lxmike
M2 fan.
My two favourite camera shops, Camera Exchange and Camera Lane, have been around for many, many years. Camera Lane has been in business for over 30 years, with owner Alan in semi-retirement after they moved from the city in Melbourne to an industrial/office building in the suburbs over a year ago. Camera Exchange also left the city a few years ago for an industrial/business area in the suburbs. They both give the experience of going to a camera store of old, perhaps not with film in abundance, but with display cabinets full of film gear, and more tripods than War of the Worlds.
As a kid in the 70s and 80s, I don't recall ever going to a camera shop, but Dad's Pentax and Minolta were mainstays of the house, along with his collection of You And Your Camera partwork magazines.
In the very late 1990s, the department store I worked at began to sell digital cameras like the Sony Mavica floppy disc camera, but the earliest I visited a camera shop was in 2002, when digital was just coming into a semblance of usefulness. DSLR's were still fairly low resolution and the mirrorless revolution was still a good few years away. People still shot with film compacts and disposable cameras, and Konica-Minolta had not yet been acquired by Sony. Casio was a prominent brand, Pentax had a range of nice compact digitals, as did Ricoh. For digital, things seemed so fresh and fast paced, and film began to wane even further.
In 2008, I was in Hong Kong, and drooling over the Leica gear in the cabinets. Little did I think that I'd own some, only a couple of years later.
F30 - Leica Gear by Archiver, on Flickr
By 2010, I had a 5D Mark II and M9, which I still use for personal and paid work even now. On my 2010 trip to Japan, I was enthralled by the gear at Yodobashi Camera and LAOX.
GRD3 - GRD and GXR by Archiver, on Flickr
I don't yearn for the days of 1999 because digital cameras were still pretty awful, and I had no emotional connection with film cameras at that time. I greatly enjoy the sense of nostalgia and quality when I pick up a SLR from the 70s, , and remember the days when I would leaf through Dad's camera magazines in the early 80s, and then the early 90s.
Yodobashi Camera looks amazing by the way, thanks for sharing