A 20-Year-Old digital camera is the hottest gadget in Gen Z

Last spring, Anthony Tabarez celebrated prom like many of today’s high schoolers: dancing the night away and capturing it through photos and videos. Tabarez, 18, is seen with his friends, smiling and jumping around on a packed dance floor.

Tabarez, however, didn’t use his smartphone. Instead, Tabarez captured prom night using an Olympus E-230, a silver, 7.1-megapixel digital camera that was made in 2007 and owned previously by his mother. Cameras like this one began to appear in high school classrooms and at social events. Tabarez gave his camera to Tabarez on prom night. He snapped fuchsia colored photos that looked right from the early aughts.

“We’re so used to our phones,” said Tabarez, a freshman at California State University, Northridge. “When you have something else to shoot on, it’s more exciting.”

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The cameras of Generation Z’s childhoods, seen as outdated and pointless by those who originally owned them, are in vogue again. Young people love the novelty of the old look and are posting photos from their digital cameras on TikTok as well as sharing them on Instagram. The hashtag #digitalcamera on TikTok has been viewed 184,000,000 times.

Modern influencers like Kylie Jenner, Bella Hadid and Charli D’Amelio are encouraging the fun and mimicking their early 2000s counterparts by taking blurry, overlit photos. Influencers post these photos on social media, rather than publishing them in tabloids or on gossip sites.

Most of today’s teenagers and youngest adults were infants at the turn of the millennium. Generation Zers were raised with smartphones that had everything, so it was no longer necessary to have separate cameras, maps devices, or other gadgets. According to Pew Research Center, 36% of U.S. teens said that they spend too much time on social networks last year.

That respite is coming in part through compact point-and-shoot digital cameras, uncovered by Gen Zers who are digging through their parents’ junk drawers and shopping secondhand. Popular finds at social events include the Canon Powershot, Kodak EasyShare and Kodak EasyShare camera lines.

In the last few years, Generation Z has been seized by nostalgia for the Y2K era. It was a time of tech enthusiasm but also existential dread. TikTok is seeing the nostalgic trend spread to other fashion brands like low-rise jeans, velour tracksuits, and dresses over jeans. Mall-stalwart brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and Juicy Couture have reaped the benefits; in 2021, Abercrombie reported its highest net sales since 2014. Today, there’s a Y2K nostalgia to the technology that made these outfits so popular in their heyday.

This time, the poor picture quality isn’t for lack of a better tool. It’s on purpose.

Compared with today’s smartphones, older digital cameras have fewer megapixels, which capture less detail, and built-in lenses with higher apertures, which let in less light, both of which contribute to lower-quality photos. The quirks and imperfections of photos taken by digital cameras can be treasured, rather than deleted in a stream of standard smartphone photos.

“People are realizing it’s fun to have something not attached to their phone,” said Mark Hunter, a photographer also known as the Cobrasnake. “You’re getting a different result than you’re used to. There’s a bit of delay in gratification.”

Hunter, 37, began his career documenting the nightlife scene in the early aughts with his digital camera. In those photos, celebrities — including a “You Belong With Me”-era Taylor Swift and the newly famous Kim Kardashian — look like ordinary partygoers, caught in the harsh light of Hunter’s camera.

He photographs a new generation of celebrities and influencers. But the photos are almost indistinguishable to his older ones, if his subjects held flip phones instead. They are rewinding the clock to 2007 and “basically reliving every episode of ‘The Simple Life,’” he said, referring to a reality television show from that era that features Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.

But many new point-and-shoot digital cameras come with today’s bells and whistles, and older models have been discontinued, so people are turning to thrift stores and secondhand e-commerce sites to find cameras with sufficiently vintage looks. On eBay, searches for “digital camera” increased by 10% from 2021 to 2022, with searches for specific models seeing even steeper jumps, said Davina Ramnarine, a company spokesperson. For example, searches for “Nikon COOLPIX” increased by 90%, she said.

Zounia Rabotson’s earliest memories are of traveling and posing in front of monuments and tourist attractions as her mother pressed a button and a digital camera whirred to life. Now a model in New York City, she has returned to her mother’s digital camera, a Canon PowerShot SX230 HS made in 2011.

Rabotson, 22 years old, posts photos on Instagram that are grainy and overexposed of her wearing miniskirts in denim and small luxury handbags. She says that she looks up to models from her childhood and that taking photos in a similar style makes her “feel like I’m them.”

“I feel like we’re becoming a bit too techy,” she said. “To go back in time is just a great idea.”

Rabotson doesn’t disconnect entirely. She has featured her camera on social media, captioning her fourth most popular video on TikTok: “Pov” — point of view — “you fell in love with digital cameras again.”

On TikTok, teenagers and young adults now show off cameras nearly as old as they are and explain how to achieve a “new aesthetic.” The cameras are not always well received. After influencer Amalie Bladt posted a video on TikTok telling viewers to “buy the cheapest digital camera you find” for “the over exposure look,” some of the more than 900 commenters responded in horror.

“NO NO NOOOOO PLS NO, I CANT RELIVE THIS ERA,” one person commented. “I swear I’m not that old.”

However, the despairing millennials and those with modern tastes were overshadowed by comments from users who had tagged friends and asked how they could upload photos from their smartphones to their digital cameras.

Brielle Saggese is a lifestyle strategist for WGSN Insight. She said that the digital camera has been popular among Gen Zers as it seems more authentic online. Photos taken with digital cameras can impart “a layer of personality that most iPhone content doesn’t,” she said.

“We want our devices to quietly blend into our surroundings and not be visible,” Saggese said. “The Y2K aesthetic has turned that on its head,” she added, describing mirror selfies and photos where digital cameras are visible accessories as “stylistic choices.”

Rudra Sondhi, a freshman at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, started using his grandmother’s digital camera because it seemed like a happy medium between film cameras and smartphones. He estimates that he takes a photo with his digital camera every five shots with his smartphone.

“When I look back at my digital photos” — from his actual camera — “I have very specific memories attached to them,” Sondhi said. “When I go through the camera roll on my phone, I sort of remember the moment and it’s not special.”

Sondhi, 18 years old, shares photos taken with his camera on a separate Instagram account called @rudrascamera. These photos show the spectrum of young adulthood from mingling in college dorm rooms to enjoying a Weeknd performance. He said that his friends instantly deem the moment special when he pulls out his camera.

Sadie Grey Strosser was 22 when digital cameras marked the beginning of a new stage in her life. She took a semester off from Williams College during the pandemic and began using her parents’ Canon Powershot. She used @mysexyfotos to document nights out, long drives, and washed-out photos.

“I felt so off the grid, and it almost went hand in hand, using a camera that wasn’t connected to a phone,” she said.

When her digital camera broke last summer, Strosser said she was “so upset.” She later started using her grandmother’s Sony Cyber-shot, which had “such a different character.” Meanwhile, she said, if her iPhone broke, “I couldn’t care less.”

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