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Monday, March 22, 2010

The plight and suffering of modern photographer

Have you ever noticed today's digital cameras have increased their resolution from a small 2M pixels to a whopping 9 or even higher resolutions? This acceleration in their unquenchable quest for forever higher and higher resolution is largely aided by the availability of cheap storage medium. It used to be very expensive to buy a 4G SD card for the camera but not anymore. 32G is sort of not rare anymore.

Even today's non-professional and non-digital SLR cameras are sporting resolution in the 8M Pixels upwards. Even mobile phone cameras are also marching to the same tune. Each manufacturer tries to out do the other in the resolution department.

The unfortunate consequence of owning one of these high resolution cameras is that the Internet e-mail system has not caught up with the camera evolution. As a result, many owners of these camera are unable to send their snap shorts to their friends and love ones.

Without a mobile phone tethered to the Internet, the only option open to them is to download the photographs to their computer and then use a digital imaging software like Picasa to shrink the size down to a Internet e-mail friendly 1-2M bytes size photos that they can send out without arousing the wrath from the recipient. Even with a mobile phone capable of sending digital images, those high resolution ones will incur the wrath from the recipient for clogging up their inbox.

This to me sounds like a 2-step advancement and 3-step back. Stupid and not utilizing technology in the way to benefit human.

Since storage media is cheap, why doesn't camera manufacturers introduce a system whereby when you take a shot, it generates two images - one of very high resolution while the other one is of Internet e-mail size about say 0.5-1.5 Mbytes with user selectable resolution. They now have digital cameras with dual screen so why not have dual-image camera?

With this system, a user, particularly not technically savvy user, will be able to reclaim the joy they once enjoyed for distributing the digital snapshots to their friend and love ones so conveniently. Just send the small one that can easily be identified by some creative naming scheme.

With the current crop of cameras, while their image is sharper but they have lost that convenience and joy to share their snapshots on the Internet.

I strongly argue that taking away that joy and convenience they once had is a retrograde step. Canon, Casio, Pentax, Nikon, etc. what do you think?

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