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In the fear that they might go out of fashion, every people and every product is rushing into the digital arena to survive the new century. Digital camera is said to be the leading product in this wave.

I like digital technologies and photographing, but I hate the current combination of the two. The digital cameras I've met so far seem more like toys than serious photographing equipment.

On Digital Camera

Do you think digital camera will eventually replace traditional ones? Well, I believe although digital technologies will definitely change everything in our life, they would probably not substitude traditional photography. Photography will continue to see very old large frame cameras along with small and light digital ones for decades.

As a computer engineer, I deal with electronical devices every day; that includes both computers and digital cameras. I see the fast-paced progress technologies are making and I do believe that they will change our life completely. Computers and other devices are becoming smaller and lighter yet more and more powerful; one day we will be able to use a pocket-sized computer that is as powerful as a today's supercomputer. We'll be using compact digital cameras that have hundreds of times of pixels more than today's products, that can store hundreds even thousands of pictures, that is ultra-light and small and you can easily lose them.

But photography is not comprised only of technologies; photography, by essence, is an art. Have artists abandoned canvas and brushes since the emerge of fast graphics chips, high-resolution display and complicated graphics software? No, they developed a new discipline called computer graphics or digital art.

There could be, however, a comprimise, or a combination of the two sides. We can first take pictures with traditional camera and film, then get the pictures digitized and processed. There has been sites (like Kodak PhotoNet Online and FujiFilm.net) on the Internet that offer to develop and digitize ordinary film and publish the pictures on the Net. Memory chips would become, besides silver plates and film, another means of storing image - a much more convenient means, of course.

So photography will continue to be an art form, whichever equipment you choose to do it.

The Kodak DC260 Zoom Camera

I usually take so-called digital cameras as computing devices rather than cameras. This type is just another proof of it. Equipped with numerous buttons, dials and sensors, the device looks very fancy and high-tech. However the bells and whistles are of little use to serious photographing. I would admit that an infrared transceiver on a camera is indeed quite rare, but that same transceiver has long been a standard part of any portable computer on today's market.

This camera is a real power hog. Four new AA batteries would last only a couple of hours - since the device starts extremely slowly, I just keep it on, like using any automatic camera. When I spot something to shoot at, I would usually find the camera has drained up the batteries or has automatically switched itself off - to save the power, the manual says.

What I like most of digital cameras is that the pictures stored in the memory is conceptually much "bigger" than 35mm and will survive repetitive cropping. What I hate most of digital cameras is that they lack certain control over how you can take the pictures, for example, in today's consumer grade digital cameras there's no way of controling the aperture to achieve certain depth of field.

Misc. Pictures Taken with DC260

Pictures I took with this DC260 in Shanghai, China.