QuickTake ⇥ eggfreckles.net
Those of you picking up a new iPhone 11 model today will get to experiment with the new QuickTake feature in the camera app. But this isn’t the first time Apple branded something “QuickTake” — from 1994 until 1997, the company sold a line of digital cameras with the same name.
The QuickTake 100 was capable of storing up to eight photos at 640×480 resolution, 32 photos at 320×240 resolution, or a mixture of both sizes on its 1MB Flash EPROM. The QuickTake 100 had no upgradable memory. All photos were stored with 24 bits of color in a proprietary QuickTake PICT format that can not be easily read in Mac OS X. Every photo taken with the QuickTake 100 had to later be converted into a JPEG, TIFF, or BMP before they could be shared. The QuickTake 100 produced photos with quality similar to today’s most primitive camera phones.
I know this is twenty-five years ago and one of the first ever consumer digital cameras, but the idea of storing a maximum of only eight photographs is staggering to me, and at miserably low resolution, too. A grid of six “3×” iPhone icons would just fit into the area of a single QuickTake 100 photograph. I know times change and all, but that’s positively quaint.