Most people can buy a digital camera without worrying about anything except the resolution and the price. It was different for me. As I stood in the camera shop on my way to the airport, words like "traitor" hovered accusingly in the air.
I imagined former readers of my old photographic magazines tapping me sharply on the shoulder and saying: "Here, aren't you the Jack Schofield whose name is on the front of The Darkroom Book? The one whose idea of fun is painting eggs with photographic emulsion?"
Yes, guv, it's a fair cop. But a digital camera provides a quick and effective way to take colour pictures that can be sent home by email or posted onto the web.
You don't have to go through the processing and scanning stages needed for conventional films, or pay to have them done. The digital snapshot is instantly available; the only delay is the time to transfer it to your desktop or notebook computer. And that doesn't take very long at all.
Most digital cameras store image files on a small removable card, typically either a SmartMedia or CompactFlash memory card. Remove the card from the camera, slot it into a carrier in the shape of a PC Card (aka PCMCIA card) or another device, then stick it in your notebook PC and copy the pictures across in seconds.
Alternatively you can use the cable supplied with the camera, which links it to the PC's serial port. Transferring pictures over the cable takes several minutes. The main drawback is that it uses up some of the camera's precious battery life.
Once on the PC, the pictures can be sorted, rotated, cropped, enhanced or repaired. Software will, for example, try to remove the "red eye" from the built-in flash. Then you can email your successes back to the office (if you're working) or to the family, or post them on one the many free "digital album" sites, such as PhotoPoint, or incorporate them into web pages.
There are backpackers touring the world, scientists on field trips, protest marchers and many others all recording their progress on free web pages so friends, family, classrooms full of kids or supporters can follow their progress.
It's a much better idea to put the pictures online than to fill people's mailboxes with attachments they may not want, that take ages to download and don't decode correctly. And once the pictures are on the web, the world and its dog can look at them.
The quality of the images from digital snapshot cameras is lower than film - even those that record more than 3 million pixels - and anyone who claims otherwise is either ignorant or lying. But on the web, quality is less important than file size, and most digital snapshot cameras provide good enough quality in 50-70KB JPEG files.
For conventional photography, you're still better off with a snapshot camera such as the Olympus Mju-2 rather than an Olympus C3030Z or Nikon Coolpix at seven or eight times the price (or the Olympus C900 Zoom I bought last year). The difference will pay for a negative scanner and a lot of film.
In fact, you can save the cost of a negative scanner, and avoid the effort of converting your best snaps to a digital format. Kodak will not just process a film and provide high-quality prints, they'll throw in Picture CD or Photo CD of your negs as well. (The Picture CD format provides familiar JPEGs.)
But digital photography has its charms. For a start, the more pictures you take, the cheaper it gets - bearing in mind that if you take 500 pictures with a £500 camera, the capital cost is £1 each. There's no real disincentive to taking thousands of pictures, as long as you use only rechargeable batteries!
Once you've taken a digital picture, you can usually look at it on the camera's built in LCD screen, and have another go if you're not happy. This is useful when taking pictures of people for publication: they can be very co-operative when they can see the benefits. Either way, you won't end up with a roll of film that has Christmas trees at both ends.
There is, of course, a drawback: the need for a computer. That doesn't bother me because I carry a notebook PC at all times just to keep up with my email.
One alternative is to carry several storage cards so you don't run out of space for new pictures - though that might be costly on a scenic holiday.
But even this problem may disappear. Small handheld computers such as the HP Jornada 430 have the screen quality to display images and can be used to email pictures to a web site for storage, as well as playing MP3 files and games such as Bubblets.
Eventually, digital cameras may come with Bluetooth connections so that users can wirelessly link them to a mobile phone and transmit pictures without using any sort of computer. In fact, given Bluetooth's ability to support ad hoc networks, groups of happy snappers will be able to sit around campfires swapping images the way kids trade Pokémon cards.
