Originally, this article was going to be about how the Canon S5 IS was going through a bit of a moment. Sometime between 2005 and 2009, I was so intimately familiar with that camera that I could tell you so much about it. From my recollection, it had a 12x optical zoom, a swivel LCD screen, could make up to three frames a second, had all manual controls, and boasted optical image stabilization. It’s nuts to think that today, this is a bit of a novelty for consumers who mostly use their phone and zoom in digitally. But then I realized something: all those cameras are currently experiencing a moment. And to reiterate what I’ve said before: long live the digicam.
To do this article, I went back not only into the Phoblographer’s archives, but into my own personal archives. On my Flickr account, I can find images there that predate my time before founding the Phoblographer in 2009. It’s the host to stuff like images from my Canon 5D Mk II and even my older Olympus E-510. That took me back to articles and reviews that I’d written a long time ago too, like for the original Canon 35mm F1.4 L in EF mount.
I graduated college in 2009 and now, we’re almost 20 years from that time.
The trend of all those things being highly coveted by Gen Z and Gen Alpha doesn’t make me feel old, but instead, I look at this era as a type of mid-life Renaissance. According to WatchCount, the Canon S5 IS is going for over $100 now. Crazy enough, that’s around the same price as the Olympus E-510 is now too. The Olympus camera is very special because it used a Kodak CCD sensor that eventually evolved into becoming a LiveMOS sensor. Those had CCD quality but CMOS-like performance. And that whole era of camera sensors is something that I truly kind of miss. I never really wanted them to go away — but I also did appreciate what came directly after them: the Olympus EM5 with its Kodak Portra-like colors when it’s been developed to be a bit more vivid.
The truth is that images from that time and cameras from this era still made photographs that work well for the web. The lead images of this article was made back in 2010 and it is still at a resolution that works in 2026.
Ultimately, I embrace these ideals because it came from an era when cameras felt a whole lot more genuine and organic. The selection of sensors weren’t all controlled by one company and the lens elements didn’t all come from fewer than you can count on one hand. Plus, there were even more camera manufacturers out there. Casio, Samsung, Kodak, HP, Vivitar, and many others made digital cameras.
YouTube and social media was initially pretty fun until it sucked the life out of us like a desert leaves the plants barren. These days, everyone is pretending like they’re an expert — yet I just saw a YouTube video of a creator who just got a camera from Pixii yet doesn’t understand how to use a rangefinder.
This isn’t an era that we need to go back to. It’s an era that needs to return in an organic way and not just some marketing scheme.