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A reason to smile
THINK OF the hassle that a simple task like taking photographs has become. The colour print film comes with a minimum of 36 exposures. You have to select the right film speed and make sense of numbers like 100 ASA, 400 ASA and what not. After the event, you are still left with half the roll unexposed. But relatives are hollering to see the results — so you are desperate to finish the roll.
At the studio, everything is computerised. The machine prints every frame that is not a complete blank, including the unexposed (you pay for everything of course). At the end of it, you will probably have half a dozen good photos and be poorer by Rs. 200 to Rs. 300. And just in case you need another print after a year, forget it. Your negatives would have faded — that's how carelessly most studios process colour film.
Why do we put up with it, when technology has moved far beyond photography's first `wet age'? We do our writing and printing digitally — on a PC; we listen to music in the neat digital MP3 format and we even bank digitally. So why have we not ditched the ancient analogue way of taking pictures, when a digital option is available? Today, digital photography is a reality in India.
At the recently concluded Photofair 2002 in Mumbai, over half the cameras on display were reportedly digital. This month's Better Photography magazine lists the 25 top cameras of 2001 and digital cameras occupy the top slots.
The digital cameras available in India cover many names well known in the traditional camera business: Yashica, Canon, Agfa, Pentax, Nikon, Minolta, Leica.... as well as a number of names in the computer business: HP, Epson, Casio and the like. But there's hardly any model below Rs. 10,000 and the big names seem to cost Rs. 50,000 or more. The digital camera uses an optical lens to focus an image on a focal plane. But instead of a chemically coated light-sensitive film, what captures the image is an array of tiny electronic sensors called Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs). In wet photography, you have a separate frame for every picture you shoot. In the digital camera, the CCD array is fixed, but it wipes itself clean after every shot and preserves the image in some form of computer storage. For the sake of compactness, most digital cameras use storage technologies like Flash memory, a thumbnail-sized slab of silicon, also called a Smart Card, or lately another Sony invention, a Memory Stick -- a tiny wafer that packs in up to 128 megabytes of memory. Once you have taken all the pictures, all you need is to attach the camera to the nearest PC or notebook with the cable provided and run the software that comes on CD with all digital cameras. This allows you to transfer the pictures to the PC hard disk and wipe the camera's memory to take some more pictures. In all this there is no recurring expenditure, you use the camera again and again. What you do need to replenish is the special paper that is required to produce reasonably good prints on a cheap inkjet printer. Or you can store the pictures on a floppy or CD or take them to a studio to have them professionally printed. And yes, even after 50 years, the prints you stored on that CD will be as good as new.
So where's the rub? The CCD matrix has to pack in a large number of elements — one for every dot or pixel in the final picture. And for a digital photograph to look like one taken in the old way, these pixels must be numbered in millions — hence the term ``mega pixel'' that digital camera makers use to describe their models. This means a two megapixel camera must have a CCD matrix with about two million active elements. Any camera that has a specification of less than one million pixels is virtually a toy because with this you can only print very small pictures — the size of a passport photo. But manufacturers have learned a trick or two.
There is another reason why digital cameras are rarely as good as the best wet cameras: To pack in as many pictures as possible in the available space, all cameras compress the pictures using formats like the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group that remove pixels wherever possible while still deceiving the eye. CCD is still a costly technology, which explains the high prices of megapixel digital cameras.
But help is on the way: a cheaper technology called CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) is becoming popular. These cameras are more affordable (Rs 2,500 plus).
Many of us don't care to make photo prints. — we want to take pictures and email them to friends and relatives. For this, webcams or low resolution digital cameras of 250,000 pixels are adequate. You get what you pay for, but look at it this way: a digital camera will add only about 20 per cent to the price of that PC — and surely that's not too big a price for the pleasure of good photography.
A. VISHNU
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