the Apple QuickTake 100 digital camera, developed in conjunction with Kodak and sold by

Apple Computer beginning in February of 1994. And it was initially sold at a

price of $749 US Dollars and was the first color fully-digital camera to hit

retail at less than $1000 on launch. And even though there were later releases

that connected to both Windows and Mac OS, this original 100 model I have here

only came with software to use with Macintosh computers. It was also

specifically geared towards taking advantage of Power Macintosh hardware as

this vibrant sticker on the front so boldly proclaims. "The freedom to bring

the world directly into your computer." Wow, all of the world just, right in there!

This was immeasurably exciting in 1994! No need to wait a week or two to get

your roll of film developed, now you can enjoy your photos the very same day.

And not only that but it did so in 24-bit color, which was still a notable

accomplishment. Its nearest-priced competitor the Logitech Fotoman Plus

shot in black and white only, and the color Dycam Model 4 cost nearly

twice as much as the QuickTake 100. Yeah that's right, an Apple product that was

both technically impressive *and* lower in price than the competition!

My how times change.

I got this particular QuickTake 100 at a local Goodwill a while back, as

seen on LGR Thrifts episode 30. I considered it quite a lucky find because

coming across these original model 100s can be a bit tough, especially complete

in box and as lightly-used as this one appeared to be. Speaking of that box

let's go ahead and get this thing open! And starting right off here with some

floppy disks, two of them that are just the normal program to work with pretty much

any Mac and then a third one to use if you have a Power Mac. You also get a bit

of Apple company paper work here: the warranty and their software license

agreement. As well as a 70 page user's guide for the Macintosh version of the

QuickTake 100 here. All sorts of useful information on how to set it up and use

this thing which, again, was kind of a new deal at this point in time. Most people

didn't even know digital cameras were a thing, this is all pretty uncharted

territory for everything from the software itself to how to use the

functions of the camera. New problems like "oh no my camera won't take pictures

why might that be?" Well maybe it's cuz the memory is full. "What, a camera has

memory, you have to erase it, that's wild." And then in the bottom of the box tucked

away in this little formed package are a few different things. Starting with the

wall charger for the nickel cadmium batteries, well that was nice of them to

include. You can just use normal AA batteries of course, but it came with an

official QuickTake charger as well as some rechargeable batteries right here.

Which I would have attempted to use, just out of curiosity, had they not been

leaking. You also get a cable to connect to the computer and work with the camera

and get your images and such. This is a GeoPort serial data cable. And then of

course there is the QuickTake 100 camera itself. And yeah it's kind of a

charmingly ugly beast, in my opinion. It's about the size and shape of a pair of

small binoculars. It weighs 18.5 ounces with batteries

installed, so just over one pound or half a kilogram. On the front of it here with

this little sliding cover that you move to turn it on you have an 8mm

fixed focus lens, the equivalent of a 50mm lens on a

35 mil camera. With an aperture ranging from f/2.8 to 16 and a

focus range of four feet to infinity. As well as shutter speeds between

1/30 and 1/175 of a second and an ISO of approximately 85. Yeah this used

a cut-down version of the CCD that was used in the earlier Kodak DCS 200

digital camera back. That thing was an $8,000 monster so having that kind of

capability in something this size and so relatively cheap was pretty neat! And

your pictures were stored on one megabyte of internal EPROM flash memory.

It's not removable, it's just in there all the time, but the nice part was that

your photos were saved even if you didn't have any batteries installed.

Unlike certain contemporaries like the Fotoman that used volatile RAM, so

you'd lose your pictures if the batteries ran out or they were taken out

or whatever. With a whole megabyte you could get 32 pictures stored at 320x240

resolution or 8 pictures at 640x480. Yes, a whopping 0.31 megapixel is what

you get with this $750 camera from 1994. Oh but hey, they threw in a free carrying

strap, that's nice. And before we get to start taking some pictures, let's take a

look at a couple of the other little things that are on here. Including this

little pop-open side panel which provides the serial connection as well

as a place for the optional external DC power supply. Along the bottom you have a

standard tripod screw mount and these two spots at the bottom are for hooking

up the strap. And around the back is where we have our viewfinder as well as

an LCD panel. There are four different functions here, the first one letting

you change the flash functionality -- whether you want it on, off, or auto.

A button for letting you switch between the high and low-res image capturing

modes. A button for enabling the timer shutter release so that you, you know, can

do timer-y things. And a recessed button here to let you delete all of the

images that are stored on the camera. Yep all of them at once, only press that if

you're sure that nothing you've taken is good. And finally when you're ready to

take yourself a photo you slide open the front panel and the shutter release

button is on the top. Just this awkward plastic button that you

smoosh inwards and there you go!

*quick and quiet shutter sound*

It quietly and rather quickly takes and saves a photo, it's a

little quicker than some other digital cameras I've used from this time period.

Gets a full resolution image saved in just a couple seconds! And of course to

take a look at the photos we need a computer, and for that I have chosen this

lovely Power Macintosh 7300/200.

