FACING THE FUTURE

IN CASE YOU HADN’T ALREADY NOTICED, this issue of Camera marks the magazine’s 40th birthday; forerunner Camera Craft having been first published in June 1979. This, of course, is cause for a bit of champagne-quaffing and high-fiving, accompanied by the inevitable look back at just what’s happened over the last four decades. Well, this being photography, a lot has happened over the last four decades… in fact, “a lot” doesn’t really cover it.

Photography has been changing ever since we set out coating glass plates and developing them with made its debut. With the arrival of the first camcorder in 1983 and the more compact cassette formats over the next couple of years, video was the consumer electronics phenomenon of that decade (big enough for use to publish an offshoot magazine called ), and it was logical that still photography would be next. The convenience factors – especially from eliminating the need for film processing – were just too significant to ignore. And, bear in mind, many of the so-called ‘photo companies’ got involved in video at this time, including Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Kodak (which pioneered the popular 8mm format), Fujifilm, Konica, Agfa and Polaroid. It was logical, then, that still video – an analog format – was considered the next step forward, until at the 1988 Photokina, Fujifilm showed that digitisation made much more sense and had much greater development potential. The Fujix DS-1P was a little camera – and, incidentally, never made it into volume production – but its impact on photography has been huge and far-reaching.