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Serenar history lesson request Anonymous
i hope Serenar can fill this one but anyone can feel free to give me this history lesson

so back in film days, when you bought a SLR, the kit lens would be the good old 50mm, and you could get a 28mm or 35mm for the zomg wide

but when did the first zooms become good enough that people started using them instead of fixed lenses?

who brought the first good, affordable ones? when did the takeover occur?
>> Anonymous
It was convenience rather than great optics that made them standard.
>> Anonymous
>>207100
This is true.

In the mid-90s camera makers started including normal zooms on most camera kits, but the quality was piss poor. The fact that most people shot with cheap negative film, had it processed at the local drug store, and never printed any bigger than 4x6 obscured any obvious quality differences, so the average user didn't notice.

Kit standard zooms didn't really see any increase in quality until digital cameras made it big. This is because with DSLRs becoming commonplace, people were now seeing their images at 100% on a monitor all the time, so it made the imperfections of cheap normal zooms blindingly obvious. Since people had grown accustomed to zooms and the average nimrod wasn't willing to use primes, manufacturers had no choice but to dramatically improve the performance of consumer normal zooms.