Animations from an unlikely source

Who knew digicam menus could be this beautiful? (I did.)

Look.

Aren’t these animations beautiful?

This is a camera I wish I had grown up with. It’s a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ5. It came out in 2006, but I bought it in 2024. It was 30 bucks on eBay.

I love this camera. It has a “simple mode” with an icon that looks like a heart. It has a mode dial and a power switch. It has a 6x zoom and it takes pretty darn good pictures. It has the crunchiest screen you’ve ever seen, which somehow makes the pictures even more beautiful.

But my favorite part of this camera is the animations that play when you select a scene mode. Do you remember these modes from your own old digicam? Did you ever use them? I didn’t. But they changed the settings based on whatever you were photographing. Portraits. Food. Sports.

Photos are detail but no movement. These animations are movement but no detail. The one thing photos can’t quite capture. Hair billowing. Clouds drifting. Stars twinkling. Wine…drinking?

Panasonic doesn’t take these too seriously. The fork and knife are dancing. The snowman is waving. (He’s just happy to be alive.)

I’m bad at being concise. I’m trying to practice with these posts. And these animations are good inspiration. They are two to four frames each. They have a palette of exactly five colors: white, black, light blue, red, and yellow.

They tell a story. I kind of want to live in this place, where only the best memories happen. Ballet shows and meteor showers. Fireworks and candlelit dinners. Babies crawling as their families watch, lovingly.

All this takes place against a dark blue backdrop. The kind you’d see on your old CRT television set, when you cut on the VCR or switched to an input with no signal. The color reminds me of the cover of The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton. Like the night is electric with possibility, the kind you could feel even when you were a child buckled into the backseat.

They didn’t have to do this. Panasonic could have just put boring static icons. It would have been cheaper. But someone decided to care. Someone decided this would bring joy.

And almost twenty years later, it still does.

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What do you remember about your digital camera, the kind you put in a drawer once your phone replaced it? Do you remember what color it was, what brand? What photos you took, and when, and where? Was it confusing to use?

Do you miss it?

Tell me everything in the comments below. And for more digicam nonsense, make sure to subscribe:

See you next time.

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P.S. My GIFs don’t quite capture the vivid colors of the animations, especially the reds. So here’s a video showing these the way they were meant to be seen: still crunchy, but less so.