Lee Chin (Editor: Rachel Chertkoff)

Driven by the World Wide Web (Web)’s insatiable appetite for visual images, the technology of digital cameras has been fast developing. Digital cameras get smaller every year, as well as better, more feature-rich, and less expensive. Better and cheaper color printers and other out-put equipment also stimulates demand for the cameras. In fact, more than 2 million digital cameras were purchased in 1997. With more advanced technologies, improved image quality, increasingly affordable price, and characteristics such as direct-to-PC connection, digital cameras have been used by households and businesses, and have been approved by many professional photographers. Digital cameras have also become a standard peripheral for the computer.

Like conventional cameras, digital cameras capture images by clicking the shutter. The major difference between the two is that digital cameras use a hard disk or flash disk rather than film to store the image. Some cameras use only built-in memory for storage, while others support removable flash-memory cards, which provide more space to store images when you cannot reach your personal computer (PC). Two devices are needed to move images from the camera to your PC: a PC Card adapter and a serial transfer. Some digital cameras come with 3.5-inch, 1.44 MB floppy drives. It is easy to download images from the camera to the floppy drives, then put the floppy directly into the computer to transfer the images. A high-quality color printer is needed for printing out pictures from your PC. There are also cameras that offer LCD viewers or NTSC video-out connectors. Such connectors allow you to attach a camera directly to a TV or VCR for the viewing of images.

The most important element determining the quality of images is the resolution of the camera. The standard resolution of a digital camera is 640 by 480 pixels, which can produce a fair image and is good enough for personal and business use. Although 320 by 240 resolution offers faster download speed, the images it provides would turn out rather blurred. For professional users, there are choices of resolutions from 1,280 by 1,000 to 3,060 by 2,036. These kinds of cameras are able to produce photographic quality images nice enough to be used in print, but the cameras are far more expensive than regular cameras.

In 1996, digital cameras were used mostly for business purposes such as real estate sales, insurance claims or photo identification cards. But by 1998, with the improvement of computer technologies, the extreme price drop-off, and the dramatic expansion of the Web and its demand for visual images, the market for digital cameras has grown rapidly. Therefore, not only film camera manufacturers, but also scanner and PC peripheral manufacturers have all rushed into this promising and relatively new market. Each company produces digital cameras for different price ranges to meet every consumer’s need. These types of cameras can be approximately divided into two categories: company and personal users and professional photographers. The cameras costing from $100 to $1,000 are for company and personal users. The lower-priced cameras are basic color cameras with a small amount of built-in memory. With higher prices, you can get cameras with higher resolutions, larger memory or removable flash-memory cards, better lighting options, and perhaps an LCD viewer. Professional-featured cameras are much more expensive, but they can provide images vivid enough to compare with 35-mm photographs. Now, more and more consumers are replacing conventional cameras with digital ones because of the popularity of the Web and the trend of the middle to late 1990s – everything should be digital.

Digital cameras, on the whole, capture the images we want, store these images on a hard disk or built-in memory of each camera, and then connect to computers or TV to display. The major use of these cameras was at first quick image capture, such as photo IDs, but at the time of this article’s publication, is to transfer images on the Web. Digital cameras can be generally divided into several categories: still cameras, video cameras, and cameras with or without flashlights. Digital still cameras capture snapshots, while digital video cameras capture a continuous stream of information. Some video cameras are accompanied by ‘frame grabbing software’ that is capable of creating a snapshot from a continuous video stream. Cameras with a built-in flash perform equally well indoors and out, and cameras without flashlights should be used only in situations with sufficient light.

The development of digital cameras was first driven by the demand for images on the Web; the improving quality of printers capable of photo-realistic output also affects this development and at the same time spurs the demand. Consumers, too, are another factor that shapes the digital camera’s progress. Each year, the cameras are developed to become smaller, easier to operate, more feature-rich, and better in image quality, meeting the need of family-user and business-user consumers. For photo hobbyists, professional designers and photographers, the cameras needed are more technology-driven and should have such characteristics as removable lenses, large memory capacity, fast recovery time, high resolutions, and good color balance.

For those camera manufacturers, the most important policy that affects the demand for digital cameras is the resolution. The lowest acceptable resolution is 320 by 240 pixels, which is available in many low-priced digital cameras. These cameras cannot provide very good image quality, but are still usable for the Web. Resolutions lower than 320 by 240 are not permitted to be produced. The standard resolution for digital cameras is 640 by 480. The resolution affects the price of the cameras directly, and the camera manufacturers use price to set their policies for developing different functions and features of digital cameras. The excessive information of easy-to-use personal and business publishing applications also facilitates the diffusion of digital cameras.

Although the market for digital cameras has existed only for a short time, with the continuing development of computer technologies and the saturation of the conventional camera market, this new market is now growing rapidly and looks promising. With falling prices and fair image quality, the digital camera is purchased mostly as a standard peripheral for the home or business PC, and more and more households use digital cameras instead of conventional ones. But there are still several problems with the development and diffusion of digital cameras. First, even though digital camera resolution is good enough for images used on Websites, it is still not as high and clear as conventional cameras; those cameras with much higher resolutions are extremely expensive. For example, Kodak’s DCS-460 with resolution as high as 3,060 by 2,036 costs $27,000. Also, the present existing output devices are not good enough to achieve professional results. And finally, the memory storage of digital cameras is limited compared to 35mm cameras. Even with removable memory cards, which are very highly priced, it is still not so convenient in comparison with traditional films. At present, the basic consumers for digital cameras are family users and business users. The main purpose of digital cameras is not to replace the conventional cameras but to be used for the Web. But with advanced development toward the three above-mentioned points, it is likely that digital cameras can attract more professional photographers and graphic designers. At that time, digital cameras could possibly become a necessity for the personal PC so that every computer owner would have one digital camera.

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