Digital Cameras, the Omnipotent Individual Information Appliance

Digital Cameras, the Omnipotent Individual Information Appliance. March. 30, 2004 22:45. by Tae-Han Kim freewill@donga.com.

--Troublesome pen, go away!

In a classroom of a college, students are eager to push the buttons of their digital cameras when the professor leaves the classroom.

“I don’t have to laboriously write down all the stuff on the board. I can print it out after taking a picture with my digital camera,” remarked Lee Su-jin, a college student, 20.

A borrowed notebook of a friend no longer needs to be photocopied. Printing out digital camera-captured pictures is same in respect to quality.

“When I am faced with the important part when I read a book in a library, I take it as a picture with my digital camera,” remarked Kim Soo-jung, 27, who majors in design art.

Large bookstores are suffering from the digital camera mania because people take pictures of the necessary parts of the book rather than buying the whole book.

Hong Min-ki, who asserts himself as a digital camera maniac, takes picture of the faces and business cards of every person he has met so far, in order to put them into a computer database.

The cases, which utilize additional functions of the digital camera such as movie and voice recording, are being increased. As most of the digital cameras released in recent times are equipped with those functions, one can record every bit of their daily life with a digital camera in their own designed method.

--Prosumer’s requisites

Breaking from the conventional belief that a camera is hardware to take pictures, digital cameras are utilized in a large scale to manufacture digital contents directly by the hand of the consumers. The prosumer, consumers who may have professional needs as well, is well served by digital cameras.

Businesswoman Han In-sook, 29, is managing her own blog, has her internet homepage powered by her internet provider, and decorates her website with her own digital pictures taken with her digital camera for the past year. Young netizens, who are familiar with digital images, are making use of the pictures as a means to communicate with the public. They mix up their pictures with popular music to produce their own versions of publicity or synthesized fake pictures.

Thanks to the digital camera boom, major Internet portal sites have image bulletin boards which are filled with individual pictures and receive high popularity.

“In a minute, tens of hundreds of new pictures are posted on the major bulletin board of the portal sites,” remarked the chief director of DC Inside, adding that “fake pictures where people synthesize their faces with movie posters are also winning netizen popularity.”

--Anybody can be an expert in the digital camera era

Due to the popularization of digital camera, the boundaries between professionals and amateurs have also become ambiguous. As the performance of products continues to be improved, digital camera mania is skyrocketing.

Utilizing the manual function of high-level digital cameras, amateurs can also challenge the closely focused pictures and nighttime pictures taken by professionals. The number of amateurs who are taking landscape pictures and character portrait pictures with background blur by purchasing high-speed wide-angle and telephoto lenses are also increasing. They put on an outside flash to enjoy the pleasures of bounce photography, and are purchasing SLR digital cameras, which have been regarded as the exclusive possession of experts.

“We can take a family picture or a business picture with a digital camera by simply learning how to use computer graphics software; it’s easy,” remarked Kim Jin-hong.

--Digital Cameras to be released in the near future

As four megapixel digital cameras become popular, experts advise that no more concerns over pixel quality will be necessary. In the market, eight mega pixel digital cameras are ready to be sold. Most film cameras quality are equivalent to that of two to four megapixel digital cameras.

The experts anticipate that in the future, the digital camera market will be divided into professional, portable, fashion, multi-purpose, and women and children’s fields.

In terms of performance, digital cameras which possess rapid and consecutive photographing functions, optical zooming function, and a large LCD image window will be popular.

At the “CEBIT 2004” exhibition held in Hanover, Germany, brand-new digital cameras, which can take clear action shots and brightly-lit nighttime scenes have been released. “If the pixels of professional digital cameras reach the 20 megapixel point, large image sensors would be in the spotlight,” anticipated Choi Moon-kyu, the manager of “Early Adoptor.com.”