ndantly clear that this new found technology was both a blessing and a curse. Fundamentally, the most obvious flaw of digital imaging to most of early adversaries stemmed from an idea known as Moore’s Law after Gordon Moore, a founder of the Intel Corporation. While his law had to do with micro-chips he predicted “…the density of transistors on a chip would double every year and a half.” (Curtin, 15) If you equate this to digital photography it would mean that you would have to purchase a new camera every six months to stay on the cutting edge of technology.In the beginning digital still cameras were used only for industrial, medical, or scientific applications. They were too expensive for ordinary consumer photography. However, in 1989 Toshiba and Fuji Film united and gave birth to the first wave of “new” digital cameras. These bulky, high-cost, high-maintenance cameras rivaled the traditional electronic camera by capturing pictures in digital form as opposed to analog. (US News, p49) Even though the idea of digital imaging had been around for almost a decade this marked the true beginning of an age that would change the way we view photography. Soon after the release of the camera came the launch of several new digital editing software programs that were more user friendly than the original. “Digital imaging makes it easy to do things that require much more time and materials in the darkroom--and makes it possible to do some things you can't do in the darkroom.”(Eggers, p.D2) However, it must be taken into consideration what is lost when this process is moved out of the hands of the photographer and into the data of a digital file. The most obvious of course is the definitive lack of resolution in digital images. Traditional film uses elliptical shaped grains that allow pictures to appear more soft and rounded. This contrasts digital images that use pixels, rectangular shaped b...
