Top three worst cameras you have ever bought

Messages
1,757
Name
Alastair
Edit My Images
Yes
I'll go first!

- Minolta Z1. It was absolutely crap. Noisy images at any ISO. Looked crap too. Nothing good to say about this camera

- Fuji XPro 1. Might be controversial but I had it for a short time, when it first came out. When you got an in-focus image, the results were superb. Had quite an ethereal look to photographs captured by this camera but therein lies the problem. It would never focus correctly.

Apparently some firmware update fixed it but at that point I was done with it and swapped it for a Leica M6, which was brilliant and had no trouble focusing.

- Wisner Technical Field Camera. A wooden 4x5 (sorry, it's 4x5 not 5x4!) made by Ron Wisner, an apparently dodgy bloke who eventually bought a boat and disappeared with a load of customers money, so I understand. My problem with the Wisner was even with the bag/wide angle bellows, I still couldn't get a 90mm lens to focus on it. I had the front bed rolled right back as far as it'd go and it still wouldn't focus. Might have been me but I hated that camera. Bought a Toyo camera soon after to replace it, which was brilliant.
 
IDX mk2
Hasselblad 503 cw
5Dsr

Even though they work fine none of them have taken good pictures.
 
Sigma SD9, my first digital SLR, nasty in every way.

Needed two different batteries, each which would drain if left in the camera for more than a few days.

Bad glass, and really clunky to use.

Gave up on it after 6 weeks and went back to film for a couple of years.
 
The only three I've ever regretted buying. All seemed great at first - until their faults quirks became a pain in the arse.

Panasonic GX7
Panasonic GX8
Olympus 770SW
 
canon 550d
Fuji x100
Nikon d90

None were really bad but I had better alternatives
 
After years of using SLR's and then DSLR's I dipped my toe in the water with a canon g10 and then a panasonic GX7. I'm not saying they were BAD as such, just that using them was a horrible experience coming from larger camera bodies. Don't mention the battery life.......

I wasn't very pleased with the Canon 7d either........
 
Funny how the GX7 is on peoples worst lists as it's one of the best cameras I've ever used and IMO only really spoilt by two things, shutter shock with affected lenses and a relatively poor EVF.

Anyway, the worst...

A keyring digital camera - I bought one years ago and as a camera it was frankly terrible but I suppose digital was in its infancy then.

Medion 85173 compact camera - The pictures this gives will be easily beaten by any phone camera. WB is all over the place and it has lots of issues but it's a tiny metal bodied camera with just two controls, the on off switch and the shutter button and as I like simple kit the Medion has it's charms :D

Fuji S602 - I thought that the image quality was good but the camera was so slow to meter, focus and shoot that I found it unusable for anything other than scenery and still life. It could however be set manually so that when you pressed the shutter it fired but manual use was joyless due to the FBW lens. I suppose it was SOTA for its day though but as a new digital user moving over from film it frustrated me no end.
 
Nikon D7000. Loved the D60 so thought the D7000 would be better. Just didn't get the same image quality or dynamic range, and didn't have the confidence I wasn't being crap to take it back. Bought a Sony Nex3 on a whim and not looked back since.
 
Funny how the GX7 is on peoples worst lists as it's one of the best cameras I've ever used and IMO only really spoilt by two things, shutter shock with affected lenses and a relatively poor EVF.

Anyway, the worst...

A keyring digital camera - I bought one years ago and as a camera it was frankly terrible but I suppose digital was in its infancy then.

Medion 85173 compact camera - The pictures this gives will be easily beaten by any phone camera. WB is all over the place and it has lots of issues but it's a tiny metal bodied camera with just two controls, the on off switch and the shutter button and as I like simple kit the Medion has it's charms :D

Fuji S602 - I thought that the image quality was good but the camera was so slow to meter, focus and shoot that I found it unusable for anything other than scenery and still life. It could however be set manually so that when you pressed the shutter it fired but manual use was joyless due to the FBW lens. I suppose it was SOTA for its day though but as a new digital user moving over from film it frustrated me no end.

