What advantage of using the digital camera? What disadvantage of using the digital camera? What the future use?

Thank you

-- Michael P'ng Yik Shen (michaelpng23@hotmail.com), June 01, 2000

Answers

Advantages: "film" is a fixed cost, not recurring or incremental. Easy to transfer images to web & email to show friends, or to computer, for photoshop manipulation. Can delete and show off images just after taking them. Digitally stored images don't fade much... :)

Disadvantages: Inferior manual control to SLR, including manual focus, aperture & shutter priority. Difficulty gauging depth of field. Inferior low light performance. Inferior lens selection (not as good zoom & wide). Color balance, saturation, sharpness may be skewed. Often more expensive. Inferior flash integration. Inferior reproduction of large prints! Greater cost to make many subsequent prints of single image.

Future: Digicam tech is improving at insane speed.

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), June 01, 2000.

advantages

• save on cost of film/developing
• instant results
• ability to delete images on the spot
• good for web publishing
• with all the above.. you tend to take more pictures...
• the oooh..ahh.. factor when people find out it's a digital camera... but this is starting to run dry.. most people has already seen one..

disadvantages

• resolution of 3.3 megapix may be high but not the quality... a marketing strategy... evidence of noise/low depth of colors/lack of sharpness in these ccds
• response time equivalent to point and shoot cameras and more... i.e. shutter lag.... the time it takes to save images...
• expensive memory media... plan on spending 100-200 dollars more on top of the price of the camera
• prints of pictures made on paper not as cheap and most are done online (soon enough there will be 1 hour photo labs that will take these cards and more home photo printers like epson 875dc will make it easier)
• to obtain better quality camera, only options are to buy pro slr models that are 5k+ but time will change these so it will be more affordable

in the end... if you have lots of people able to get online and browse the web, having a digital camera and upload to online galleries are quite fun... short trips are great with digital cameras... long trips require external storage like laptop... my 96mb flash lasts me about a day... the quality? most of the pro/consumer models exhibit some noise artifacts that still make it look like it came out of a digital camera. i'd say the majority of the people out there will not notice it.. just those that are quality freaks like me... a 8x10 by most 2 megapix cameras are quite stunning... it saves on film and developing costs.. and those does add up... i develop 3 rolls of double prints yesterday and it came out to $58... calculating that i've shot about over 5,000 digital pictures i would have paid for the camera back ages ago... my new nikon 990 is not the fastest thing in the world, but it's quite fun to play with.... just dont think it's a replacement for a slr... i went to a wedding this last weekend, and the film prints are much better in quality than any of my digital ones... sharper, more in focus and not to mention the pictures i manage to take because it was much faster...

i'm prolly missing out a lot of other points but others can fill it in for me :)

-- Keat Lim (keatlim@my-deja.com), June 01, 2000.

One of the answers above said that photo costs were more expensive and one said they were cheaper. I side with the cheaper side for the reason that when I shoot 35mm I only show about 25% to show people and hide the rest; not because they are bad but because they are often redundent (or bad). (How many people in your office bring in every last lousy picture they took on their vacation?) My point is - with digital you print far less. And the instant gratification is g r e a t!!

-- bill (this_old_house@pobox.com), June 01, 2000.