A family break with the CCD Nikon Coolpix P50.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, we took a family holiday and I didn’t take my main camera with me. In the past I’ve tried to shrink things by only taking the smallest lens, and just keeping it to one camera love lens, however this time it was the vintage Nikon Coolpix P50. A 15 year old (2008) semi-point and shoot camera with a tiny CCD sensor.

The first thing that comes to mind, is the whole holiday was a huge surprise and a boost in enjoyment for a number of reasons that I never thought about before the trip

The biggest thing I noticed was that I no longer had to worry about how I’m going to keep my camera safe, or if I should leave it in the hotel room etc. It was literally in my pocket the whole time, no matter what trousers or shorts that I wore. There was no worrying at all, not a single moment of panic.

Secondly, because of its size, I could take it out and take photos of anything, and no-one seen it as a camera. The kids didn’t care, people around didn’t care, and I didn’t hesitate to simply pull it out of my pocket and take a photo of whatever I wanted.

Thirdly, it brought me the joy of flash photography (you can spot them in the photo gallery below). These days with my more professional cameras, there is no built-in flash, and the DSLRs I have had have seen the flash being next to useless. With a camera from 2008, a flash was essential in certain circumstances, and it was a joy to use, giving an almost film like look and feel to images that used the flash.

Fourth, the out of camera images, including those with the flash as mentioned, look very organic and almost film like. It is because they are not perfect that they are special. With only a tiny amount of editing, the already great jpegs become even better.

Fifth and definitely not finally, is the experience. Although the Nikon P50 is also a fully manual camera, it also offers an excellent “P” mode, for full automatic photography with the ability to tweak as needed. I have forgotten how much easier it is to just think about the photographs you are taking instead of worrying about settings. It’s a beautiful feeling and experience, and I really don’t care what people think, it was a pleasure using the camera that way.

Here are the images from the camera. The only editing that has taken place is rotating, cropping, exposure correction if needed and adding a border. Because the jpegs have nasty barrel distortion, I have also corrected this where I feel it was needed.

A few people told me before I went away to take my X-T3 with me, as I would miss out on its image quality. While there is no denying that the X-T3 and Olympus have much superior image quality in every possible way if you pixel peep, I think that is actually missing the whole point of photography.

I wanted to capture images, I wanted to not be seen with the camera, I wanted to get images I could print easily up to A4 and I wanted images I could share on the internet. In that respect, the little Nikon P50 and its CCD sensor passed every test very easily and in fact surpassed those needs.

I know many buy the latest cameras for the best possible image quality, but 99% of those people just waste their money as they don’t complete the photographic process, and don’t print their images! In fact, they just share to social media, where none of what they bought their cameras for matters!

I’m not saying these cameras are perfect, because they’re not. The battery life is terrible (I went through 6 AA batteries in 4 days), the image on close inspection falls apart much quicker than on modern cameras, there is noise in even the slightest dark conditions and there are imperfections everywhere. However, for general photography, and for printing, sharing on social media and using on websites, they are more than capable! Plus of course, they give you fantastic results straight from camera and they have a very organic look to them. Most importantly, it is just fun! And I feel too many people are too serious with their photography these days.

So, give it a go one day, or join our Facebook group dedicated to CCD sensors, and explore the nostalgia that is vintage digital photography.