I had the Fuji S6900, which I think was the baby brother of the S602. It was one of those anyway, the one that didn't have "Pro" in its name. And I recall it being pretty laggy for everything. I was working for a magazine at the time and would occasionally need to take photos, I used that Fuji camera. It wasn't great but it was better than the Minolta I had before it!
 
Minox 35ML - nice lens but cheap construction. Mine died out in SE Asia just out of waranty when I decided to travel with hand baggage only on a long trip and went very light.

Canon G9 - I think the G9 was potentially a lovely wee camera let down by over ambitious use of a small sensor with too many Mp. Raw images were pretty awful except at lowest ISO. The JPeg engine did a lot of cleanup. The simple OVF was a nice touch but let down by the intrusion of the lens into its field of view.

Canon G10 - takes the best and worst of the G9 and really doesn't change them. Even more Mp in the small sensor. (I didn't like the G9 - mine ended up going for a repair which introduced a new problem so it was replaced by a G10).
 
In no particular order...
  • Fuji Instax Mini 90
  • Fuji Instax Wide 300
  • Fuji Instax SQ6
These are technically, the worst. They are however, along with my Noon 6x12 pinhole, RealitySoSubtle 6x6F pinhole and Holga 120GN the ones I enjoy using the most.
 
Minox 35ML - nice lens but cheap construction. Mine died out in SE Asia just out of waranty when I decided to travel with hand baggage only on a long trip and went very light.

I quite like the Minox 35ML. Still use it occasionally. The only problem I've ever had is that the battery drains if it gets humid. That and the viewfinder has yellowed with age.
 
In truth.

I hated the results from my 70D.
The Nikon D90 was about as nice as the interior of a Vauxhall Mokka.
And my Canon ixus was basically not useable in daylight.
 
Apart from some crappy p&s cameras I bought in my teens, I didn't have a lot to moan about when it came to dslr/mirrorless bodies.

Sony A200 - bought used, so don't know what might have happened to it beforehand, but the IBIS failed and left the sensor crooked after a couple of months

Nikon D200 - Loved the body, ergonomics, controls .... hated it's low light performance, above ISO 400 it was , well, s***e. Still shot 2 weddings using it

Fuji Xpro1 - I had the X-T1 at the same time and loved that, but couldn't get on with the ergo's of the pro1, it was also a hell of a lot slower than the T-1 so that made it seem worse perhaps. For a camera that was once Fuji's flagship, I was really disappointed. Lovely end image quality but a PITA to use, for me.
 



Possibly a Kodak Instamatic "cube" 126 and
a Kodak 110.

The first I found in a city bus and the second
offered to me by someone I'm sure hated me. :ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO::ROFLMAO:
 
Fuji x-t2 .I'm all for a bit of retro but I just found this too small and cramped on top to.use. my fingers were always pressing something or turning a dial when I didn't want to do it. Just make the body a little bigger and space the buttons out on the next version.

Mamiya rb67. And at the opposite end of the scale was this half tonne beast. You really needed a shopping trolley to mount it on to get it anywhere.

Can't think of a third,
 
I quite like the Minox 35ML. Still use it occasionally. The only problem I've ever had is that the battery drains if it gets humid. That and the viewfinder has yellowed with age.

I think the concept was really good. But the reliability questionable. I was probably unluckier than most but after mine broke I came across other people who had similar failures.
 
Back before phones had decent cameras I tried getting a 'party camera' - one which was small enough to fit into a shirt/jeans pocket.

I ended up with a Konica Minolta Dimage X31. Promised loads - with it's clever internal moving mirrors and 3x optical zoom, but was awful - even back then.

31lUh3v92aL.jpg
41TNX2QN1PL.jpg


Loads of noise, and it simply would not focus in the dark, which, as I'd bought to use on nights out, made it useless.

