21 cameras that have changed the history of photography

Launched in 1900, the Kodak Brownie was the first popular camera. It was only $1 and was primarily designed to drive sales of the Kodak’s 117 film, as well as to popularise photography. The Brownie was, in fact, a simple cardboard box which a meniscus lens was mounted on. It was replaced in 1901 by the next model, which costs $2 and was – as the first one – a huge success.

The first Rolleiflex, introduced in 1929 after three years of development, used 117 film too. Later models switched to 120 and 127 film. One of the first “waist-level” cameras, followed in the 1930s by models such as the Automat, which could automatically read and report the number of remaining shots.

Launched in 1938, the Kodak Six-20 was twenty years ahead of the market. It was the first camera to introduce the self-exposure concept. Kodak introduced it as the “camera with the electric eye”. Unfortunately, it was unsuccessful: it was very expensive at the time ($225), more than a Leica, and it was considered quite unreliable.

The name of the first snap-shot has nothing to do with landscapes, but comes from Edwin Land’s surname, inventor of the film developing system inside the camera that would become symbol of the Polaroid brand. The Land Camera Model 95 was the first model to be produced by the company in 1948, but various subsequent ones were produced until the early 1980s.  

Launched in 1959, the Nikon F was the Japanese brand’s first professional 35mm single-lens reflex camera. It was immediately adopted by professionals, particularly photojournalists, and its design led the way for all subsequent Nikon film SLR models. Little known fact: the name “F” comes from the F in “reflex”. The decision not to use the initial “R” is due to the difficulty of pronouncing this letter in various Asian languages.

In 1969 the Apollo 11 astronauts brought with them various cameras to document the moon landing. Among them were two special models realised by Hasselblad, Sweden, that have gone down in photographic history: the Hasselblad Data Camera (HDC) and the Hasselblad Electric Camera (HEC). The HDC is the one you see attached to the astronauts’ suits in the famous moon landing photos. The latter was used to take pictures from inside the Lunar Module Eagle.

Presented for the first time at Photokina of Cologne in 1972, the OM-1 introduced a light and compact design in a market dominated by heavy and bulky SLRs. It never managed to undermine the Leica and Nikon’s dominance, but it was certainly a success, especially among those approaching professional photography, thanks to the excellent lens system compatible with the camera body too.

The Polaroid Land Camera was also the first true instant camera, the SX-70 is the model that almost everyone associates with the brand. Launched in 1972 by Edwin Land, it allowed you to take a lot of pictures quickly and the image development took no more than 10 minutes. It was not cheap in the 1970s, but it was a huge success: by 1974 Polaroid had sold more than 700,000 of them.

Launched in 1977, the K1000 was a huge success because of its build quality and the strength of its mechanics. It was not a particularly advanced camera, but it was a small, reliable battleship that could be taken anywhere and used in almost any condition.

Produced from 1984 to 2002, the Leica M6 is the result of a thirty-year evolution of the M series, born with the M3 model in the 1950s. It is a rangefinder camera equipped with a TTL (“through the lens”) exposure meter and is widely recognised as one of the best models ever produced by Leica. Even today, almost twenty years after its production ended, crowds of enthusiasts still review it and are willing to pay several thousand of Euros to buy one.

Today, the Autofocus concept is a standard that has reached the highest technological heights. However, just over thirty years ago, it was an absolute novelty. The first camera to introduce the autofocus was the revolutionary Minolta Maxxum 7000, in 1985, which combined autofocus with automatic film advance. In Asia the camera was called the alpha-7000, the same name that Sony would retain for its line of digital cameras many years later after its acquisition of Minolta (2006).

The first model in Canon’s highly successful EOS series, this 650 was the first to introduce the EF lens system, designed to work with autofocus lenses. It may not have been clear at the time, but the EOS 650 led the way for Canon’s historic EF series of cameras and lenses in 1987. The EF system was so well engineered that Canon would not introduce a new one until 2018, with the EOS R’s launch, the company’s first mirrorless and the first camera to introduce the new RF system.

