Check out this article in today's San Francisco Chronicle.
I have been debating for several months--probably almost a year now--whether or not to purchase a digital camera. I have a little bit of money (thanks to some donors) put away for an out-of-the-ordinary purchase, and have reallly been leaning toward buying one. At Target last week (killing time waiting for my brother's flight to arrive at SFO), I was able to hold a couple models and liked the feel of them, and I love the concept. Being able to do whatever you want with a picture so easily, instead of being limited to paper and scanning. Plus, it's so much cheaper. I haven't taken many pictures since living in SF, largely because of film and processing costs.
But this article brings up the cons--yes, there actually are some--of digital photography. None of which are really making me think twice about buying a new digital, but definitely thought provoking. What will digital storage be like in 20 or 30 years? Will we even be able to access our pictures from 2005 at that time, if they're not in a hard-copy form? As is the human way, we're always going to be finding something bigger and better, but at the same time, it forces out our old stand-by options.
Any thoughts on this phenomenon, or recommendations on how/what to buy when it comes to digital cameras? :-)
About Me
- Chris Winkler
- Serving Bible translation in Nigeria, I'm a Christ-follower, husband and father living in Plateau State.
Friends' Blogs
- Jon Shuler (Jon's photos are amazing)
- Back Row Leader (my friend Roy's thoughts on leadership)
- Those Winklers (our family blog site)
- AfriGadget (some of the most creative uses for "stuff in Africa")
- White African (All things techie coming out of Africa)
- Center for Student Missions (stories from my previous ministry)
- Ryan (friend from SF who always has interesting blog postings)
- Bob Creson (president of Wycliffe Bible Translators)
1 comment:
I'm perhaps bias, being a computer geek, but I vote for digital. Since the photos are represented as nothing but 1's and 0's and they aren't married to a hardware standard (like DVDs, CDs, etc, which probably won't exist in 30 years), there'll always be a way to convert them into other formats in the future, and you won't have to worry about their quality degrading with time... the trick just being that you have to find a safe place to store those 1's and 0's, because CD-R's and hard drives alone aren't safe. One good option is to pick an online service (or two or three - might as well be REALLY safe) that are definitely going to keep backups, and likely won't go under any time soon without due warning. Yahoo! Photos is a good option for that, but I might be bias. ;) (Now that Yahoo owns Flickr, which is a great photo sharing service, I'm even more enthusiastic about going that route!)
With printed photos, not only do they worsen in quality over time but it's not so easy to keep multiple copies in multiple locations in case of fire, flood, hurricane, etc... digital makes that kind of distributed backup easy and inexpensive! :) In my mind, those are the two best reasons to go digital - no loss of quality and the ability to keep copies of your photos in an unlimited number of places worldwide with the click of a mouse means that if you're smart about it, you can be sure that you'll always have your photos *somewhere* even if disaster strikes!
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