{"id":731124,"date":"2026-08-08T04:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T04:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/731124\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T04:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T04:34:08","slug":"digital-cameras-and-wired-earphones-are-back-and-a-bit-more-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/731124\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital cameras and wired earphones are back – and ‘a bit more real’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Luckily I’m out with my photography-loving best friend, who helps adjust the settings on the camera and gets snapping while I’m otherwise engaged on the dancefloor.<\/p>\n

The mere sight of us pulling out the camera and squinting through its tiny viewfinder draws attention \u2013 “I’ve not seen one of these in years”, a man remarks.<\/p>\n

He’s right \u2013 digital cameras had their heyday in the late 1990s and early 2000s, just before smartphones took off.<\/p>\n

There are currently 42 million active film camera users globally, more than a third of these aged 18\u201330 and largely influenced by social media trends, according to a market research report, external<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n

So why, when we’re surrounded by more advanced tech here in 2026, are they seemingly making a resurgence?<\/p>\n

For Lily Redman, a 26-year-old content creator from South Wales, digital cameras “capture a quality that my phone just can’t replicate”.<\/p>\n

She’s been taking one on nights out and to concerts and feels the flash on her phone “is grainy and too high definition” compared to the “more smooth” finished product on a digital camera.<\/p>\n

“I think people are looking for a bit of grit or something that feels a bit more real,” she says.<\/p>\n

That may also explain why low exposure photos taken on iPhones and Androids \u2013 where people dodge ready-made filters to artificially crank down the exposure setting and produce a darker image \u2013 are also popular on socials right now.<\/p>\n

With digital cameras offering an element of surprise when you plug in the memory card reader to your computer at home, digital cameras capture a moment in time.<\/p>\n

“If I look back at photos my mum took when I was two, they look so old but when I look at photos I took five years ago, they look like they were taken yesterday,” says Redman. <\/p>\n

“Phone photos have warped our perception of time.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luckily I’m out with my photography-loving best friend, who helps adjust the settings on the camera and gets…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731125,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-731124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731124\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}