NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, March 2004
Digital Photography
Where From? Where to?
by Bill Moeller
wmoeller@arkansasusa.com
(click to email author)


The turnout for the February meeting was impressive, and members and guests alike showed a high level of interest in the program topic--Digital Photography. This might be because 90% or so of the folks at the meeting have owned a film camera at one time or another, and nearly as many, maybe 85%, have owned a digital camera. (Not only that, nearly a third have owned their own darkroom, and more than a third have the basics of a digital darkroom today.)

The article which follows pretty well summarizes the convergent history of computing and photography. During the meeting I supplemented this with some initial observations about where we are today, and then later went out on a limb and made the following predictions about the future of digital photography:

Digital image quality will continue to improve at a rapid pace. Prices of digital imaging equipment will continue to decline at a rapid pace. Digital print quality and longevity will both continue to improve at a rapid pace. Digital sensors will continue to rapidly displace film in mainstream consumer products. Digital imaging will more slowly displace silver imaging among art and other serious photographers. Film will eventually disappear as a mainstream technology. Film will never disappear completely.

We are planning to have more programs on digital photography this year. Please let me or any of the other members of the Executive Board know if there is any particular area or topic you would like to see explored.

Cameras and computers have both been around for a long time, but only recently have the two technologies begun to converge.

Aristotle wrote about the camera obscura in the fourth century B.C.; the Chinese and others were using the abacus in the sixth. Things were moving, but at a snail’s pace. It wasn’t until the sixth century A.D. that zero was invented by two mathematicians in India, and even as late as the sixteenth century the camera obscura was used only by the artists of the time as a sketching aid.

Some progress was made in the area of mechanical calculating devices over the next couple of hundred years, but it wasn’t until 1820 that the first commercially successful calculating machine capable of performing “all operations” was introduced by Charles Thomas. Six years later in 1826, Joseph Niépce successfully recorded a photo image on a light sensitive material after an eight hour exposure in bright sunlight.

In the mid-1800’s, Charles Babbage designed his “Analytical Engine,” which foresaw the modern computer but which was never built because the technology of the day wasn’t up to the job. Photography evolved rapidly following development of the Daguerrotype in 1839 and the wet plate process in 1851, culminating in the introduction of the first consumer level camera and roll film by George Eastman in 1888.

The first half of the 20th century saw rapid developments in photography with the introduction of the 35mm camera by Leitz in 1925, color slide film in 1935, color negative film in 1942, and the Polariod Land camera in 1947. In the latter part of this period, the first true digital computer (with vacuum tubes, of course) was developed by John Atanasof of Iowa State University, the famous (or infamous) ENIAC computer was developed by the University of Pennsylvania, and solid state electronics took a quantum leap with the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs. During this same period, the developing technology of television was slyly hinting at the future convergence of electronic and photo technology.

In 1950, the state of the art in computers was a heavily air-conditioned room full of unreliable vacuum tubes with a total computing power considerably less than that of today’s PC, requiring for all practical purposes a graduate degree in engineering to operate. In that same year, the state of the art in the camera world was the 35mm camera with mechanical shutter, range finder focusing, and manual exposure controls.

During the next twenty-five years, major developments in electronics further set the stage for the digital challenge to film’s preeminent role in photographic imaging. Outstanding among these were the integrated circuit (TI, 1957), the charge coupled device (Bell Labs, 1969), complementary metal oxide semiconductor circuits( Fairchild Semiconductor, 1963), and the microprocessor (Intel, 1971). In 1968 the first solid state imaging patent was issued to the Philips Corporation, and in 1973 microcomputer kits appeared on the open market.

Then in 1976, things shifted into high gear. In 1976, the year in which the Apple 1 was introduced, The Canon AE-1 became the first 35mm camera to boast a built-in microprocessor. Other autofocus and automatic exposure control cameras followed, including the Konica C35-AF point-and-shoot. In 1981, the year in which IBM got serious about PC’s, the University of Calgary developed the first operational digital camera. The leading camera manufacturers continued to refine their film-based products through the use of microprocessors and other electronic goodies. The JPEG standard for photographic image compression was introduced in 1988, Photoshop I appeared in 1990, and the first commercial digital camera--a 1.3megapixel sensor in a Nikon F-3 body was introduced by Kodak in 1991. A couple of years later, the first consumer level digital cameras made their appearance.

The image quality and convenience of these first mainstream digital cameras left a lot to be desired, but in the last ten years things have been moving along at warp speed, and in 2003 sales of digital cameras exceeded sales of film cameras for the first time. Today you can buy digital cameras which rival the print image quality of 35mm for roughly two hundred to two thousand dollars, depending on how many bells and whistles and just how much image quality you want. And, if Moore’s law continues to hold, we can expect image quality to continue to improve and price to decline to the point where media preference alone will be the determining factor in choosing between a film and a digital camera.

During this same ten year period, computers have more than kept up. Digital image processing, with its large files and complex operations, calls for a fast processor, lots of RAM, lots of storage, good software, and the ability to communicate at high speed with the camera, scanner, printer, backup and permanent storage, etc. PC processor speeds today are measured in GHz and hard drive capacity in tens of GBs. 512MB of RAM is common, and USB 2 is standard for communications with external peripherals. DVDs, with their multiple GB capacity, are available for that all-important off-line storage. Perhaps of even greater importance is the wide range of image processing software suitable for all levels of interest. To name just two examples, Paintshop Pro 8 and Photoshop Elements II are incredibly powerful and flexible, and sell for about one hundred dollars or less each.

You might say that we are entering into the golden age of amateur digital photography. We are on the threshold of major advances, such as breaking the 8-bit barrier in tonal definition, and eliminating the need to interpolate colors for each individual pixel. The industry is hard at work today to solve these and other problems in order to bring us better products tomorrow. I am confident they will. The intellectual challenge and the economic incentive are both there, big time.

Click here to return to top



==================================================================