Several messages recently have talked about the Imagek system which supposedly will be a device that emulates a film cartridge by replacing it with an electronic device capturing an image digitally using an ordinary film camera. Honestly, I DO hope such a device comes out. However, there are many reasons to doubt its existence, or even possibility, without redefining the specs. First, the company. Imagek has been talking about this device for some time -- two or three years I believe. It is still vaporware, and every time an announced date nears, the company pushes back by a few more months. If they even had a semi-working prototype, you can bet it'd be plastered all over photographic, digital, computer, and consumer magazines, with lots of high quality images as proof of its existence. As far as I can find, there are NO samples of what it does. Next, such a device could not just pop into a camera, simply replacing film. This is for several reasons. First, it is currently impossible to make a sensor area as thin as film, yet durable enough to last. Such a device would require at least a modified camera back in order to work. Next, there simply is not enough room in an area the size of a film cassette to hold memory, electronic circuitry and battery. Given current technology, a film-cassette-size memory chip couldn't hold more than one low-resolution image. With a modified back to provide connections, some of these limitations can be overcome, but that hardly would be the "drop-in" replacement touted by Imagek. Digital photography in general is not yet -- and may never -- be able to replace photographic processes. Photographic processes are continuous tone -- digital is not. To capture -- digitally - all of the richness and resolution of an average-quality transparency requires a digital image file size of 20 megabytes to 50 megabytes (perhaps more). The equivalent of a 36-exposure roll of film would require upwards of 720 megabytes! Since there's no way of knowing in advance what images would be okay at a lower resolution, the image would have to be captured at the highest resolution the photographer anticipated would ever be needed. Even in these times of multi-gigabyte hard drives practically being given away, it wouldn't take too many photo shoots to fill up a whole bunch, and disk drives still take up lots more space than slide boxes. (Negative film similarly holds far more data in less space than a digital counterpart.) Then there's what I call the "Aunt Emma" factor. Suppose you take a roll of film at a family reunion, and the only shot of "Aunt Emma" has her looking cross-eyed with a silly grin on her face. Between the time you drop off the film for processing and picking up the prints, "Aunt Emma" gets run over by a truck and the last picture you have of her is the "silly" one. But ANY picture is better than NO picture. If you had photographed her digitally, in order to save space, you'd probably have erased the "silly" image quickly. I'm not a troglodyte, nor Luddite, nor technology-challenged. I've consulted in computer graphics. I understand the technology. But... I am a pragmatic realist. I'm an early adopter of just about everything, and I'd like inexpensive digital imaging devices to equal film cameras also. But they don't exist now with the quality I want, and probably never will -- at least not without molecular-level, semi-biological devices not even yet in theory stages. I believe the best approach for now is the combination of a good-quality but fairly inexpensive color printer and a good quality but slightly more expensive film/transparency scanner. One other thing about photographs. We know that photographic prints last at least 175 years. Digital images eventually fade away without proper refreshing. Whether this is soon or not we don't know, because the process hasn't been around as long as traditional photography. -- John Albino mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
