"We may have just lived through a golden age of photography where there was
a coincidence of amateur and professional equipment allowing for high
quality and low price at the same time. " - Winsor Crosby
Touche' ! Photography wasn't like that before the 1970s, and it won't be
like that again. In particular, casual snapshooters are satisfied with
640x480-pixel digital images; professionals aren't. So the stage is set
for a big divergence again.
George Eastman's fundamental insight, back in the 1890s, is that
non-technical amateurs (casual snapshooters, i.e., people who want
photographs as souvenirs of their experiences, but are not seriously
interested in photographic technology or art) will trade a *lot* of picture
quality for convenience. Beginning with the first Kodak, for the next 70
years there was a clear distinction between amateur and professional
cameras.
I'm old enough to remember the 1960s and to have a good idea what
photography was like in the 1950s. The professional-amateur convergence was
just starting then. Remember all those Instamatics and box Brownies?
35-mm was for professionals, or at least connoisseurs. By the late 1970s
there were suddenly 35-mm SLRs all over the place. I think that with things
like the Nikon N50 and Canon Rebel we're witnessing the tail end of that
movements. Point-and-shoots (not suitable for professional work) are now
taking a large part of the snapshooter market, although thankfully they use
the same film format we do, so we enjoy an abundance of film. Even that
won't last indefinitely.
Michael A. Covington / AI Center / The University of Georgia
http://www.ai.uga.edu/~mc http://www.mindspring.com/~covington <><
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