Remember this thing? The Apple Quicktake 200

It’s possible that this escaped my attention in 1997, because at the time, I would have been listening to Smashing Pumpkins and playing Riven most of the time. Meanwhile, Apple was slapping its name on a Fuji camera and trying to pioneer a new industry — and failing. It was a noble effort (like the Newton), but ultimately the Quicktake 200 was too early and probably too expensive.

This is a pretty good retrospective of the device, which took 640×480 pictures onto a 2-megabyte flash card. That was a lot of space back then, remember? I’m actually surprised it didn’t take 3.5″ floppies. If they were each about 40-50kb, you’d be able to get 35 or 40 pictures on there, no problem!

Unfortunately, at $600 it was kind of expensive, and you could get much better quality from a scanned 3×5″ photo. Hell, you can still get great quality out of a scanned 3×5 today! In any case, it went the day of the dodo and until relatively recently, Apple (bitten once) was twice shy about returning to the imaging field.