In today’s age of instant gratification, digital photography has firmed its position in the culture. With the ability to have photo-quality prints within minutes of taking a picture, the term quick print takes on a whole new meaning. Digital photography has enabled people to take pictures of visiting family and giving them finished pictures before they head for home, instead of waiting up to weeks while hoping someone mails them a copy of the pictures.

Since 1981, with the release of the Sony Mavica digital camera, there have been innovations to bring digital photography to its position in the digital world. Although the Mavica was actually a digital movie camera that took freeze frame photos, it can be blamed for starting the digital photography wars for the design of cameras and new technology.

Today digital photography is almost the standard for picture-taking, much the way the compact disk relegated vinyl music albums to the audio museum and Digital Video Disks have put videocassette tapes in the storage bins. One of the biggest advantages to digital photography is being able to view the photo at the time it is taken and know whether it came out or not. If someone closed their eyes you have the option of deleting it from the camera’s memory card and shooting it over or leaving it in memory for fun later.

No Need For Bulky Rolls Of Film

Much to the chagrin of film manufacturers, digital photography has replaced film with digital memory devices, some smaller than a quarter that can hold several hundred pictures, depending on the pixel size of the image being captured. Today’s digital cameras have about an average resolution of five mega pixels with some cameras having as high as 12 MP or more.

The costs of pictures using digital photography depend greatly on your choice of finishing. Many photography print labs will print pictures through the same printer they use for print film, provided they have the right computer and software, producing finished prints that are hard to differentiate from film photographs.

Home printers are also capable of printing pictures taken with digital photography with even some of the less expensive models producing good results. There are printers that connect directly to the camera to print whichever pictures the user chooses, but most people will download their pictures to computer software to manipulate the pictures to obtain the best picture they can.