A digital camera may have been on a holiday gift wish list of a Gen Z in your life this season.
If you’re wondering why someone between the ages of 12 and 17 would want an outdated piece of technology, you’re probably not doomscrolling enough, because digital point-and-shoots are trendy again and Gen Z is driving up their popularity in the same way they have with vinyl and film cameras.
“We are seeing more young people looking for things like point-and-shoot cameras, which we literally can’t keep on the shelves,” said Evelyn Drake, who works at The Camera Store, a Calgary-based business along 11th Avenue S.W.
Alongside brand new gear, the shop also sells second-hand cameras. Drake says they’ve been hearing from a lot of young customers who are gravitating toward a photography experience that’s completely off their phones.
“Hopefully manufacturers are really going to take note of that and start making more of them, because I think that there’s a really big opportunity here,” she said.
“There’s been more of a trend for the young Gen Z generation to look for different ways to express themselves with photography.”
Digital cameras trend again
On TikTok, #digitalcamera has over 287,000 posts.
Additionally, searches for the term “digital camera” have been on an upward trend in Canada for the past five years, peaking near the end of this year, according to Google Trends.
There’s been extensive reporting on how Gen Z loves the vibe of so-called retro digital cameras, or how the generation’s fascination lies within the nostalgia of a simpler, more affordable technological time, but perhaps the news cycle hasn’t dug deep enough.
Some say the why behind Gen Z’s affinity for yesterday’s technology is more profound than just aesthetics.
Based in Amsterdam, Sofia Lee is the co-founder of @digicam.love — an Instagram account and online community with over 13,000 followers — and the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI), an online community that analyzes design and visual culture.
Lee believes blaming nostalgia for the surging popularity of digital cameras among Gen Z doesn’t tell the full story.
“I think it’s ironic that Gen Z is stereotyped as being the most logged-on generation, when a lot of their countercultural tech practices indicate the need to break away and create a space that is separate from the internet,” said Lee.
The aversion to smartphone photography, according to Lee, also comes from the fact that the images have become so HD and highly processed that they no longer feel like true pictures.
Using a digital camera means “it’s not uploaded instantly to the internet the way a phone image can be,” she says. “It also undergoes a significantly more primitive set of algorithmic transformations in order to produce the JPEG image.”
‘Being intentional with consumption’
It’s no secret that today’s young people are more connected than ever — according to data from Statistics Canada, younger Canadians reported higher-than-average usage rates for various online activities, and in 2022, over 99 per cent of Canadians aged 15 to 24 reported using the internet.
But as younger generations become increasingly online, so too does the need to touch grass.
Veronica Garcia is a 26-year-old based in Calgary who uses a Nikon Coolpix S4100 — a compact digital camera that launched in early 2011.
“I love this thing…. The way I use it, I feel like it helps me be more in the moment instead of it being like a phone,” she said, adding that a phone in 2024 has become so much more than just a device for calls.
Garcia says most elder Gen Zs grew up in a time before the smartphone dominated everything, but also have been around for the transition to a new digital age.
She says she first had unrestricted access to the internet at 13 years old, and it’s been a big part of her life ever since.
“It’s been over a decade of the worms in my brain,” she says, describing how being chronically online contributes to overall brain rot (Oxford’s 2024 word of the year).
And Garcia’s own tech habits aren’t limited to photography. She also uses a little black flip phone as her daily cellphone, which she affectionately calls a “dumbphone,” as well as a portable MP3 player to listen to music and a 2001-era Canon ZR30MC digital camcorder for videos.
“It’s really just that shift toward being intentional with consumption and just how you spend your time on the screens that suck the soul out of you.”
For Garcia, it’s not really about being on-trend or conjuring up some nostalgia that romanticizes the past. On its most surface level, she says young people’s affinity for digital cameras is a rejection of modernity.
“Everything is political,” said Garcia, adding that it’s a small choice that ultimately helps her disconnect from big internet.
Because people in their late 20s have had a front-row seat to the constantly evolving tech landscape, re-embracing these outdated machines might be a commentary on the pace of technology.
A photographer herself, Lee expects the renaissance of digital point-and-shoot cameras won’t be short-lived among this younger generation of photographers, as she’s watched the community of digicam users grow over the years.
Lee and her other @digicam.love co-founders have organized over 60 meet-ups for point-and-shoot appreciators across the globe since they founded the page in 2018.
“On one hand, there is a trend happening, of course. I think that that’s undeniable,” Lee said.
“But I also think that we could say film photography was a trend…. As you can see now, it still exists.”
