PLUGGED IN
Digital photos: another look
As readers weigh in on new technology, picture emerges: It's here to stay
By Simson L. Garfinkel, 12/25/97
 ast week I wrote about my experiences with some of the new digital cameras on the market. This week I want to share some stories of what readers are doing with digital photography.
Thomas Raia, a college student on a budget, bought the least expensive digital camera he could find - a Kodak DC-20 that cost less than $200. The camera's small size lets Raia carry it everywhere. ''I use my camera to take pictures of everything (and I mean everything) that goes on while I'm away at college, and then post them to my Web site,'' Raia writes. ''The picture quality isn't always great, but it gets the job done.'' If you want to see Raia's photographs from his first year at Florida Institute of Technology, you can find them at mocha. internexus.net/photos/FIT. Justin Lee Altshuler, a professor of dental medicine at Boston University, is using low-end cameras from Minolta and Casio for close-up medical and dental photography. He likes the Casio QV-11, which can store 92 images on a removable chip and has a detachable lens. Dr. Altshuler predicts that within five years, ''film and/or Polaroid instants will be history.'' One factor that will help spell the end of film-based photography is low-cost printers that print with film-like quality on special paper. Many of these printers can connect directly
o your camera, eliminating the need to use a computer. Over the past week I have played with the Casio DP-8000 printer ($400). The printer uses a dye-sublimation thermal transfer system to make spectacular 4x6 glossy color prints. You can also produce special effects, such as birthday cards, calendars, or picture-postcards, without using a desktop computer. If you do have a computer, you can connect it to the back of the printer, and use the printer to print images you find on the Internet. One problem with the Casio printer is its speed: It takes about four minutes to print each image from start to finish. Of course, as with everything else, photograph printers will only get faster. But high-speed equipment will be expensive at first, so we're likely to get our first look at them in malls and photo stores. You'll just drop off your camera's chip, then stop by an hour later to pick up your chip and the prints. Several readers wrote in asking whether they could use their video camera with a Snappy or ano
her video-capture system as a low-cost alternative to digital cameras. The answer is you can but you probably won't want to. Pictures from video cameras look fine on television, but they don't look as good when you display them on a high-resolution computer monitor. Video has less resolution and less detail than is available with digital cameras. The big advantage of video is that you can capture hundreds of images on an hourlong videotape - much more than you can store on a chip. A number of readers wrote to say I had made a mistake about Sony's Digital Mavica, the camera that stores images on floppy disks instead of silicon chips. Tom Spada reports his camera can store 22 to 26 pictures shot in natural light, and 30 to 31 pictures shot with the flash. Why the difference? When you use the flash, the pictures tend to get washed out. Because these images have large expanses of white space, they tend to compress better. Unfortunately, these are the very pictures you don't want to keep. Robert Ames chastis
d me for my ''Attitudes of the Rich and Famous.'' Why spend $400 for a digital camera, he asks, when you can buy a 35mm disposable camera for $12 plus processing? Well, aside from the environmental concerns, digital cameras are actually cheaper than film. Using film, you'll pay $1 per final print. If you shoot and develop just seven roles of 36 prints each, you'll spend more money than Raia did on his Kodak DC-20. The big advantage of film today is not cost but quality. Film has more exposure latitude, which means you can get more details in shadows and in bright areas. Film also has permanence: Kodachrome slides will last hundreds of years if properly stored. You can get the best of both worlds by ordering a Photo-CD when you have your film developed. You get both your slides (or prints) and digital copies of your images on a CD-ROM. But Photo-CD is neither cheap nor fast. Mosher Photo on Martha's Vineyard sends its Photo-CD orders to an outside processor, adding $22.98 and several days' delay to each
nprocessed 36-exposure role. On the other hand, the quality is unmatched. I made a Photo-CD of my wedding album, which you can find at simson.net/ photos/wedding. You can make your own scans as well. Hewlett-Packard's PhotoSmart scanner works with slides, 35mm negatives, and prints. I'm very impressed with the quality. You can find it for $500. You can also use the $300 PaperPort Strobe, although the photographic quality is not as good. However you get your photographs on line, you'll need some way to catalog them, manipulate them, and file them away. Although every camera and scanner I've seen comes with some sort of program, they are uniformly bad. A far better choice is to go to the Internet and download a copy of ThumbsPlus from Cerious Software (www.cerious.com). As its name implies, ThumbsPlus will show you little thumbnail images for every photograph on your hard drive. The program lets you drag-and-drop images from one directory to another. You can also rotate, crop, do color correction, sharp
n, and perform other enhancements. And unlike other programs, ThumbsPlus builds a database of all of your images, which means the program does not have to reread all the images on your computer each time it starts up. A real time saver. ThumbsPlus is shareware; it costs $65 to register. The program runs on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95; the company is working on a Macintosh version. Technology writer Simson L. Garfinkel can be reached at plugged-in@simson.net.
This story ran on page of the Boston Globe on 12/25/97.
© Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company.
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