What’s the future of photography?
The Independent today has a special digital photography supplement, for which I’ve written a few things, including a consideration of how the analogue/digital issue is moving.
The old expectation that more megapixels would solve your problems is gradually fading; once you get beyond four megapixels, your picture is not going to improve, unless you’re making posters. So digital cameras with replaceable lenses, and particularly programmable shutters (which let you adjustthe depth of focus and exposure time) will become much cheaper, and so more common.
The phone companies aren’t going to stand still either; though their purpose is not to give us the best possible cameras. It is to encourage us to upload our phone photos directly to online sharing sites, because that is a data transfer (which earns the phone network operator money). People also like the idea of sharing photos, and browsing them on phones (which more of the photo sharing sites are enabling).
It’s a world that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago. But it’s coming..
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Ian Hobson succumbs to the lure of "and what's more..." (28 July 2005; score: 33.28%)
- Netimperative: what's wrong with government telling us about technology (12 February 2005; score: 32.23%)
- That's funny, I thought the answer was 'an iPod' or 'Robosapien' (7 December 2004; score: 30.79%)
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November 18th, 2005 at 5:31 pm
Until of course the energy runs out and we can’t use all this digital technology to which we have converted…..
November 19th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Image quality can actually get worse above about five megapixels, especially in compact cameras where the image sensors have to cram all the extra pixels into the same space. Crosstalk starts to occur and the image gets noisy. The problem is that digital camera makers are now bogged down an a megapixel war, because the megapixel rating is the only one consumers understand. It is all just as much of a pointless waste of time as the ‘megaherz wars’ that the PC makers indulged in in the late 1990s.
November 19th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
And, the energy used in creating a digital image is negligible compared with the energy used to make a chemical film, process it and make the paper to print it on. If we all went digital right away, we would save a lot of energy and prevent a lot of pollution as well - paper mills are notorious polluters.
November 19th, 2005 at 3:47 pm
I’d like to see a total statistical breakdown of that including the manufacture of the camera and all those batteries - I suspect they may be closer in energy terms than you suggest. And we still print out digital images - think of all the energy used by those digital picture frames. Increasing energy costs and just less available energy will certainly put a cap on some of the current ideas about ubiquity. I can actually get some sound out of my vinly albums using basic technology - something you’ll never do with a CD. Mind you they’ll make good bird scarers for the plot where you have to grow your own food because it costs to much to distribute it…