A Digicam is something that your kids and/or younger adults have been talking about for a while now. And let’s be honest, it’s a word that has been around for many years now. But in modern-day vernacular, the word Digicam has changed to mean something different. If you’re a bit confused, then we’re going to break it down for you here.
A DigiCam colloquially refers to any camera that was digital. In fact, it’s a contraction for Digital Camera. But in today’s world, a DigiCam refers to older cameras that are typically before the time of smartphones and around the time that they really started to become commonplace in our hands as consumers. Essentially, it’s a camera from a time before we all had one in our pockets attached to something that makes calls.
But it can get even more complex. The whole idea is that you’re trying to shoot images that remove all the scene detection, AI, etc. Think film cameras, but with a digital aspect to them. With this in mind, you can think about the earliest digital cameras that were still more or less borrowing technology and ideas from the film days. Digital cameras and technology hadn’t yet stretched its imagination to understand what it could fully become.
While these usually refer to point and shoot cameras (those with a fixed lens), it can also refer to some DSLRs.
DigiCams are different from Retro Digital cameras in that those cameras are typically vintage — which means that they’re from around 20 years ago. Retro Digital cameras are from a time before scene detection, AI, etc, all came into cameras. It also removes lots of the crazy processing done in-camera to make images cleaner and cleaner.
The idea is to rebel against AI and the norms. And honestly, I’m into it. I founded this website with the idea that we should take photography out of the lab and bring it into the real world.