The development of technology has presented a person with the ability to stop time. Not in the literal sense, of course, but the camera allows you to capture the most important, valuable and simply interesting moments in life. The range of photographic equipment today impresses with both a variety of functions and a price range.
Where does the name come from
There are cameras that are popularly called "soap dishes". The origin of this name has several interpretations.
In the nineties, very inexpensive plastic cameras with a fixed lens appeared on the post-Soviet market. This lens was covered with a sliding cover. Outwardly, this device looked like an ordinary soap dish, for which it received its popular nickname.
There is also an opinion that they began to talk about cheap photographic equipment, which gave a fuzzy, low-quality, "blurry" picture, and that is why it was named so.
In magazines like "Young Technician", there were articles on how to make a camera with your own hands, using this same soap box as a basis, which was the reason for the association.
The first option, of course, has a better chance of being reliable, especially when you consider that lenses were inserted into the first plastic cameras, which, despite their cheapness and fragility, produced fairly clear and bright frames, suffering only from distortion of real colors.
What cameras are called "soap dishes" today
Today, a whole class of cameras is called a soap dish, which includes a technique with no manual settings, the impossibility of changing lenses, lack of shutter speed and other points. However, since the name is still rather slang, popular, it is hardly possible to clearly determine whether a particular device belongs to the category of soap boxes or not. After all, in fact, it is a matter of taste.
With a high degree of probability, compact units can be attributed to these cameras, which, despite the fact that they are not always made of plastic, have retained in many ways their shape of a regular parallelepiped with rounded edges, so similar to a well-known object.
Only professional SLR cameras can be excluded from the category of "hygiene products" with accuracy, since their shape, quality of shooting, and functionality go beyond the concept of "soap dishes", and the price often causes simple human awe for such a miracle of technology.
It is worth adding that if you accidentally find that your pet has fallen into the category of "soap boxes", this is not a reason to get upset or feel inferior. Since today the majority of pocket digital cameras, if not equal in photo quality to professional equipment, are very close to them. At the same time, they will not require additional manipulations and special knowledge from you.
