Looking at the Pros and Cons of Digital Photography

Digital cameras blend the art of photography with the science of the computer age. They serve as an outlet for creative expression and as a serious communication tool. Just as important, digital cameras are fun. Digital photography, however, does have its pros and cons.

Advantages of digital photography

For convenience, quality control, flexibility, and fun, digital does a slam-dunk on film photography. Here are just a few advantages of working with digital images:

• More creative control: With traditional film photos, you have no input into an image after it leaves your camera. Everything rests in the hands of the photofinisher. But with a digital photo, you can use your computer and photo-editing software to touch up and enhance your pictures.

• Instant, easy, photo sharing: You can send an image instantaneously by attaching it to an e-mail message. Not only is electronic distribution of images quicker than regular mail or overnight delivery services, it's also more convenient. You don't have to address an envelope, find a stamp, or truck off to the post office or delivery drop box.

In addition to sending photos via e-mail, you can share photos with friends, family, and clients, no matter how far away, via a personal Web page or a photo-sharing site such as the Kodak EasyShare Gallery.

• More interesting presentations: You can include pictures in business or educational presentations that you create with programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint. For more casual audiences, you can produce fun multimedia slide shows and burn them to a CD or DVD.

• More useful databases and household records: You can include digital images in business and household databases. For example, if your company operates a telemarketing program, you can insert images into a product order database so that when sales reps pull up information about a product, they see a picture of the product and can describe it to customers.

• More creative fun: You can have a lot of fun exploring your artistic side. Using an image-editing program, you can apply wacky special effects, paint mustaches on your evil enemy, and otherwise distort reality. You can also apply special-effects filters that give your photo the look of a painting, pencil sketch, or other traditional art medium, as shown in Figure 1.

In addition, you can also create your own personalized stationery, business cards, calendars, mugs, T-shirts, postcards, and other goodies. Some programs provide templates for creating such materials. You just select the design you want to use and insert your own photos into the template.

After you place your photos into the templates, you can print your artwork on a color printer using specialized print media sold by Kodak, Epson, HP, and other vendors. If you don't have access to a printer with this capability, you can get the job done at a local quick-copy shop or e-mail your image to one of the many vendors offering digital printing services via the Internet.

Disadvantages of digital photography

Thanks to design and manufacturing refinements, problems that kept people from moving to digital photography in the early days of the technology — high prices and questionable image quality being the most critical — have been solved.

A few downside issues remain, however:

• Images from low-resolution digital cameras don't contain enough picture information to produce decent prints. Today's digital cameras can produce the same high quality prints as you've come to expect from your film camera. However, to enjoy that kind of picture quality, you need to start with a camera that offers moderate-to-high image resolution. Low-resolution cameras are fine for pictures that you want to use on a Web page or in a multimedia presentation, however.

• After you press the shutter button on a digital camera, the camera requires a few seconds to record the image to memory. During that time, you can't shoot another picture. With some cameras, you also experience a slight delay between the time you press the shutter button and the time the camera captures the image. These lag times can be a problem when you're trying to capture action-oriented events.

Generally speaking, the more expensive the camera, the less lag time you encounter. With some of the newer models, lag time isn't much more than you experience with a film camera using an automatic film advance. As manufacturers continue to refine digital-imaging technology, you can expect continued improvements in price and image-capture speed.

• Becoming a digital photographer involves learning some new concepts and skills. If you're familiar with a computer, you shouldn't have much trouble getting up to speed with digital images. If you're a novice to both computers and digital cameras, expect to spend a fair amount of time making friends with your new machines.