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Belinda walked into the studio yesterday holding a CF card in her hand. She handed it to me and told me she'd found it in a desk drawer. She wanted to know if I needed it anymore. I don't think she assumed that there were images on it because we're both pretty good about
always backing stuff up. The card was a MicroTech 64 MB (megabyte, not gigabyte) card. Records show that it is one I bought in 1999 for a trip to Madrid for a company called Tivoli (now a subset of IBM).
I expected that a fifteen year old card would be corrupted by now but I stuck it into the card reader and opened up all the files in Preview. The files originated in a Nikon Coolpix 950. It was one of Nikon's swivel body compact digital camera, sporting a whopping 2 megapixels of sensor resolution and a 3X zoom lens. It took four double "A" batteries and its native ISO was around 80. You can buy one used on Amazon now for about $35. If I remember correctly the cameras costs about $1200 when they were new.
I used that camera as well as a few other Nikon Coolpix swivel body variants do document trade shows back in the very early days of digital, in conjunction with film. The film shots were for posterity and the digital shots for uploads to news sites and web sites.
When I moved on to bigger cameras, like the Kodak DCS 660 and 760's I handed the Nikon 950 to Belinda to use for fun, social picture taking.
The two images above are of me and five year old Ben. We're playing the Pokemon version of Monopoly which nicely combines two of Ben's favorite games.
While the images were taken with direct flash I think the camera did a good job at exposure and it certainly did a good job getting everything in focus. The skin tones are nice and there's enough detail for a decent snapshot.
I guess CF cards are decent medium/long (10 years?) storage devices. I guess I'll figure out a use for this stack of newer Sandisk, high capacity cards sitting in a stack on my desk. The only camera I have left that uses them is the Sony R1 and I think a couple of 32 gig cards will be adequate for that camera for some time to come....
