You ever wonder???

Buttons252 wrote:

Ive never shot film, developing it is a complete turn off to me -- but using a film camera looks like a lot of fun. Mechanical dials, metal body, smooth focusing lenses. I remember how much i enjoyed my Pentax SMC 50mm F1.4 lens on a pentax KX. would enjoy it even more with a mechanical camera to go with it especially if it had a large and bright viewfinder

Yep, it sure was a lot of fun for 30 years for me, at least as far as camera handling went.

I am drawn to the older ccd cameras because i enjoy the challenge of what you "can" get out of them. Everyone seems to be so proud of their Iphone these days, but when i show them portraits I took with a $90 Sony A100 from 2006 and a $30 Minolta 70-210mm F4 lens they are floored.

Yes, I share your liking for getting a lot out of little. It's rewarding. I sometimes mention on forums that it's only for the "edge cases" where a fancier camera will deliver noticeably better results than more basic cameras. If one doesn't really go to the edge case situations in one's photography, the fancy cameras just aren't necessary.

Everyone talks about "the film" look, i dont even know what that means.

You are right to not know what it means: all the different films, be they colour and monochrome and slide, have widely variant 'looks', so "the" film look is an oxymoron. Having said that, I suspect that the key attributes of the stereotyped notion are: a bit of an S-shaped tonal curve with an especially long flattish highlights region; more colour saturation in the mid tones than in the shadows and highlights; and at the very least a small hint of granularity, instead of the ceramic-smooth look of a well-exposed digital image.

Sigma foveons have a unique look about them and i think my CCD cameras also had a unique look -- is it filmish? i dont know, but its pleasing to me in certain circumstances.

Well you have come to the right forum if you want reinforcement for your implication that sensors have 'looks' -- but you won't get it from me. I've concluded that Sigma's software has a lot to do with the 'look' of Foveon, but the concept and the cameras are cool-as, all the same.