Soon forgotten, Apple’s digital cameras enjoyed their moment of glory for three years, from 1994 to 1997, until Steve Jobs returned to head the Cupertino company. Three models were produced, in different formats, two made by Kodak and one by Fujifilm. They had a resolution of only 0.3MP and cost about $700. They sold quite well in specific markets, but today they are mainly remembered as relics for fans of the bitten apple brand.

In 1997, when the transition from analogue to digital seemed inevitable, Olympus launched the second model of its Mju compact. Despite its compact size, the Mju-II was able to take great pictures, so much so that today it is one of the most expensive film compacts you can find on the second-hand market for fans of analogue photography.

In 1999, it was already clear that times were changing for photography. Not many people will remember the VP-210 for its phone features, but Kyocera’s phone certainly deserves a place of honour on this list for introducing the first camera in a mobile phone. Smartphones and Instagram were still a long way off, but surely anyone who looked at this product without prejudice would have seen the signs of the revolutions that would rock the photography market over the next decade.

Also, in 1999, a major brand of photography was preparing in time for the change that was coming. The D1, Nikon’s first digital camera, was unveiled on 15 June of that year: it had a 2.3 Megapixel sensor, a resolution unacceptable even on the cheapest of smartphonestoday, and could shoot 4.5 frames per second.

Six years were more than enough to completely change the face of the photographymarket. In 2005, Canon introduced its EOS 5D, the first in a series of four cameras (EOS 5D Mark II, Mark III and Mark IV) that would become the absolute standard for professional photographers (at least, for Canonists) for the next decade. The 5D Mark IV is still the standard camera for a wide range of professional photographers today. From a certain point of view, Canon was also a victim of this success: the caution in disappointingthe most loyal customers can be seen as one of the reasons for the “delay” of the Japanese brand in entering the mirrorless sector. Today the mirrorless equivalent of the EOS 5D is the new Canon EOS R5.

In this list, Fujifilm deserves a place of honour for its ability to rise from the epochal film crisis. The company has managed to innovate like few others, exploring other industries where its thin film chemistry know-how is still well paid for and launching a series of very interesting digital cameras. We chose the X-Pro series (launched in 2012) because it embodies the retro aesthetic of the Japanese brand at its best. With the X-Pro 3, the latest in the series, Fuji has gone even further into the realm of nostalgia, creating a great digital camera whose rear screen is normally kept closed and hidden, in favour of a small screen that instead shows the type of film effect selected and the shooting characteristics.

After the Minolta and Konica’s acquisition in 2006, the Japanese brand had enjoyed some success with its translucent mirrorless cameras. However, it will be the new professional mirrorless Alpha 7 series to throw Sony into the photographic empyrean with advanced-feature cameras that appeal especially to multimedia professionals and filmmakers.

The rise of aerial photography in TV series and movies over the last five years is due to one video drone company: DJI. The Chinese giant’s drones have also helped revolutionise the photography and land art industry, with products such as the DJI Mavic Pro. Launched in 2016, DJI’s compact video drone is controlled from your smartphone and can produce the highest quality photos and videos. It is also foldable and extremely compact, as well as affordable: the latest models can be bought for just over £500. Further legitimising DJI’s presence in a list dedicated to cameras: the company’s recent acquisition of the historic Hasselblad brand.

In a list of the cameras that have made history, you cannot miss the one that we all carry in our pockets: the iPhone. We could have included the first iPhone, from 2007, but we chose to close with the latest and most powerful model ever: iPhone 12 Pro Max. The importance of the iPhone – and of a few other Android phones, such as Google’s Pixel or Huawei’s Mate and P – in the evolution of the photographic industry is easy to underestimate, and it is easy to fall into the temptation of dismissing these products as toys for non-professionals. However, the reality is different: smartphones have literally destroyed the market for compact cameras, where the big players like Canon and Nikon used to make their real profits.  Not only that, but they have helped to introduce and develop the concept of computational photography, i.e., a new form of digital photographic imaging that relies on software to make up for the shortcomings of hardware. The rules of optics will never allow lenses mounted on an iPhone’s tiny sensor to achieve the same effects or colours as a lens mounted on a Canon R5, which has more glass area than the smartphone’s display and weighs at least ten times as much. However, the software running on the iPhone manages to cope so well – and in total autonomy – that it has enabled us to create professional-grade photographic content with objects that, after all, were supposed for telephoning only.