Point & Shoot Cameras!

I can remember sitting in a snack bar at a Camera and Film trade show in Las Vegas. The time period was the mid-eighties and Fuji, Kodak, and other film manufacturers were introducing the concept of cameras that did not use film. I was eavesdropping on a group of attendees sitting quite close to me. The group, whose very livelihood depended on people bringing film into their stores for developing, and then buying more film to take more pictures to be developed, were very skeptical. There expressions of skepticism ranged from "the public will never accept the idea of not having film in their camera" to "how could anyone possibly expect a digital image to be as true to the original as high quality film". I left that day wondering what the future would hold for film and camera companies.

Flash forward twenty five years...Digital cameras have come a very long way baby! People are taking pictures at a rate never before seen in history. Cameras are an essential part of every cell phone sold today. And cell phones not only take pictures, they also take pretty good quality video, with sound. Those pictures and movies can then, be instantly sent to someone else over the internet. Wow! Those skeptics in the snack bar were wrong. Digital quality is good and people love their digital cameras.

Interestingly enough, the business strategy of the industry hasn't really changed that much over the years. They produced very low cost, easy to use cameras then. And they still produce very low cost, easy to use cameras. The range of cameras available pre-digital hasn't really changed very much. We can go into the local drug store and buy a disposal camera that we use once and dispose of, or we can go into very high end camera shops and buy very expensive equipment geared to the professional. And in between, we have the wide range of stores that provide cameras for the masses. We have digital point and click that can fit into a shirt pocket and we have digital SLR that is a bit larger and has a lot more features.

Once a person makes a decision about what type of photographer they'd like to be, or what their picture taking needs are, they can be sure that there is a camera designed perfectly for them. The guys sitting in the snack bar along side the Fuji Film exhibit those many years ago were wrong. Digital cameras can take high quality pictures and people love the idea of not having to get film developed.