Whatever happened to carbon paper? Once a mainstay in the company office, it has disappeared along with the ink well. Soon the telex machine will be retired and the emerging electronic mail via desk-top computers will take over.

What parallels loom in the photography/publishing industry? Just around the corner is a big revolution. Film-based pictures will be out and digital pictures in. While it won't happen tomorrow, all signs indicate you'll miss the boat unless you prepare for your cameras and your pictures to become antiques.

Film, as we know it today, will be going the way of tin and glass plates. The homework is in process, and the race is on in business and industry. The military, for example, already uses digital video cameras in its spy planes. The resolution (5,000 pixels) doesn't compare to film-based resolution (3 million pixels). But that's the kind of thing they were saying about home computers only a decade ago.

The impact promises to be monumental. According to most reports, Americans shoot 11 billion pictures a year and spend some $8 billion on cameras, film, photofinishing, and other film-related process and costs. Photofinishers get the largest chunk: $2.5 billion. Film makers get the next largest share: $2 billion. Both processes will be obsolete when digital pictures take over.

Not only will the digital picture meet the needs of the amateur photography industry, but once the digital process is perfected to produce high-resolution pictures, the transmittal of these pictures via phone lines, FM sub-carrier radio, or other data transmission process, will revolutionize the professional photo acquisition industry. Photo editors will be able to access and select pictures in minutes, rather than the cumbersome hours and days that today's processing requires, dealing with film-based pictures.

Digital pictures will be stored in central video disk banks. The notion of a stock agency holding original pictures will be an anachronism. Stock agencies are already beginning to adjust to the future portents, and all of us need to be studying the situation along with them.

One of the biggest hold-ups in this area is the tendency of olde-tyme craftsmen and decision-makers who have "always done it this way", to resist technological change. It took a generation for editors accustomed to the 4x5 camera to give in to photographers who touted the 35mm camera. Here at PhotoSource International we're drawing blueprints for a marketing network that will serve both the photo illustrator and the photobuyer, to incorporate the technological advances as they get in place.

 

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