To digital or not to digital that is the question.

Growing up with film cameras most of my life I am use to those photos I get back from the processor that are blurry, or the head is cut off, out of focus, or of something I have no idea what it is. I hated having to pay for these unusable prints, but most of all finding that, that moment in time was lost and never would be retrievable. With the advent of digital cameras many of these problems became a thing of the past. We are now able to review our photos instantly, on built in monitors on back of most digital cameras. We can see whether a new photo is required, or we can take as many as your camera is capable of taking without the worry of paying for unusable photos. You can simply delete those photos that are of no value and move on. While we can still take or send our photos to a processor to print them, we now can do this in the comfort of our home or office on a color printer attached to our computer or thru a docking station made for some cameras.

Long gone are those days of what you see is what you get with regard to photos. We can now with the advent of numerous software programs, edit our photos to meet the requirements we want. We can crop photos to something or someone in a photo, or highlight the part of the photo we want to see. We can remove red eye, that flash back seen in the eyes of subjects in our photos. We can print all different sizes of our photos for the wallet or wall, without losing the integrity of the photo.

How many of you have or have had a video camera? Yes I mean those that record to tape, either VHS or the smaller tapes. Well now most of the high-end cameras can also perform as video cameras making them even handier. The video is recorded digitally and can be down loaded to your computer. What a world huh.

I want to talk about the Pentax Optio A30 as an example of this new technology as it is one of the newest top class digital cameras out today. The A30 is built by Pentax, the innovative leader for over 80 years in the production of digital cameras along with lenses, laser printers, and scanners just to name a few. The 10 million pixels Pentax Optio A30 camera, which was introduced in February of 2007, achieves one of the highest image qualities available to date in compact digital cameras. Thanks to features such as 10 million effective megapixels that enables high-resolution images, a 1/1.8-inchCCD with a wide light –sensitive area for superior reproduction, a SMC Pentax zoom lens which is renowned for its high resolving power, an image processing engine that makes rich color reproduction possible, and three different types of anti-shake functions this is the camera of the future now.

It is these three different anti-shake functions that turns anyone using this camera into an artist. Pentax has improved it original Shake Reduction (SR) technology in the A30 by adding both Digital and Movie SR to improve image capture in lowlight settings and telephoto capture. To better detect faces and focus to properly capture portraits, Pentax has introduced their Face Recognition AF & AE function. The Optio A30 is the sixth DivX Certified digital camera that Pentax has manufactured in the past 18 months. The DivX technology makes it easy for users to create their own media with the push of a button. Instantly recording high quality DivX video and then playing it back on any of 50 million DivX Certified consumer devices available today. The Digital SR mode automatically changes sensitivity according to the brightness of the subject, and effectively reduces camera shakes and subject blurring. For the Optio A30, the maximum sensitivity has been improved to ISO 3200. With faster shutter speeds, photography with reduced blurring is now possible. While these are just a few of the capabilities of this and many of the new digital cameras, one can see this is not our fathers cameras, and the way technology keeps increasing these are also not our children’s cameras.