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.
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:
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.
Early digicams weren't powerful enough to pull off a lot of the fancy behind-the-scenes instant post-processinf modern cameras do before you even get to see the picture. The result was they often resembled film photography in many ways, especially the digital noise that in the right circumstances didn't look too dissimilar from film grain.
This is why I personally have a small collection of early digicams I like shooting on from time to time, and why they've recently become a whole TikTok trend.
I think if we allowed modern cameras to have an option that performs little to no post-processing on captured photos (without having to resort to RAW capture), we could get pictures that a lot more closely resemble this stuff.
How early would they need to be? I still have an original Canon 5D (2005) and in a way I prefer the output of it over even my Leica Q. I wonder if the reason is related to what you are saying.
2005 is about as late as you can go before the processors in cameras started being powerful enough to do a lot of stuff to the images. Most of my collection is very early 2000s or even late 90s. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F717 is a great cam from 2002 that was Sony's flagship at the time. Despite having cool features that modern cams don't (nightshot which also allows for easy IR photography, a swiveling lens assembly), the pictures have that "filmic" look thanks to the CCD sensor and little to no denoising done in-camera. It was also high resolution enough for the time (5MP) that the pictures still look reasonably detailed and sharp. Super early digicams often had like 1MP sensors that produce quite fuzzy images (though I feel that has its own appeal)
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.