The Movement from Film to Digital Photography

Many of us remember the days of cameras with film—you had to take it to the store and pay for it to be processed. If you are like most people you often forgot to get the film to the store and by the time you got around to it you had 20-30 rolls that needed developing. Instead of $10-15 you had to put out $40-50 or more depending on the number of exposures on the roll. Of course, that was if you had not left them so long that the film deteriorated and the exposures were ruined.

 Of course, the biggest inconvenience was that you had the take the film out of the camera and to the store if you wanted the pictures immediately. Of course, you had mailers you could send, but those could take a week or more to come back, thus the next best solution was the one hour photo labs which were more expensive than standard processing. It was definitely an improvement over the original film processing which always had to go to the lab and could take a week for completion.

 When digital photography first became popular most people took their memory cards to the store and had the pictures printed. One of the reasons for this was in the beginning of digital photography technology only special digital camera printers were designed to print photos were a digital camera. In the beginning they were also quite expensive—almost the same cost as that of a standard home computer printer. For many people it was more economical to pay for printing of digital photographs than invest in a special printer.

 Today many printers are made with photo quality so that you can download the pictures from your digital camera directly to your computer and print them on high quality photo paper. Of course, if you take a great many pictures that you want printed, it may be cheaper to go to the store instead of using the ink in your printer. However it is very easy to see how digital photography has changed the way we capture and retain pictures. Newer cameras have memory cards you can buy to increase the number of pictures you can store and to allow you to either download them to your computer or pay for photograph processing. As we proceed into the 21st century, we can expect to see advanced digital photography.