As an employee of a large computer manufacturer and a keen amateur photographer, I am always being asked whether I use digital cameras. People are shocked when I say no quite firmly. Its not that digital cameras don't have their place or uses, its just that there seem to be too many fundamental problems which the IT industry still has to overcome.

The first problem to consider is the printing of images. Having the pictures on a computer screen is great but a picture to hand around or stick on a wall is much more satisfying. Most of the cheaper colour printers cant produce an image as good as a normal print and this is due in part to the fundamental problem of not having a range of coloured inks available. All shades and hues from three colours and black using a technique called dithering (akin to the dots used to make pictures in newspapers). The stability of the inks is poor and I have seen images start to fade within a year. There are some really good printers available which are capable of producing high resolution images with continuous tone but these are very expensive and have high running costs. Prints on the other hand have a much better track record and we have lots of material that has survived over a hundred years albeit with some degradation. Black and white prints that have been processed correctly and toned to remove the silver have a proven track record and my understanding is that Cibachrome colour prints are virtually indestructible.

Digital pictures are much simpler to process and manipulate and some quite stunning effects can be easily generated with the powerful software tools that are available today. Selectively adjusting contrast, brightness and colour are trivial tasks which require little skill to exercise but as always an experienced eye to master. Compared to the solitary dark room, with all those nasty substances and time consuming practises, you can see how sitting in front of a computer in a warm room with the lights on may have its advantages. Personally I find, however, a much greater sense of achievement and skill from rolling my sleeves up and becoming one with enlarger, dodgers and chemicals and seeing my images develop in front of my eyes.

Having filled up the memory in your digital camera what do you do? The better cameras allow you to add memory cards but they are relatively costly compared to film and not so easily available (can you get them at the petrol station?). The problem doesn't end there however, as memory cartridges are an expensive way to store images, so you dump it to your PC where storage is cheaper until the disk space runs out or crashes. You need a more permanent and secure way of storing these images. Negatives are easy, you just put them in a shoebox and in 50 years time, your grandchildren will be looking at them and wondering why shellsuits! In the PC world however, the best medium for storing data is the DLT tape which has a 10 year life and CDROM which is approximately the same. The degradation and decay in the material used to create these devices will eventually render them as unreadable that is of course assuming that in 50 years time, there will still be a device available that could read them.

That leads us onto the final issue of technology churn. Film is like television and a number of other everyday objects that we take for granted precisely because it is always there and never seems to change. You buy a camera and it lasts you for years because it is a simple opto mechanical device and while the film quality may improve, the basic process of exposure and developing remains unaltered. Digital cameras will continue to evolve at a rapid pace as the technology improves and the big players fight to take control of the market. The devices will have a comparatively short life expectancy and will be virtually unrepairable due to the complexity of the electronics. Like computers today, models will run for a year or less and then be superseded with the latest and greatest which may or may not be compatible with the rest of the system you have been building up.

Even with the problems I have mentioned, the poor resolution and lack of exposure control on all but the most advanced of digital cameras, I do believe there is a place for digital photography. I even possess a small digital camera (although the CCD has developed a pixel fault in its relatively short life) which I use for times when I need an instant picture (Its cheaper to run than Polaroid). There are sound business and scientific uses for digital cameras & imaging but as a consumer product I would rate it as a gadget. The amount of investment required to beat the quality of a £50 camera and high street processing is high and would cover the cost of hundreds of rolls of film and processing (probably more than the average user would use in a life time). Until we see more stabilisation of the basic technology, an increase in reliability and a decrease in cost, I for one will not be moving my library of images into a digital archive.