When I walked into the building that houses the Steve Jobs Theater for the iPhone 16 launch last week, the first person I saw taking a photo of the room wasn’t using an iPhone; they were using a compact digital camera.
I’m not talking about a fancy Ricoh GR III. I’m talking a PowerShot, Cybershot, or a Coolpix — something with 6 megapixels and a CCD sensor that makes anything above ISO 1600 look like confetti. These cameras are in style right now with a certain subset of photographers, tired of phone photos looking “overprocessed,” running straight in the other direction to the hard contrast and blown highlights of those early digital sensors. What’s old is new again, and artificially bright shadows are out.
Apple’s reaction to the…