Capturing moments leaps digital way

Access to digital photography has now become universal among urban population in the developed nations, thanks to sales exceeding 200 million a year worldwide, including camera-phones.

What is astonishing is to realise that the important changes -- from nearly zero adoption to near-saturation of the market -- took place in only five years.

Digital photography took off only when, at the turn of the millennium, every computer could comfortably handle the large image files digital cameras would generate. As the market grew, manufacturing costs dropped. The adoption of cost-saving measures such as sharing components (the imaging chip, image processors, LCD screens and minor optics) between camera models also helped drive down the prices.

The impact of digital photography on modern life is in part due to its marketing. Aggressive competition between camera makers has forced product cycles -- the time between new models -- to shorten. Replacement models are being announced almost before the previous camera hits the market.

The arrival of each new model offering more features and more quality at lower prices means consumers are the winners. And don't they know it: half of the customers of all digital cameras (excepting camera-phones) in the US and Europe has already had a digital camera!

The intense activity has fuelled a parallel growth in technological awareness: it is no longer remarkable when a grandmother asks her teenage grandson to explain the differences between optical and digital zoom. Retired schoolteachers shop for cameras with a checklist of specifications in a way they would never have done for film-based models.

The increased awareness of the technology together with wide access to digital photography has, in turn, thrown the industry into disarray. The headlines -- such as Nikon and Canon stop making most of its film cameras, Kodak laying off employees by the thousands and the near-extinction of household names such as Leica, Agfa and Polaroid -- all signal the obvious changes.

Lately, Kodak announced it would be laying off 10,000 employees, which is less an indication of the company's health than it is a nod to the rapid shrinking of the film market. The digital photography boom is killing film sales at a pace much quicker than many companies, including Kodak, could have anticipated.

These enterprises saw the size of the digital photography wave, but not its speed. And what's happening at Kodak is happening across the film industry.

The reason for this dramatic change in how people photograph is because digital cameras have so many advantages over traditional film cameras.

With digital photography, there's instant review of the pictures, with no wait for the film to be developed. If there's a problem with a picture, the photographer can immediately correct the problem and take another picture. Only successful pictures need to be printed; and that means a photographer can take many shots of the same scene but with slightly different settings, and then choose the best resulting photo. Doing this with film would be too expensive and time consuming.

Digital photography also enables a photographer to experiment with the camera settings; different styles of images can be tried out without the expense of film processing.

Digital media can also easily be stored permanently using a computer. Images can be copied from one media to another without any loss in quality. Digital image files can be backed up to CD-ROM or DVD-ROM that can last ages. A digital photograph can also be easily printed using a computer and a consumer-grade printer. Some new printers can even communicate directly to a camera or a memory card, for printing without the use of a computer.

When National Geographic asked pro photographer Jim Brandenburg about the advantages of digital photography, he said: "First, there is the simplicity of digital photos: You can look at your images instantly. And it's an original that will always be an original. Kodachrome duplicates never look the same. With digital [photography], you can make a perfect copy and send it off immediately. The colour is also more accurate.

"Plus, digital cameras let you control the light better. A huge advantage is that you can easily change the sensitivity of the film. If I want to shoot a moving car, I need 400 or 800 film to get a picture of it. But for a traditional landscape, I would want 100 ISO films. Instead of ripping out one roll for another, in a second I can set my digital camera from 100 ISO to 1,600. The image quality on my high-end digital camera is even better at high speeds than my film cameras."

And that's not all. Since there's no need to print the photos, digital photographers hardly print pictures any more. From the happy days of a print made for every image captured, it's now one miserable print for every few hundred images. This is particularly annoying because we now take far more images than ever: stories of those who once exposed a roll of film per holiday but now return to find hundreds of images in their new digital camera are not rare.

But it's not all happy news either. Digital cameras do suffer from a few disadvantages. The most direct and painful drawback is the fact that equivalent film cameras are much less expensive than digital cameras. There is also less need for batteries, as film cameras can potentially work without them. The image is stored on film rather in memory using CCD/CMOS sensors and associated electronics, which require power to operate.

But the most important factor for professional photographers is the fact that film is capable of much greater resolution than digital photographs. The traditional 35mm film offers a resolution comparable to 12 megapixels, a resolution matched only by top-of-the-line digital SLR cameras.

Film also has a better dynamic range. Depending on the contrast of the subject, the lightest parts of the image may be so over-exposed that there is no image information, other than total white, in these highlights. Also, the reverse may occur, making a dark shadow in a photograph totally black, because of the inability of the camera's sensor to cope with the contrast. Film is significantly better at conditions like this.

Of course, the way digital photography is advancing, in a few years, we can hope these problems will probably be sorted out.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Wikipedia and Tom Ang for their research on the topic.