These days, digital photography gives you the same flexibility as those old chemical
darkrooms??”the ability to brighten or darken an image, crop it down to generate a better
composition, and print enlargements in a variety of sizes??”but without the chemicals, without
the steep learning curve, and without dedicating a part of your house to nothing but photography.
And that??™s to say nothing of all the special effects you can easily master. You can digitally change
colors, create photo composites, and more. So how did we get here?
A Slow Evolution
These days, some digital cameras can compete with the best 35mm Single Lens Reflex (SLR)
cameras in terms of resolution and image quality. Obviously, it hasn??™t always been this way.
When you consider the first digital cameras that debuted in the early 1990s, it??™s a miracle
that anyone used them at all. The first models you could buy for under a grand included the
Logitech Fotoman, Kodak DC40, Apple QuickTake 100, and the Casio QV-10. They were
strictly for gear-headed early adopters that bought them just to try out the nascent field of digital
photography. They certainly weren??™t particularly useful, since they offered poor image quality,
limited resolution, and substandard optics. Early digital cameras generated low-resolution images
with a mere 376?—240 pixels and, soon thereafter, 640?—480 pixels??”not even enough to fill a
computer screen when your Windows Desktop was set to the lowest resolution.
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