*classic Mac startup chime*

First things first you'll need that serial cable plugged into the back of

the computer, and it's going to be plugged into either the printer or the

modem port. And then the other end just plugs into that little opening panel on

the side of the QuickTake itself. And that's really it, just make sure it's

turned on and you're ready to go! Just stick those floppy disks in there and

you'll be installed and ready to go in no time. So the QuickTake 1.0 software

is what this comes with and well, it is the most bare-bones of image retrieval

and editing tools. In fact there's not much here in terms of editing, it really

is mostly just for getting the camera images off of the camera itself and onto

your computer in the file format that you choose. Anyway you can view them

directly or you can choose to move all of the images to your hard disk. And it

does it pretty quickly, only taking about a minute for the full one megabyte

transfer. And then it'll ask you if you want to erase all of the images from the

camera, "yes or no." And if you say yes it'll bring up this little camera

control panel and delete the images straight away. And if you stick around in

that camera controls area after that then you can do pretty much everything

that you could with the camera. Like switching around the options for flash,

resolution, and timer and deletion. But you can also take a picture. You won't be

able to see a live image but you will immediately see it quote-unquote

"developed" and show up on your desktop. And your results may vary. But yeah at

this point you can view your images within QuickTake -- and you do need

QuickTake. It actually shoots in its own version of PICT images, that's P-I-C-T.

You can save in TIFF or uncompressed PICT formats as well if you'd like, but

those are gonna take up more disk space. And yeah just check out some of these

shots! As usual I like using older digital cameras and just older cameras

in general to take pictures of things where you really wouldn't be able to

tell when it was taken. Stuff that's era-appropriate, like buildings and old

electronics. Especially technology I just like taking pictures of, with old

technology. There's something poetic about that, especially cars. Oh my

goodness, cars and appropriate surroundings just make for some really

convincing new/old pictures in my opinion. And I did not actually notice

until after I had already developed my first set of pictures that

a lot of my images were shifted to the left. Like I was trying to center up these

coffee mugs and then try to get a shot through this chain-link fence at this

cool background going on. But it ended up with other stuff being in the way of the

lens, it just wasn't centered. And that is

because -- I didn't actually think about this when shooting -- so, you have the flash

over here and then you have the little hole for the viewfinder to look through

and a couple sensors right there. And the actual lens isn't where you would

naturally expect it to be in the center or close to it: it's off to the right,

when you're shooting that is. So you have to keep that in mind and compensate when

you're framing your photos through that little slightly unhelpful viewfinder,

just forcing you to get into the habit of moving everything to the left when

you're trying to center up images or frame them in a certain way. And let's

also talk about the color reproduction because they were so boastful about that

24-bit color. And you know, a lot of these early CCDs like this had very washed

out kind of blown out colors, and this one is no exception. I talked about all

those specs before with the ISO and the shutter speed being very limited, and

indeed it is. But also just the colors that it picks up are really strange. Like

this ridiculous scene right here, that's not supposed to be anything pink there.

That's like reds and oranges and blues and tans, and it just comes across as

bizarre. Anything that's red looks a little more pink and anything that's

pink is ridiculously pink. And also you have to keep in mind that this is not

good at doing any kind of close-up imagery, like this right here was shot

about one foot away from this camera. And of course it's blurry, the minimum

distance that it can photograph things sharply is four feet. Which means that

unless you have arms that are over four feet long every single selfie you take

is going to be a bit blurry. Or just completely washed out because the flash

goes crazy and does not know what to do with things that are up-close and blown

out by the flash. But hey, instant beauty filter! Also worth noting that that file

format that it saves things in by default, you cannot open that in Photoshop or

pretty much any modern image editor without a plugin like UFRaw. And this

one will take that raw image that's been compressed and you can save it as

something else in GIMP or whatever you want to do. Still that QuickTake format

does a reasonable job of compression. It makes every image about

116 kilobytes, whereas if you were saving it as TIFF it'd be like 900K per

picture. Certainly something that would have been handy back in the days when

floppy disks were your primary way of transferring files like this. And really

that is it for the Apple QuickTake 100! I think it's a pretty darn neat little

camera. It's interesting, if nothing else, because it was so early to the party and

really its results aren't that bad for 1994. But at the same time I can

absolutely see why it did not become this massive success for Apple, because

it just was too far ahead of its time and nobody really knew what to do with it.

Granted it still was followed up with a

factory updated Plus version, and then two follow-up models the 150 and the 200. But

it was still only on the market three years, being discontinued in 1997 when

Steve Jobs returned to Apple and drastically simplified their product

line. Still, while the QuickTake wasn't a bastion of market success, I don't

exactly agree with all of the hyperbole I see online retroactively branding it

"an unmitigated disaster" and "one of the single worst Apple products ever made."

Yes, it was expensive and low on features, but that's what you get when you're an

early entry in a new product category. And if you actually look it up, critics

at the time when this was released were praising the QuickTake for being as

affordable and capable as it was, compared to the few other competing

digital cameras back then. I know pointing out Apple's failures gets clicks,

but I don't think the QuickTake is truly the worst. It was, however,

absolutely early to the party and expensive, costing more than a good

35mm SLR at the time. It is no wonder that it didn't exactly

fly off the shelves but you know, that is exciting and unproven technology for you!

No one knew where it was going, photographers were debating whether or

not digital could ever replace film. And yeah, cameras like the QuickTake

definitely wouldn't replace film, but it was an important step along the way

to getting to that point.

And if you enjoyed this episode of LGR perhaps you would like to see some of my

others! I like talking about old tech and digital cameras, or computers, software,

and oddware, all sorts of things every Monday and Friday. So stick around if you

like this kind of stuff. And as always thank you very much for watching!