Other than that, in terms of compacts, i bought various versions of the Panasonic Lumix cameras and none of them have been great despite the amazing reviews they always get. And this was all before getting my first DSLR, so not comparing it to a 'better' camera.
 
Another vote for the Panasonic gx7. Bought it used and realised it suffered from the dreaded dust under the sensor glass way after I could return it. Ended up selling it at a loss. After some use I realised it wasn't that good anyway, it showed quite a lot of noise even it lower ISO settings.

Panasonic Fz45. Horrible noise at low settings.

Olympus OM20. Absolutely awful shutter button and fiddly manual control ring.

I'm not over the moon about the D90 I have either. It's OK but just seems dull and boring in some way.
 
Last edited:
1. Minolta Dimage D7 - Reputedly the world's first 5mp consumer camera which, in favourable conditions could deliver some very nice looking photos, even by today's standards (as long as you bear in mind the limitations of 5mp and don't zoom in and pixel peep too much), but on a cloudy day... meh! Oh, and battery life... dreadful, I'd be lucky to get 130 shots out of a set of 4 rechargeable NiMh AAs and they'd always seem to fail at the most inconvenient moment! It was a real love-hate relationship with this camera, and it's the only camera I've ever written to the manufacturer to complain about - and I didn't get a reply!

2. Polaroid 1000 - This was a Christmas present. The novelty of instant photos soon wore off and I was left with a camera that delivered fuzzy looking pastel-coloured images on film that as a kid I couldn't afford to buy. I'd have been better off asking Santa for a Zenit E!

3. Can't think of anything else I wasn't pleased enough with given its age/price/condition, etc.
 
Praktica MTL3 - was a bit of a friday afternoon after the vodka break special... after a couple of months of use it pretty much shredded the sprocket holes on 1 in 3 rolls of film. Got to the point that I just automatically opened the camera in the changing bag and loaded it straight into the developing spiral rather than even TRY and rewind the film. Still - it learned me how to use a SLR camera in full "manual mode" because that's all it had.

Fed 3a - Not really anything to do with the actual camera's clunky implementation of a ripped off Leica design, or the fact that it's made from left over T63 tank parts according to how much it weighs... no, it's down to the way that the rubberised cotton fabric that is the roller-blind shutter became non-rubberised cotton fabric during the first roll I shot. This left a semi-opaque shutter and some "interesting" light leak effects. Thankfully it cost me something like £3 posted from an online auction where the seller had optimistically thought that including free delivery would improve the prices bid. It didn't. It DID however cost me about £4 plus postage for the black latex fabric paint that I used to re-light-proof the shutter. The camera now works, the shutter speeds are probably half a stop slow because the shutter is heavier due to the paint, but it works... And it DID come with the rather lovely if somewhat radioactive Industar 55mm f/2.8
N-61 L/D lens that should really be on a Fed5...

Worst camera, hands down though, in terms of build quality, lens quality, features, facilities and ability to trash any roll of film put into it has to be my Holga. I hated it so much that I sent it on something like a 18 month journey around the UK to various members of the forum, so that they could feel better about their own cameras after using it... Just kidding. Yep, it's a terrible camera by all the classical ways of measuring a camera. But it's actually FUN and quite liberating in that you know things aren't going to be necessarily sharp, or perfectly exposed, or framed properly, and that you'll most likely forget to wind on after pressing the shutter at least once a roll - and things will sometimes come out a hot steaming mess - or not at all. But every frame you get out of it you'll look at, laugh over, and probably treasure for the experience of using it. And that makes it worthwhile.

So - there we are, the three worst camera's ive used, and every one of them has redeeming factors - the main one being they're cameras, and I ENJOY using cameras and taking pictures, so, by definition they're great - even if they're crap...
 
Last edited:
Fuji X-Pro1

Purely because the diopter has such limited adjustment that it never worked with my eyes, the only camera I've ever had that issue with, and I know plenty of others who had the same issue.

