Overheard a debate about old camera manuals at the swap meet

I was at the Pasadena swap meet last weekend and two guys were arguing over a box of 1970s camera manuals. One said keeping the original paper ones is a waste of space now that everything is scanned online. The other guy got really heated and said the scans often miss the tiny notes and grease pencil marks from past techs, which are like a repair history. He held up a Canon F-1 manual with a handwritten note about a shim fix. Made me think about what we lose when we go digital only. Do you guys keep the original paper manuals or are you all PDF now?

4 comments

4 Comments

uma6591mo ago

Oh man, that guy is SO right. I scan the manual for a clean copy, but I keep the original paper one in the gear bag. Those old notes have saved me hours of guesswork.

jennybailey1mo ago

Exactly! My old shop manual is full of coffee stains and notes in the margin. The previous owner wrote down the exact torque spec that fixed a weird vibration. You can't get that from a PDF.

alex8201mo ago

Those grease pencil marks are the real repair logs.

the_hayden19d ago

Wait, is that guy with the Canon F-1 manual my long lost brother? lol. I still have the manual for my old Minolta X-700 that my uncle gave me, and it's covered in his messy scribbles about "this lens is soft at f/2.8" and a weird doodle of a bird next to the film rewind instructions. I'd lose my mind if I just had a PDF and those little notes vanished into thin air. Plus, half the time I try to find a manual online it's some garbled scan from 2003 that's missing the last five pages.