Driving by a "found-in-the-house" neighborhood sale, stopped to find a camera bag with almost unused EOS Rebel SLR with kit lens, $20. Just before buying, looked in a pouch and found this pristine Kodak Z627 with 35-420 equivalent zoom, 6mp, 12 oz. Seller said, "Just take it, bonus!" (Turns out, nowadays, these old space-age-looking cameras are in vogue with some rich elite youth who want to impress their friends that they have flashy cameras that are cooler than those boring, flat cell phone cameras.)
So, yeah, I'll take photos with this older camera on walks with my wife, or daily life photos, don't need more than 3mp for these shots anyhow. (The photo of the camera is less than 600kb, and works here...)

Move a few times and you will understand. I have moved around 7 times in the last 22 years and each time I decide to part ways with more "stuff". Each time I move I embrace the concept of minimalism a little bit more. In the last 10 years, my wife and I have gone from a four-bedroom house with a 2-car garage to a three-bedroom condo to a one-bedroom cottage. This summer we are moving to a one-bedroom apartment.

I figure that in another 5 years, we will be down to a suitcase each and my camera bag, possibly living in an RV on a beach somewhere.

When I go from teaching my Digital Photography or Photojournalism classes and teach my 35mm B&W film class I get an instant return to the beginnings of my professional career, decades ago. It is a revelation about how far the gear and gear experience has changed.

But what doesn't change for me is the creative thinking process to making great compositions, capturing the right moment and knowing a thing or two about exposure and lighting along the way. And the anticipation and anxiety of having to wait until the film is developed and those negatives are on the light table to see what you have, is a great pause for both me and my university students in our world of instant image gratification.

I am happy to exist in both worlds of photography, on the cutting edge of the best of the latest tech, but also still having my hands on teaching, preserving and passing on first-hand the history of photography, and exposing young creative minds to another "new" creative medium.

And amazingly after weeks of their struggles and learning curves with the cameras, film, developing and printing processes, most of my 35mm B&W film class students come to embrace it as a "cool" thing by the end of the semester. And many then buy their own used SLR or rangefinder film cameras to add to their favorite smartphones.

Personally I still have a one of my old SLRs a Canon F1, and one of my old DSLRs a Nikon D3, but I have sold all my other DSLRs and earlier mirrorless cameras as I upgraded to better performing mirrorless models for my professional and personal work. I still get to use some older model DLSR and mirrorless cameras that we have in the university camera/lens kits for use by our photo students. I have to keep up with how they all work to help my students learn how to master the use of them.

Cheers and best to you all.

In the digital era...holding on will drop performance...period.

Now if you don't care about that...fire away.

Todays lenses are built ...different...better...the designs are more complicated...which costs coin...but yields much improved results.
Bodies...it gets even worse holding onto to older ones.


Will folks online tell you it doesn't matter? Sure...folks will say almost anything to maintain their own perspective...myself included.

But those are opinions...and are fine...but not when they conflict with the data.

The data has spoken...quite clearly.

The analog and dslr pace was glacial...glacial.

The digital pace is like greyhound racing...

Choose whatever you like...but there is always a price to be paid...either way.

When I go from teaching my Digital Photography or Photojournalism classes and teach my 35mm B&W film class I get an instant return to the beginnings of my professional career, decades ago. It is a revelation about how far the gear and gear experience has changed.

But what doesn't change for me is the creative thinking process to making great compositions, capturing the right moment and knowing a thing or two about exposure and lighting along the way. And the anticipation and anxiety of having to wait until the film is developed and those negatives are on the light table to see what you have, is a great pause for both me and my university students in our world of instant image gratification.

I am happy to exist in both worlds of photography, on the cutting edge of the best of the latest tech, but also still having my hands on teaching, preserving and passing on first-hand the history of photography, and exposing young creative minds to another "new" creative medium.

And amazingly after weeks of their struggles and learning curves with the cameras, film, developing and printing processes, most of my 35mm B&W film class students come to embrace it as a "cool" thing by the end of the semester. And many then buy their own used SLR or rangefinder film cameras to add to their favorite smartphones.

Personally I still have a one of my old SLRs a Canon F1, and one of my old DSLRs a Nikon D3, but I have sold all my other DSLRs and earlier mirrorless cameras as I upgraded to better performing mirrorless models for my professional and personal work. I still get to use some older model DLSR and mirrorless cameras that we have in the university camera/lens kits for use by our photo students. I have to keep up with how they all work to help my students learn how to master the use of them.

Cheers and best to you all.

There's probably two aspects of this question in a 2023 Digital Age: a, the cameras and b, the lenses.

Personally, I actively shoot circa 1980s manual focus lenses on modern digital mirrorless bodies. One of my favorite AF-capable lenses is a circa 1987 original 50mm f/1.8 lens. My manual focus camera bodies (film) have all been sold off. I never could focus the same lenses on those cameras as I can on mirrorless with the multiple focusing assist tools. For digital bodies, someone earlier said something along the lines of why would you keep a DSLR with less pixel resolution, poor noise performance, smaller LCDs, slower frames per second, smaller buffers, and any other technical limitation vs your best equipment?