a “minimum acceptable quality” which people were willing to tolerate, and manufacturers inevietably converge towards it in an effort to shave off a few cents here and there.
Audiophile now is very different, because it’s not a mass market consumer format any longer - it’s a niche hobby, and people are willing to pay top money for their hobbies.
Really? I’ve heard the opposite: that modern cassette players are garbage because they all reuse the same Chinese mechanism with mono playback and no Dolby noise reduction.
If you want a good cassette player, you’re supposed to buy one from the 80s or 90s, preferably a Sony.
Yeah that’s exactly the problem with modern cassette players, they’re almost a waste of money. And the tape that is still produced today is quite terrible compared the old tape, so you also have to find old tape as well
I own two modern cassette players. I’m not old enough to have really lived through the original cassette era, but can confirm the modern stuff is kinda trash. Lots of motor whine. Would love to get my hands on a Walkman, but can’t justify the price. Tbh I kinda lost interest in cassettes more recently. I love the idea of physical media and mix tapes, but digital just feels more practical.
Indeed, some models are reselling for extremely expensive prices nowadays, it’s a bit crazy. Especially since digital is just much more convenient, but it can feel nice to have some physical media
Alternatively you could look into a cassette deck if you’re not set on a portable player (one released before the 2000s, I don’t think they make new ones at all anyways), the high or medium end decks tend to have better sound – there’s much less flutter/wow – compared to portable players in the same price range nowadays, since they’re less “cool”. Still have to be pretty lucky to find good deals though
Well yes that’s true.
The modern hobbyist resurgence is in vinyl, not cassette. I was only mentioning cassette to make the point that the same phenomenon occurs in other media too - of technologies getting worse over time. Especially true in cassette, in fact.
Good cassettes players are old ones.
It seems hit or miss. Most of my vinyl is 180 gram, I guess because it isn’t the primary means of consumption for music these days, people expect to pay a little more for better quality. But I definitely have a lot of cheaper, thinner records that I bought brand new in the last few years.
People probably kinda forgot how to cost cut when it went out of style, as the vynl market was mainly just audiophiles for a little while, and now that the market is growing again there’s more incentive to cut costs again.
Hasn’t vinyl been around longer than 1985?
I suddenly feel old, doing the math wasn’t nice to me
They’re saying that by the late 80s when cassettes and CDs ultimately replaced the record, records had been in use for over a century, and the recognizable 12" disc format had been in use for 40 years prior to their replacement.
Oh duh, I misread that
Erm I have vinal records my dad gave me from the 50s
You are correct they are thin as shit though compared to the ones I buy now
I’mma be honest, I’ve used disposable cameras, but not in a long time. I’d appreciate the reminder if I were handed one. Something about winding after (or before?) each photo?
For most of them, it doesn’t matter. When the film is wound on, it would hit a ratchet stop to prevent you winding it beyond the next film cell anyway - which would only be released when the shutter button was operated, so you’d intuitively feel whether the film had been already wound forward or not.
This thread reminds me of inexpensive package holidays as a child. It’s brilliant.
When I was a kid my parents used to buy loads of those disposable cameras whenever we went on holiday to keep me and my sister quiet. It’s hard to believe that we found it diverting.
Today’s kids would not be happy with anything less than an iPad.
as an uncle of a “todays kid” - not true at all
Brief moment in history…
I remember reading this tip in a magazine. Instead of having a professional photographer at a wedding, put a disposable camera at every table.
That should be a tip for your reception, not the wedding itself.
These days it’s reasonably common to replace the disposable cameras with a QR code or link to where people can upload photos they took on their phone.
My eldest asked me “have you seen the memes about this One Pound Fish guy?”
I’m like “dude, I paid my 79p to try and get that song to Number 1”… back when it mattered.
Okay Boomer