Sony RX1

Also on my 'best cameras' list, but the battery life was beyond hilarious and it had some bugs that Sony flat out refused to fix via a firmware update.

Any Canon camera

Tried a few times simply because the ecosystem is so well supported and so affordable due to huge volume of used gear on the market. However I've never got on with a single camera, the handling just doesn't seem to work for me at all.
 
My only bad camera is my 1942 Zeiss Ikon Tenax 1. The lens is made from wartime metal and is so prone to internal light bleeding that it is unusable.
 
1. Minolta Dimage D7 - Reputedly the world's first 5mp consumer camera which, in favourable conditions could deliver some very nice looking photos, even by today's standards (as long as you bear in mind the limitations of 5mp and don't zoom in and pixel peep too much), but on a cloudy day... meh! Oh, and battery life... dreadful, I'd be lucky to get 130 shots out of a set of 4 rechargeable NiMh AAs and they'd always seem to fail at the most inconvenient moment! It was a real love-hate relationship with this camera, and it's the only camera I've ever written to the manufacturer to complain about - and I didn't get a reply!

I had a Dimage 7i - I loved it. Really lovely lens, and it rekindled my love in photography. It was my first proper digital camera after a nasty Kodak 3mp camera I got in an Argos pricing error. I took lots of images with it, and still have one of the images on our wall at home that I took in Venice, printed to 13x19 and perfectly sharp. It was a bit noisy relative to modern stuff, but I always remember being shocked at how good ISO1600 images printed at 13x19 looked from it. I still have lots of rechargeable batteries from when I owned it though, but look back on it fondly as one of my favourite cameras - small enough to take everywhere, great zoom range, no lenses to change and the images I took with it still look great. Hall of Fame stuff for me!
 
Tricky.

1) Some no-name piece of digital junk in the early 2000s that output VGA images which looked as if they'd been taken in a snowstorm.
2) A Ricoh caplio G3 compact bought around 2004. Less noise, but no better optics.
3) Final one is slightly tricky. I've owned a Lubitel 166 and a cheap Russian Minox-alike. Probably a Fuji HS30 bridge camera, that only ever produced disappointing pictures in my hands.
 
Funny how the GX7 is on peoples worst lists as it's one of the best cameras I've ever used and IMO only really spoilt by two things, shutter shock with affected lenses and a relatively poor EVF.

Anyway, the worst...

A keyring digital camera - I bought one years ago and as a camera it was frankly terrible but I suppose digital was in its infancy then.

Medion 85173 compact camera - The pictures this gives will be easily beaten by any phone camera. WB is all over the place and it has lots of issues but it's a tiny metal bodied camera with just two controls, the on off switch and the shutter button and as I like simple kit the Medion has it's charms :D

Fuji S602 - I thought that the image quality was good but the camera was so slow to meter, focus and shoot that I found it unusable for anything other than scenery and still life. It could however be set manually so that when you pressed the shutter it fired but manual use was joyless due to the FBW lens. I suppose it was SOTA for its day though but as a new digital user moving over from film it frustrated me no end.
I've still got my 602. At the time it was pretty much as good as you could get without spending stupid money on the first DSLRs. They did bring out a pro version which I'm sure had the same spec , but also had a pc sync port and an optional remote trigger. It is really slow and the shutter lag is what feels like days. On the plus I did like the full control and I have some great shots from it, you just need to get over its quirks. I have given it to my six year old daughter to play with as a first camera and she has been running around snapping away with it.
 
I had a Dimage 7i - I loved it. Really lovely lens, and it rekindled my love in photography. It was my first proper digital camera after a nasty Kodak 3mp camera I got in an Argos pricing error. I took lots of images with it, and still have one of the images on our wall at home that I took in Venice, printed to 13x19 and perfectly sharp. It was a bit noisy relative to modern stuff, but I always remember being shocked at how good ISO1600 images printed at 13x19 looked from it. I still have lots of rechargeable batteries from when I owned it though, but look back on it fondly as one of my favourite cameras - small enough to take everywhere, great zoom range, no lenses to change and the images I took with it still look great. Hall of Fame stuff for me!
You had the '7i' version, mine was it's predecessor, the 7. In my view, you got the camera I should have had. Suffice it to say, I've never rushed in and bought a 'new model' camera since.
 
