processors
Steve Shipside
It’s a depressingly familiar scenario. Your film comes back with 10 underdeveloped pictures, 10 overdeveloped, three shots of your thumb, and four cases of red-eye that make close family members look like Zoltan, Hound of Dracula.
Precisely that disappointment is driving the digital photography market, says Steve Hoffenberg, director of the Digital Photography Advisory Service at market researchers, Lyra Research. The LCD display panel on the latest generation of cameras is the prime consumer motivator. You know immediately whether you have a good shot.
You can also print out those photos at will, and from home. Kodak tried to kickstart the consumer market for digital photography more than five years ago with PhotoCD, where Boots would return your films to you as digital images on CD-Rom.
The problem was that people didn’t want photos on a screen, they wanted prints. Then, the only photo-quality colour printer available, also from Kodak, cost more than R70 000 and resembled a fully laden dishwasher in size and weight.
Now there are photo-quality colour printers for less than R50 and Agfa has produced a paper for standard inkjet printers with photographic texture and gloss.
Yet while Lyra predicts that annual sales of digital cameras will near 10-million worldwide in 2001, and photo-quality printers will top 50-million, the facts are more sober.
Last year, fewer than one million digital cameras were sold. Agfa’s latest LCD- equipped model, the ePhoto 1280 will cost around $1 000 in the United States when it becomes available. Only more expensive digital cameras, with a million pixels, can reliably give photographic quality.
With three different competing standards for the flash memory storage, the industry is also a long way from the one-size-fits- all convenience of 35mm film.
In the US, a company called Photonet is, however, offering a halfway house to exploit the price gap between cheap photoquality output and expensive digital input.
Drop your film off at a participating developer, and, using an ID number, you can lift your digitised shots off the Photonet Web site. From there you can choose to have them printed up and sent to you, or made up as T-shirts, mugs and ties – or download them and print them off on your own colour printer.