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Reasons for Using Digital Images

Although the picture quality of non-digital film-based photographs called analog photo graphy is still superior, digital cameras and scanners are gaining quality all the time and increasing in the resolution which is the number of dots per inch that work together to form a picture to make digital pictures sharper than before. Soon, a trained eye will not be able to tell the difference between a digital picture and a picture produced the traditional way.

Given that the quality of digital pictures is still inferior to regular photographed prints, and given that digital cameras are still higher-priced than their film-based counterparts, why is digital photography so important and in such widespread use today?

Several reasons exist for the popularity of digital photography and scanning equipment. More digital cameras are being sold every year, and their popularity has only just started. Here are just a few of the advantages of digital cameras:

No film is required; just storage chips, such as memory sticks or flash memory, that you can reuse.
You can look at a picture through the digital camera's viewfinder right after you snap the picture. Not only can you see the most recent picture you've taken, but you can see all the pictures you've taken and stored on the camera's memory chip.
You can carry several memory chips with you so when you fill up one with pictures, you can replace the full one with an empty one.
You can copy the memory chip's pictures to your computer, print the photos, or send them to others through e-mail and then erase the memory chip and use it again.
If you don't like a picture you just took, you can delete it and that space on your storage chip is freed up instantly.
Unlike film, you have no development costs because you have no film to process. You can pay to have the images on your digital camera's memory chip processed as prints, but you don't have to buy a new chip (unlike film) when you develop the pictures—just reuse the memory chip.
Web site pictures are easier with digital pictures because you can transfer the pictures directly from your camera to the Web. Put up-to-the-minute pictures on your family's Web page or sell your old memorabilia in an eBay auction that shows pictures of the goods you're selling. With regular prints, you would first have to scan the picture and then upload the scanned image to the Web site.

The key to digital cameras is found in the term digital. When you digitize data, such as a picture, you convert that picture into computer-ready data. With a digital camera, the photos are instantly digitized. With a scanner, you can create digital photos of non-digital pictures and other items such as magazine covers that you can scan. Therefore, no discussion on digital photography would be complete without including a little about scanners.

Windows XP is the first operating system from Microsoft to integrate digital image support directly into the operating system.

The Scanner's TWAIN Compliance

Scanners have adhered to a standard, named the TWAIN standard, since 1992. The early and mid 1990s were generally not the years that hardware manufacturers adopted standards well among the industry, but the scanner folks got this one right. Most scanners since the earliest ones utilized the TWAIN method of digital capture, making the support of scanners in software much easier and more widespread.

The name TWAIN simply comes from Rudyard's Kipling's The Ballad of East and West, from the line, " … and never the twain shall meet." (The rumor that TWAIN stands for Technology Without an Interesting Name is false!)

Both PCs and Macs support the TWAIN standard. The bottom line of years of the same standard means that users have more options at lower costs than would be the case if manufacturers did not adopt the same method of scanning.

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