Printing In The Digital Age

[douglas_vitello]

Just read this story on the Yahoo News site.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20070830/bs_bw/aug2007tc20070826454418

Digital camera owners shot over 45 Billion exposures last year but printed less

than 15.2 Million.Great news for the manufactures who make cameras and

computers but sad news for print media.Sometimes I wonder where all this will

lead.I'll bet 99% of these digital images are stored on a hard drive with no

back up.

[stwrtertbsratbs5]

So, that's about 1 print per 3,000 images. I guess my yield of keepers isn't so bad after all!

[randmcnatt]

Most consumers shooting negative film would probably pick out a few shots for the latest family album and just "archive" the rest (like my wife) and rarely if ever have an enlargment printed. So the ratio of shot to (re)print has probably actually gone UP. Before digital, all those images were stored forgotten in attics and drawers, negatives right beside the drugstore prints, with no backups, so not much has changed there.

 

And I'd bet that if you looked at all those advanced amatuers who shot only color slides back in the last century (like my dad) the ratio of shots to prints would be similar.

 

Actually, I think the new and improved "backup solution" is emailing a copy to all your friends and posting the pictures to MySpace. That's all most people really want to do with their own pictures, anyway. So as long as the Internet endures and the images get moved around occasionally, your pictures will last indefinitely.

[david_henderson]

Whilst I have no difficulty believing that a small proportion of digital photographs ever get printed I have a difficulty with these numbers. I can't believe that the inkjet paper industry, the photo- quality inkjet printer industry, and the retail lab industry could in entirety be supported by 15m prints a year. I know that prints will also be made from film originals but presumably this will be dropping by now. There's a few zeros missing soomewhere I bet. If this were true no-one would invest in Frontiers et al, and you'd struggle to find paper to put in your inkjets at home.

[oskar_ojala]

It should also be remembered that with digital cameras, people take a lot more pictures than before.

[harryo]

Rand, yes a lot of photos that were taken back in the film days were just stored away in shoe boxes...but at least they were stored. Just recently I discovered some of my parents photos taken back 60 years ago. I just wonder where the digital images being captured today will be 60 years from now. My vote is the majority would have long ago disappeared along with the drives they reside on.

[marc_bergman1]

"Well over half of the 8 billion digital images printed in the United States last year rolled off home printers, InfoTrends reports, even though home printing is considerably more expensive than ordering prints online or in stores."

<p>

That was in 2004.

<p>

<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/01/AR2005060102026.html">Washington Post article</a>

<p>

So it seems that things are OK in digital land.

[bill_tuthill]

Given that all Consumer Reports' top-rated printers are Canon or HP,

and much we hated our Epson inkjet versus how much we love our Canon,

I would not invest in Epson right now.<div></div>

[marc_bergman1]

As much as I love my HP printers, and I have three, I would not base my printer purchase on anything that Consumer Reports says or on Epson's stock market price.

 

The reason, is that to do that would be stupid. There are a number of better Internet sources for printer evaluations than Consumer Reports.