Epson

Epson PhotoPC (1995)

Here’s a noteworthy digital camera from 1995.

It’s the Epson PhotoPC, the Sanyo VPC-G1, the Sierra Imaging SD640 and the Colorio CP-100.

I’m not kidding. This might be a simple early digital camera but it had a complicated commercial existence. It was marketed by three companies – Epson, Sanyo and Sierra Imaging – under four different model names.

Its actual maker was Sanyo which licensed it to the other companies. (Colorio was a brand of printers and related products marketed by Sanyo in Japan.)

As this was 1995, the camera is unsophisticated. It has fixed aperture and no zoom. It has just 1mb of internal memory. It has no monitor screen. It is big. My photo shows how much bigger it is than the Kodak DC25 of the same year.

However, it does have ease of connection to a computer. And that’s the point of this point-and-shoot. Epson intended the PhotoPC to complement the well-established line of Epson printers. It screamed this news on the box with slogans like “The quick, easy way to bring pictures into your computer” and “Just imaging what you can do!”.

What you can do, after connecting the camera to your PC, is to control the camera from your keyboard as well as perform quite advanced manipulation of your photos. All that for about US$500.

So that, ladies and gentlemen, is the PhotoPC and the VPC-G1, the SD640 and the CP-100.