I said that the new digital cameras costing $800 or $900 are as good as regular 35 mm film cameras in the print sizes that non-pros want.
I am sorry that you took offense. Certainly none was intended.
Apparently you believe your statement. Unfortunately, it doesn't mesh with the facts. Digital cameras may well be getting good enough that the images are satisfactory to those who are not very critical of what they are looking at or for those planning on electronic publishing and the like where the inherent limitations are there anyway, but that doesn't mean that the images are actually "as good as".
Digital camera images have inherent limitations in color rendition which analog film does not, even when used in very low end cameras -- do a lot of people notice -- probably not, but the difference is there.
Digital camera have an inherent problem with noise in low light images and the dark parts of a image. Again, not critical for a lot of people, but there none the less.
And, to be sure, lots of folks just print out there 3x4s or whatever and stuff them in the drawer, but I would guess that from time to time lots of folks do enlarge individual prints or it wouldn't be one of the services that every 1hr shop offers ... and when they try that with a digital image, they are likely to be unhappy with the result.
None of which has anything to do with the potential tornado for digital cameras. Like most discontinuous innovations, much of the use is powered not by direct replacement of the predecessor, but by new uses. Pictures for e-mail or web-posting, quick review of pictures, immediate access to one or two pictures -- there are many attractions to drive acquisition of digital cameras -- *even* by those who also use film. Image quality isn't the only damper. Think about going off for a two week holiday with 5-10 roles of film and then translate than into batteries and flash memory.
anachonistic fragile rotating magnetic media represented the future. Get real.
I'm not projecting that rotating memory will win; just suggesting that one shouldn't count it out pre-maturely. Modern rotating memory, whether the microdisks which IBM is getting so good at or this new Sony CDR thing, is not so fragile as to be an issue in a camera, which people are used to having to treat with some care, if only to keep the optics intact. If it were a question of anything like equal cost and density, then flash would be a clear winner, but we are talking multiple orders of magnitude difference in capacity (and, in the CDR case, in unit cost of increments).
I am certainly not trying to dump on you or on the likelihood that digital photography is in a tornado. I am trying to be clear that there are some issues here and that we are most likely to see the digital camera growth come in applications where digital has advantages -- which, by the way, is exactly why these cameras are selling so well already, even though they are still pretty expensive for the better models. If we keep issues like this in mind we can make more reasonable projections than if we think that current purchasers of throw aways will soon be converting to digital -- I overstate, but you get the point.
Returning to the rotating versus flash issue ... back in 1969-70 time frame I was sure that we would soon see CRT computer terminals replaced by plasma panels since it was obviously a superior technology. The only problem was, CRTs continued to advance rapidly enough and kept prices falling so that plasma panels never got into volume production so that the price could really drop enough for mass adoption. Don't count out rotating memory just because it has been around a long time. |
