30 Years Of
Digital Photography
It's 2027. It has now been thirty years since the Toshiba Tecra 530CDT was launched. With a suggested retail price of $5,099, (around $10,300 today), this was one of the more reliable laptops of the time, which we now know with three decades of hindsight, but also anecdotally, since this machine still functions with its original 2.1GB hard disk. The average lifespan of those drives is 3–5 years, so this one is living on fumes, fairy dust and luck. I have now replaced the drive with a compact flash card for general use, but I will try to spin up the HDD every couple of years, just to keep it going.
Since Photography is my main interest, and I collect cameras from around this period. I decided to combine it with an old Minolta RD-175 from 1995. This 1.5 megapixel camera uses a converted Minolta film SLR with reduction optics to
Old vs New
Unpacking
Unpacking this laptop was a joyous experience. Despite never owned a PC this old (let alone a laptop) it somehow brought all my early computer memories flooding back. After watching a couple videos about similar models, I realized I would need to perform some surgery on it first. These old models used Ni-Mh batteries for CMOS and Suspend, which can leak, corroding and destroying the motherboard and thus the PC. Unfortunately, this particular model needed a full disassembly to get to the batteries. It made me pretty nervous, but I managed to do it in about an hour or so. Reinstalling the OS without a floppy drive was more problematic. It can be done by formatting the drive on another computer and putting DOS and Windows directly onto the drive, but the version of Windows I used didn't play well with the USB port, so with no floppy or PCMCIA support there was no way to get photos on to the machine. I have ordered an IDE drive that allows compact flash cards to be used as a hard drive. This will make a second install much easier, and I will do it with a better version of Windows this time. I just have to wait for it to arrive from China. In the meantime, I managed to get the PCMCIA readers to work, so at least I can edit some images on Photoshop 4.0 for now...
Photos
Here are some differences in image quality from these two cameras, but also showing the difference in their software editing.
Image Quality
What do you notice first between these two images (above)? For me, it is the colour, then dynamic range and finally sharpness (resolution + optical quality). Even with modern software, I could not get the sky to be blue without messing up the white balance of the rest of the image. I could get it closer with more advanced editing, but that would be unfair. If I was doing this editing on the old laptop, it would have been even worse.
Being a bright sunny day the old Minolta doesn't struggle at least, well I had to put the aperture down to f/11 for it not to be overexposed and that makes it a 85mm f/22 equivalent, but at least I managed to get some colour in that sky. That makes the f/13 I used on the modern Sony actually a little more blurred from depth in the foreground. There isn't a massive difference in depth of field here otherwise, but that's not how I usually use a portrait lens. For that, check out this next image...
Depth Of Field
Since I shot these in the shade, it allowed me to have the Minolta's aperture at its fastest (f/6.7) here, but due to the crop factor this unfortunately doubles to a very lacklustre 85mm f/13.4 equivalent. Compared to the fast 85mm lens on the modern Sony, this is six and a half stops slower, which makes a massive difference to subject isolation. Despite the friendly shaded lighting, I'm still pretty impressed by the older camera's dynamic range and sharpness. My expectations of 1.5 megapixels using reduction optics was that it would be unusable, but that's not the case