Contents: Superconducting electronics, digital photo, and home automation.

Digital cameras become more powerful and probably in a few years they will meet professional or almost professional requirements. Now affordable digital camera is a perfect tool for real-estate agent, and for many people who don't care much about the picture quality. I am not a professional photographer but had invested recently about $400 to camera, which still using films. I am not saying that digital camera is bad, everyone should make his own decision based on personal requirements and needs. I am not going to make comprehensive comparison, but giving a few hints explaining why I would prefer film camera. If you find them not so important, a digital camera would be your best choice.

1. Affordable digital camera has resolution about 1600x1200 pixels. This is definitely not enough for making 20" x 30 " posters. Friend of mine likes put such posters on walls at his home, and this limitation gives him no choice. Such poster costs about $6 at Clark Color Laboratories to make it from negative film. I have found only one place where the pictures in digital form are accepted for posters (about $25) but did not try it yet. I hope that images with the scanned resolution of 3300 x 2300 pixels will be enough for making posters, and I let you now after trying this service. (See also scanning tips).

2. Limited resolution of digital camera typically fit to the monitor screen resolution now. It means that you could not show even third part of the image without loosing its quality. It will happen with the prints too. It means that by having digital camera you should professionally select composition to fit the full image size. A scanned image allows showing quarter of the picture without any visible quality change.

3. Limited resolution of images will not be enough to show them using the higher resolution computer monitors and projectors.

4. To save memory space digital camera uses JPEG format (or some other types with comparable compression rates). It means that you have to avoid editing this image. This is intrinsic property of JPEG files. Being read and saved into the file it is loosing its quality. Bigger images more tolerant to such editing.

5. The most rigid limitation of using digital cameras is the relatively low color resolution, which is hardly defined by the space occupied by image in the camera flash memory. Let me explain. If you see background picture of this web-site in full colors, you probably using High Color (16 bit) or True Color (24 bit) setting at your computer video driver. It means many millions of colors. Do we really can see them? The answer is YES. Every color can be made from three basic colors: red, green, and blue. It is good idea to save images with color depth of 24 bits (True Color) to reserve 8 bits for each basic color. Thus each basic color will have 256 gradations of brightness. Imaging white-black photo. Would it be enough to draw it with 256 gradations of tone? Probably yes, what about 64 or 32? I don't think it will look good. The same may happen with the color image too. This can be verified experimentally by saving image to files with different color depth. Typical scanned image at resolution of 3300 x 2300 pixels and 24 bit color depth occupied 23 Mb memory as BMP file, which can be rewritten many times (see note 4 above). This can be as twice improved by using not distracting (which is not a JPEG) packer like zip. How real to have such images in camera? How long it will take to copy them into computer? Probably it will not be so bad in a few years, but it is not now. I am still using JPEG files to keep digitized images at size of 2.5 Mb (see also scanning tips), but if later I'll find I don't like one of them, there is still negative in a shoe box.