Digital photography: a farewell to “cheese”

Although professional photographers have long been using digital acquisition, storage, and manipulation technology, it has been too costly for most personal use. But recent technological improvements have changed all that, and perhaps more important, the Web represents a large test market, willing and able to tolerate, at least initially, lower-quality digital images. The first channel for converting photos into digital form was Eastman Kodak´s Photo CD system, introduced in 1992. Photo CD lets users develop film onto a computer-readable compact disk instead of paper. Each photo is encoded at five separate quality levels, from low-resolution thumbnail to high-resolution poster, enabling each CD to hold up to 100 photos. Since Photo CD´s arrival, other technologies for translating from atoms to bits and vice versa have appeared. Photospecialized scanners will scan negatives, prints, or slides, producing digital images that photo-quality printers then can print. While the quality of digital development still can´t match paper-based developing, ink-jet color printers are rapidly improving in quality and dropping in price. For example, Epson offers the Stylus Photo, sporting near-photo-quality images at 720 dots per inch and selling for just under $400, while Hewlett-Packard offers the comparable Photosmart printer