What a long and winding road we’ve traveled since digital cameras first hit the mainstream in the mid-1990s. During our 25th anniversary year, we’ve been looking back and thinking a lot, a lot, about the cameras that mattered to us. We’ve shared some of our favorites and we also asked you to tell us what camera you wished you could always have had and why.

Well, today we take a strange turn. A turn toward the big swings, the grand visions, the risks that failed to rise to their ambitions, the groundbreakers ahead of their time and the coulda-shoulda-wouldas around each corner, all leading us down the path to the down-right weird, quirky, novel and odd.

Before us is a threshold to a yesteryear between science and reality, a reminder of dreams lost and deferred, a place where the limits of a digital camera are only bounded by the scope of our wildest ideas. We find ourselves in a place between here and now, at the fulcrum of zig and zag.

You’ve just entered the twilight zone (of cameras).