|
|
|
|
|
|
by bambax
4669 days ago
|
|
|
Why the hate? I too used to make my own prints, not at home since we didn't have the equipment or a spare room that could be darken, but at school. I still have lots of paper from that time -- certainly useless by now. I think this is kind of cool though; the big difference with a real film camera is that you get to do it picture by picture. On a film camera you have to expose a whole roll of film, then process it, then go back and see what shot you want to develop (which is not easy if you only have the film; I used to order small prints to help me choose which pictures I wanted to print myself). With this, you can go ahead and print the picture you just took. Will the quality be a little crappy? Probably. But it's a toy! What's wrong with toys? Would you complain that your kid's toy car doesn't have a real gas-powered engine? |
|
|
" speaking as someone who used to spend hours and hours as a kid in the 1980s in our garage, making prints in our home-made darkroom."
That is why, the grand parent has an emotional attachment to the memories of making prints in their garage, and someone has made a toy which will give someone a "photography like experience" (sort of like an "Easy Bake" Oven gives you a cooking experience) and they cry inside over the cartoon like experience of something that was so transformative in their life. It expresses as hate.
When they put in an escalator on Mt. Everest for the last pitch, when you "run a marathon" in virtual reality, or when you replace all the chemicals in a chemistry set with water. Basically if you take an experience that someone had, and make it accessible by reducing the challenge and/or fidelity you will invoke this reaction on people whose emotional enjoyment of their memories is the challenge or fidelity.
That said, I don't think it will be all that successful. We were quite successful helping folks enjoy analog photography with light sensitive paper and pin hole cameras. Even contact prints of leaves or insects can give you a sense of wonder. This seems like it will be much more expensive than that without much in the way of additional depth so the value proposition is effectively lower.