Why did we go digital?

Well I'm working on a project and I can't seem to be able to find the answer to this. Why did cameras end up going digital? Was there a good reason? Do you have sources to back this up? (links?)

instant gratification, no processing cost, no film cost, easily post processed.
just my personal experience.
Jim

* Convenience
* Cost (both in buying and developing film)
* Technological Progress
* We also have ultimate choice in saying how we want our photos developed, cropped and printed (something you never got from handing your film over the counter and picking up your prints a couple of days later)

so that everyone who already had a camera had to buy a new one duh...its all about them greenbacks

Digital imaging as we know it was pushed by deadline guys, newspapers who wanted to avoid the delays of film processing. In 1994, The Associated Press and Kodak collaborated on the first useful conversion of a Nikon 35mm SLR. That camera wasn't as capable as today's US $200 point and shoot cameras, but it showed the advantage of being able to take an image straight from the camera and send it to a newspaper's photo desk.

Less than ten years after that camera was introduced, most daily newspapers stopped using film and junked their processing chains. They gave their photographers Nikon 2D and Canon 1D series cameras, along with MacBooks equipped with wireless upload links and loaded with processing and captioning software.

For consumers, around the same time, the photo industry was trying to impose the Advanced Photo System on customers. It was a collection of cameras that used film that was smaller than the established 35mm format. APS was a failure, put more rapidly in its grave by the quickly improving consumer-grade digital cameras that were first marketed around 1995.

What Andy Grove of Intel calls a "strategic inflection point" with consumer digital cameras came around 1998 with the release of two cameras, the Nikon Coolpix 900 and the Sony Mavica FD-71. The Nikon was the first popular camera to show that digital images could look good, and the Sony's floppy drive storage demonstrated that digital imaging could be more convenient to use than 35mm film. Those cameras convinced large numbers of people that digicams were more than gimmicks.

The image quality gap to 35mm film was rapidly closed over the next few years with cameras such as the breakthrough Nikon D1. The definitive nail in film's coffin was the release of the Canon D30, the first high-quality DSLR that was available at what was, in 2000, the exceptionally affordable price of $3,000.

The rise of personal computers with high-resolution, full color displays also has been a major factor. When floppy-drive Mavicas were popular, a typical home computer display was a CRT of 640x480 pixels and 256 colors. Now, a minimum display is a LCD of 1024x768 at 24-bit color depth.

Given the choice between paying for film processing and having a 4"x6" print, or having a digital image on a larger personal computer screen, people have chosen digital imaging. It's a trend that won't be reversed; salesmen at one camera store have said that not only has digital imaging drastically reduced their film business, they've seen their once-healthy medium-format film business decline to a minor niche.

I believe that the use of digital image sensors was something that began with the astronomers, because a cooled CCD allows much more sensitive light detection than film (so the technology was developed to solve an existing problem in a seperate application - but once it had matured then porting it to a camera would have been a logical step, rather than inventing a whole system from scratch)

I imagine it would have found more 'camera' like use in scientific equipment, before the technology became cheap enough to put in cameras for wiring new pics.

The massive public uptake of cheap digital cameras once the technology further matured was probably to do with convenience - I know I got my first digicam just because I wanted to be able to take quick snaps of everyday things that I wouldn't necessarily want to pay printing costs to be able to see and keep. As my interest and skills grew, the easy control over postprocessing was a major plus.

Thanks guys!

Heck, just got to Google and type in "digital camera history" and you get more links than you know what to do with. Wiki has a great write up going decades before Kodak jumped into the game.

Cuz film smells funny?

darosk wrote in post #6852268
Cuz film smells funny?

I like the smell of film and film chemicals. I probably have brain damage... damage...damage... damage... from stuffy darkrooms but that was one of the risks

gjl711 wrote in post #6852214
Heck, just got to Google and type in "digital camera history" and you get more links than you know what to do with. Wiki has a great write up going decades before Kodak jumped into the game.

I know I get history of certain camera series but not "why" we switched over really

The above explanations sound good, but I would also add that digitization had already occurred with music, and with personal home computers becoming markedly popular by the mid-1990s (bolstered by the Internet), the shift to digital cameras was arguably inevitable.

That said, I went the other way…

scotteisenphotography wrote in post #6849823
Well I'm working on a project and I can't seem to be able to find the answer to this. Why did cameras end up going digital? Was there a good reason? Do you have sources to back this up? (links?)

I'd go with: "There was a huge supply of film cameras which work fine and don't become obsolete. Digital created the demand to change your bodies every second year"

The ease of use is an appeal for the masses... followed by pack mentality.

I'm shooting film.

scotteisenphotography wrote in post #6852630
I know I get history of certain camera series but not "why" we switched over really

I think that's going to be an unaswerable question as there isn't one reason. Why switch from sail ships to steam ships, from horses to cars, from Coke to Pepsi. Everyone has their own set of reasons.

Maybe the way to attack this issue is to state that there is not one reason and start offering testimonials from photographers as to why they switched.

Because it was the next logical step in the evolution of photography.