Digital Photography Still in Infancy

Clearly the rapid rise of digital cameras has been restrained by the cost of memory. Once the cost of memory reached some magical level, sales of consumer grade digital cameras started to take off in the marketplace. It is now at a point where digital cameras are threatening to totally displace film. I think I read that sales of new cameras has now tipped the scales toward digital; it would be interesting to know how many digital pictures are now being taken versus film.

The problem is that this technology is still far from maturity mainly because the cost of memory is still a huge limiting factor. The other restraint is internet bandwidth. Not until we are all blessed with infinite bandwidth and dirt cheap digital memory, will digital photography approach the level that film photography has achieved.

Think about it. When you are taking your digital pictures, what resolution do you have your camera set to? Probably much less than the maximum your camera allows. If you have a 4 megapixel camera, you probably take most of your shots at around 1-2 megapixels. Why? because you can fit more shots on your expensive memory card and because it takes a long time to send a bunch of hi-res pictures over the internet to your friends, and because hi-res pictures take a long time to print on your inkjet printer. All these things effectively force the quality of your digital prints below the quality of film.

When we finally surmount this problem, you will no longer be kicking yourself that you didn’t take that perfect shot at the highest resolution because now all your shots will be good enough for an 11x14 or larger print. Plus, your PC software will pay attention to how you edit your pictures and automatically make corrections based on these accumulated preferences, thus improving on the current “average” quick editing that most software does. Also, you’ll be able to quickly send hi-res pictures over the internet and you’ll be able to store an entire vacation’s worth of pictures on one or two memory chips that cost $5 each.

The trick is going to be how we store all these pictures. I like Picasa, but it doesn't have a way to annotate each photo, only folders or albums. We are going to need a good system to annotate pictures or we will never be able to find them before long; many people already have this problem. We also need to get more conscientious about throwing away the bad ones. I should go through my photos before it becomes too big a chore.....