April 25, 2004
Snap unhappy - digital photography's dirty little secret
To Joanna Wane writing for New Zealand stuff, "the digital revolution is creating a gaping hole in our heritage. While the public and the professionals have embraced this magical technology that allows pictures to be viewed in an instant and transmitted around the globe, concern is being raised that our pictorial history is at risk".
[...] Imagine, for example, the exhilarated couple who snap off some shots on their mobile phone to announce the arrival of their newborn baby to the world within minutes of his birth. Later, when they're looking for pictures to frame or save in an album, they'll be caught short if that low-resolution mobile-phone image is all they have."
How digital cameras and camera phones will affect our heritage is an interesting subject and has been written up before. cf related articles:
-- Picture Phones mark a change in social record-keeping - Until now, popular interest in photography was more centered on the long-term preservation of memories in family albums. But with camera phones, the focus is more on sharing than storing.
-- The future of digital cameras - The rise of digital signifies a paradigm shift in the use of cameras away from being image capturing devices and towards data gathering devices.
-- Digital era 'a threat to memories' - Australians are taking more photos than ever before - but few of them are being printed. Historical records as well as family albums may suffer, with less than 20 per cent of pictures making it into print, says the Photographic Imaging Council of Australia.
-- How camera phones will affect print and digital cameras - Camera-phones might also hasten the decline of printed photos. As handsets improve, viewing images on-screen could become the norm, whether on phones, PCs, televisions, or even by beaming photos to a wireless-enabled picture frame next to Grandma's chair.
I'm not sure about this last point as the Economist does not take into account the many Cell Phone Printer projects by company greats such as Kodak and HP, allowing to print directly from a handset, not over the Internet but in physical locations such as shopping malls or selected outlets. But I do go along with the the author of this article when he says that no one knows where this is going. That's for sure.
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