[gryson]

The Hitachi product site for this is still online (from 1995; Japanese):

https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/9512/1201.html

It was intended as an in-car game console / GPS navigation combo unit.

One of the unique selling points was that it could use the Saturn hardware to create a 3D map simulation of a planned route that you could view in advance of going on a trip. So, you could take it in the house, watch the simulation, then put it in the car for the actual trip and use the GPS navigation.

[gary_0]

Seeing a product photo from that era evoked a particularly weird feeling of nostalgia that I had never reflected on before. I think it's the sleek molded-plastic consumer electronics design combined with crisp photography that still lacks the uncanny valley of extensive digital photo retouching or full-blown 3D rendering that would become prevalent only a few years later.

Now I kind of want to find a website with scans of old product advertisements from the 90's. While they seemed to lack the cultural distinctiveness of previous decades, the 90's were still a happening time and the eye of the storm of (post) modernity we find ourselves in now.

[gryson]

A good source for such photos are the ads in old Japanese computer magazines, such as Micom Basic. Archive.org has the entire run (I think) from the 80s and 90s. Here's April 1985:

https://archive.org/details/basic-1985-04/page/n5/mode/2up

[auto]

I had the same feeling, and I think along with what the other commenters have said, the bit rate of the image contributes to it as well, you can see the grain in the light background where it doesn’t have the practically infinite color spectrum to work with and you get the color dithering effect instead.

[fidotron]

In this case “crisp” means high contrast.

Modern photographers and post process people would look at the histogram of the photo on that site and die inside.

[matheusmoreira]

I know how you feel. Really miss that era.

> crisp photography

Old photos just look so good, really miss them. Is it even possible to achieve this with current technology?

[throwaway128128]

Knowing the quality of Saturn 3D games I can't imagine the 3D GPS feature was any good..

[Grazester]

The Saturn had good 3D games! The work it took to get a decent 3D games not many game studio could do. In fact it might have been only Sega. And for something as simple as a 90's 3D map the Saturn could certainly do with ease, once again if it wasn't half assed