Digital Photography vs Analog Photography

What is with this hype regarding digital technologies that are gradually replacing the (so-called) outdated analog technologies (digital cameras replacing analog cameras, digital telephony replacing analog telephony, digital television replacing analog television and so on)? So why is digital photography better than analog photography (film-based), or is it?

Advantages of Analog Photography

The analog technologies have the ability to capture the nature of the real world with great finesse, for example music, video or pictures captured on media such as magnetic tapes and photographic film. Digital technologies require a lot of processing power and bandwidth even from the state-of-the-art digital machines to archive the same level of finesse, and sometimes they are just unable to do that. So why is digital better? Although this is still an advantage for some high-level analog technologies (including photography), it is the only one and the digital technologies are catching up very fast.

Advantages of Digital Photography

Once the signal (either sound, pictures or video) is recorded in analog format, no matter how modern the analog equipment is, it cannot copy the signal perfectly. In comparison a signal recorded in digital format (or digitized) can be easily cloned any number of times. The ability to make identical copies and (as a result) to easily share digital material is what makes the Internet work and the digital technology to be the nemesis for the analog one.

Another great plus for digital photography (and all the other digital technologies) is that once the picture is taken, it can be easily processed. With a digital camera after taking photos the user have instant gratification by being able to view, edit and delete the pictures so it doesn't have to go through the developing process only to see them. Also the digital photos are stored on reusable memory (memory cards), there are no consumables involved (as is the case with the photographic film in analog cameras) so the user can print a picture without waiting to develop an entire roll of film or wasting the whole roll for just a few pictures.

Digital Photography Overview

The storage devices for digital photos (memory cards, hard-disks, DVD's etc.) are getting cheaper and larger with every year so scores of digital photos can be stored on such devices. The photo-capturing devices are no longer limited to digital cameras but include mobile phones, PDA's and others. This in itself is leading to a whole new problem: a very large number of digital photos captured and chaotically stored in multiple locations without being adjusted.

To take on the issue of an increasing number of captured digital photos, specialized software has been built for sorting, viewing, sharing photos (from Google, Picasa) or for adjusting groups of pictures in one operation (BatchPhoto) just to name a few.

As a conclusion digital photography is definitively better than analog photography for amateur photographers taking into consideration the advantages of easy processing, copying, sharing and cheap storing but the analog photography is still a viable alternative for professional photographers because of the great quality that high-end analog cameras have.

by Cosmin Unguru, Apr'11 2006