Last edited:
3) Final one is slightly tricky. I've owned a Lubitel 166 and a cheap Russian Minox-alike. Probably a Fuji HS30 bridge camera, that only ever produced disappointing pictures in my hands.
I bought a Lubitel 166 back in the 80's. One of the few cameras I could rely on in a fight ;). Wife sold it on eBay a couple of years ago for much more money than it was worth. She probably bought a handbag with the proceeds.
 
OM4T - replaced an OM2SP, should have kept the OM2SP as I did not really use the extra metering functions and it had a battery habit.
Canon G2 - camera was OK, but the 4mp images were a little dire.
Others have all been OK.
 
Was given a Canon compact as a leaving present because my XA wouldn’t fire.

It was awful, motorised wind-on, but one side of the image was grossly blurred. I couldn’t take it back because it was a present and I’d moved 120 miles away. So I got the XA out and blew hard at the shutter button. It fired again.

First iPhone. Photos way worse than my previous phone, a Sony Ericsson marvel.
 
Was given a Canon compact as a leaving present because my XA wouldn’t fire.

I had/have a Canon SureShot AF35M II. Best P&S 35mm I ever had. It could shoot in pitch black and nail the focus and exposure. I still have photos of people I could use for nefarious purposes. Assuming the rats in the attic haven't eaten them.
 
Last edited:
Nikon D7000. Loved the D60 so thought the D7000 would be better. Just didn't get the same image quality or dynamic range, and didn't have the confidence I wasn't being crap to take it back. Bought a Sony Nex3 on a whim and not looked back since.

Another vote for the D7000, brought one, couldn't gel with it, didn't like the images it produced, got a D90 and had 5 happy years before getting a D7200...

Can't really put my finger on why I didn't like the D7000 image quality, the quality was just very meh...
 
Zenith something or other back in the 70s. It was the entry level model with the non-return mirror, no meter and came with the f3.5 lens. I wanted an SLR and this was all I could afford at the time. It took decent enough photographs but was an absolute pain in the neck to use. I bought a Nikon F2 when I was working in Hong Kong a few years later, and it was obviously in a completely different class. Still my favourite of all the cameras I've owned.
 
Canon EOS 10D ( in fairness it turned out to be faulty) Exposure seemed to be totally random varying from near white out to darkness on the same subject with the same settings a few seconds apart. I tried with this camera for way too long blaming it on the fact I was using manual film camera lenses (which I was keen to use as I like manual film cameras rather than electronic menus) then I came across a Canon lens which was shockingly plasticy compared to my film camera lenses. I chucked it out only for it to be rescued by a friend who had a friend with a camera shop in Staffs he then condemned it as being faulty.
Apart from this one most of the cameras I have (mainly film cameras) seem to work o.k with some of the more basic having various limitations or situations where they work well so I either have to think which camera to take with me if I know what I am going to encounter or use the camera to only take photos within its limitations.
 
Last edited:
There have been some very cheap film, digital compacts that have offered poor iq (at best) and some of the early mobile phone cams are best forgotten but really there isn’t a bad modern ‘tool’ only the user. I have probably had 10 advanced digital cams including many cited in this thread and they all offer far more than me...
 
Nikon D7000. Loved the D60 so thought the D7000 would be better. Just didn't get the same image quality or dynamic range, and didn't have the confidence I wasn't being crap to take it back. Bought a Sony Nex3 on a whim and not looked back since.

That's odd to hear as the D7000 was one of the best crop bodies at the time (and by todays standards still decent) and a good leap over a D60 never mind a D80 or D90. I wonder if it was faulty or a "bad one".
 
Back
Top