
Ahhhhh! What a nightmare! I'm only 30 but even now I'm saying things like 'I remember the days when' and reminiscing about the £35 film camera's I used to buy whose final picture quality still exceeds the £400 digital cameras on sale now. It's all about convenience really. With a digital camera you can see the picture you've taken to know if you got a good one. You can delete photos rather than have to pay to print them out. You can go home and print the photos out directly, many even plug into the cigarette lighter socket in your car! Does the number of advantages exceed the downsides? For example, having them on film pushed us to have to print out the photos to see them and then we had a permanent copy to look back on. Everyone I spoke to whilst creating this section admitting to having not just one, but several flash memory cards stuffed in a drawer somewhere with dozens of photos just waiting to be printed. Don't listen to the salesman who says that you can save money by just plugging your camera into your computer and printing them off on a standard printer - you will never take the time to do it and the longer you leave it, the more of a task it becomes. Get a custom one-touch printer that your camera plugs straight into or at the very least a high quality printer with flash drive sockets, a digital display and it's own 6x4 photo paper drawer. Otherwise, like the rest of us, you'll never look at the pictures you've taken ever again except for the one of your dog chasing it's tail that you have as a screensaver.










The main downside to this ever increasing quality is that when you look over the pictures you took only a couple of years ago on your, then top-of-the-range, 2 megapixel camera, they look as though they were taken in the seventies! Today I'm sporting an 8 megapixel camera (my mobile phone even has 5) but I can't help this nagging feeling that in a couple of years I'm going to be disappointed with the quality of the pictures I'm taking now. Why did we move away from film before the new technology (the stuff available to the public anyway) could match the old technology's quality at a matching price? Of course, many will say that it is not the camera's fault, it is taking the pictures at a very high quality, it is just that the printers for printing those high quality photos out is still technologically in it's infancy. How does that help the argument? This is mid-2008 and I just visited a PC World store where I was told 'this new printer is almost as good as chemical development!' like it was some sort of achievement? How can it be a move forward if it hasn't even caught up with the old technology yet? I wouldn't buy a car from a salesman that said 'this new car has satnav, mp3 player, dvd screens and the brakes are almost as good as they were fifty years ago' ... †