It was the mid 1990s when the company bought that camera. And yea, we did one project for an oil company that was $880,000K when delivered. So it was paid for quickly.
The camera we got was the third to last one ever made.
https://aerial-survey-base.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/RC30_Brochure_020326_LR.pdf
This is a link to more information about that system.
We had to send it to a company every 5 years to be cleaned and lubricated, and then to the USGS to be calibrated. That was right at 20 grand each time. The USGS issued a calibration table we supplied clients.
https://catalogue.data.wa.gov.au/dataset/aerial-imagery-camera-calibration-certificates/resource/a430dada-760a-44c3-ba08-2c15d96bc37d
The camera came with a visual view port that we never used. We ran ours from a laptop and a mapping grade GPS that cost us 20 grand. There was a little bitty weenie cable we had to pay 5 grand for to hook the GPS to the camera. The laptop read the GPS, and recorded the exact X- Y and Z position of the aircraft. It even knew the pitch and yaw.
We scanned the images on a 100K photogrammetric scanner. Each frame of film made a 1 GB tiff file. Many projects were hundreds to thousands of frames. They all had overlap both forward and side to side as we flew a pattern much like mowing the grass. With the overlap, we could generate 3D images. The operator had to sit for hours with polarized glasses that flickered on and off each eye and pick the points of each frame of film to make them all align into the 3D image.
It was all technology from WW2.