Shooting With a 1998 Original Gameboy Camera

The Gameboy Color from the late Nineties had a camera module you could buy separately. I owned one of them and I remember enjoying it, particularly paired with the Gameboy printer. But, just how bad was the quality back then?

When I was just entering my teens, I begged my parents for a mobile phone (back then, they weren't a staple of life yet) and eventually I got one. Then, at some point in 2001, I got a Sony Ericsson T68i. The reason I wanted this particular phone was that it came with this chubby, plug-in camera that allowed you to take photographs. I had one for my Gameboy already and enjoyed it, but I knew I'd always have my phone on me, so I wanted that one too.

I can't find an example shot with it, but I remember thinking it was really quite good. I'd enjoyed the Gameboy camera and it felt like an upgrade. Before I watched this video by Vuhlandes, I couldn't remember what the images looked like, but I had a rough approximation as a memory and now I've watched the video, I can say I was way off.

It's really quite remarkable how far we've come in a little of two decades. The Gameboy camera was a real hot item back in the late Nineties and it was common to see printed photos on pinboards in your friends' rooms. Now, I look at the images taken with it by a professional photographer, and I can't see what on earth I was enjoying about it!

There is of course diminishing returns, but it's hard not to wonder how absurdly awful our current tech will be in the 2040s.

Robert K Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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1 Comment

honestly, my first camera :D