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Great for immediate, bad for longevityMar 05 '02 Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Digital Cameras
The Bottom Line Digital tech is moving quickly. What you own now will be obsolete in a year or so. Use film for images you want to have 20 years from now.
"Film is DEAD!" or so the ads will have you believe. The media hype tells you that if you want to be cool, hip, and part of the future and not a dead tech, you should go digital. And while I would never say that digital has no place in your life, I would seriously advise potential digital camera owners to consider what they're purchasing, before they purchase. Let me offer a bit about myself so you can consider the source of my opinions on digital. I work part-time both as a computer support tech and also as a visual artist. As such, I have no problem with computer technology per se. I understand how it works and understand it's vast opportunities. I also understand the issues of technological obsolescence. One of the biggest concerns I have over the switch to digital imaging over film is the issue of longevity of images. By that I mean, how long will your digital media work, how long will it take for it to be obsolete and what images do you save. By way of example, I just spent the last few months pawing through my family's photo album. The images ranged from a few yellowed photographs from the turn of the century, to shots from 1920's, to pictures from my father's stint in WWII and the Korean war, to photos from the 1950's to the present...complete with negatives. There were literally over a thousand images to sort through. And quite honestly, many of the shots were...well losers. The focus was off, the sun shinning too much in people's faces, tongues stuck out at the camera, etc. Nevertheless...we kept the shots because on a roll of 36 shots, one tends to keep the negatives. I'm glad these "loser" photos were kept. In them was a vast visual history of not just my family, but the lives they lead. I look at these photos and see the culture of the world they lived in as well. Film stands out in contrast to digital, where the images are temporarily stored on a memory device, often times edited out there, then moved to a hard-drive, and then often times edited out there, and then some are actually saved to a CD or zip disk. In digital, there's a lot of editing out going on. So here's problem number one....many of the images you look back upon, 5, 10, 15, 30 years from now are losers in a technical sense. If you had the immediate opportunity to throw them away and make room for more memory on your camera...you probably would have thrown them away. And if so, it can be quite a loss. I'm not the first visual artist to pose the question...how much visual, personal and cultural history is being lost at the flick of a switch in order to make more "room"? The second issue of longevity of images has to do with your digital media and how long can you trust it to last. The official word is that a properly stored CD can/should last for 20-30 years. BUT I can say from sad experience that I've experienced a number of disk errors on burned CD's. Compare the two forms of imaging...film vs digital...a photograph that has a scratch in it can be scanned and then "fixed" in photoshop. A damaged digital CD often means that the data is lost--forever. The third issue regarding the longevity of images has to do with how long the media that we currently use, will be in use, a few, 5, 10 or 20 years from now. Just look at what happened to betamax tapes, the mac plus, 8 track tapes and the like. For large scale educational, corporate or art institutions, they employ folks whose sole purpose is to archive and update important data. But what about you, the casual user. What happens if you shoot your kid's wedding or your first born and store those precious images on a CD that gets corrupted or a hard drive that crashes. What happens when the CD or memory stick you images are on goes the way of 8 track tapes? Sure, you can print out each and every single digital shot and save every print, but actual digital usage patterns show this typically isn't the case. Again, once you commit your primary image taking devices to digital format, you committ yourself to having to stay up to date on the digital curve, which if you're a tech head is fine, but if you're not is a pain in the rear...one that costs alot. So, that being said, what should you know about digital cameras? Pros--images are available fast Cons-digital slrs are extremely expensive, tech obsolescence of all digital cameras is fast, image archivability still questionable, digital sensors in consumer cameras not up to film standards If you're a professional photo-journalist who's bureau requires digital uploads, you're already using a canon d30 or nikon d1x. Why? Because speed is of the essence in news and digital is fast. So if you want to have access to your photos immediately, by all means use a digital camera. You can shoot little suzi's first step, put her back in the playpen and then run to the computer, download the images and batch email them to every friend in the world. If you want to be sure that your images of little suzy are useable 15-20 years from now...shoot also in traditional film format. Put your negatives in archival negative protective sleeves, keep away from extreme heat and scan them if you want to use them digitally. The cost for prosumer level digital cameras runs from $1,000 to $3,500. Professional SLR digital cameras can run from $2,500 to $5,500 NOT including interchangable lenses. In contrast, the cost for amateur digital cameras ranges from $150 to $600. The digital camera you buy today WILL be obsolete in a year, possibly two. Think of that before you drop big money on something that will be nothing more than a door weight in a few years. Consider this--- you can buy a NEW leica camera for a couple thousand dollars. That camera is considered the rolls royce of gear. Very expensive but will last a lifetime. OR you can drop a couple thousand on some high-resolution digital camera (which still doesn't match the resolution of film) and have that camera obsolete in a few years. Question--which one seems like a better deal? I know that I'm sounding like digital is all bad and I don't want to leave one with that misperception. I do own a digital camera. I use it for just the purposes that I outlined above...certain point and shoot shots that I want to get back and image quickly. BUT I also have my REAL photographic gear, that shoots in film. Film offers me archival longevity that I can either repoduce traditionally OR digitally. If you do chose to buy a digital camera, spend some time understanding how they work and what the various features on them are. Know that a digital camera has a lens that opens up to a digital sensor. The sensor "reads" the image in the form of pixels. More pixels means greater resolution. Note that the resolution in digital doesn't currently match film. What the digital sensor sees is only a percentage of what is being viewed in reality. The rest of the image not picked up by the digital sensor is "filled in" or interpolated by the soft or firmware that comes with the gear. SO, when going to buy a digital camera consider how many million mega-pixels the sensor has. The greater the number the better it is. Some camera manufacturers "cheat" when reporting how well their digital camera works. They say 3 million when in fact it's only 1.5 million and the rest is digitally doubled. Be sure actual megapixels are truly being read and not digitally enhanced. For purchasing a digital camera, identify what you can afford. Don't go beyond what your means are. If you can, compare the output images of different megapixel cameras, thus giving you an idea of what the difference looks like. Look at how the digital camera is laid out as well as the features it sports. You can have a camera that is filled with features but is so hard to work that you not only never utilize the features, but you never pick up the camera!!!! Unless you're a professional photojournalist, forget about digital slr camera bodies for now. The resolution of the non-digital lenses exceeds that of current sensors, so that the whiz bang lenses you use on your traditional film gear have to be dumbed down for use with the computer sensor. And besides, spending $4,000 on a camera that will be a door-stop in a year or two is plain stupid unless you can write the whole thing off as a business expense or unless it will make you $4,000 in sales. In review, here's are my suggestions about digital cameras. For now, be sure you have a traditional film camera before you have a digital one. Traditional film cameras can last 5-30 years before they stop working. They are a better bang for the buck. Learn how to use your camera. Buy a digital camera that is the best price for something you will probably only own (or more accurately use) for a few years. Don't be swayed by media hype. Above all, enjoy your images and make great art!  |
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by Howard_Creech
