Digital Home Thoughts: Dump Your Digital Cameras for Something Called '35mm Film'

"Start snapping away with the Vivitar 35 millimeter film camera! Who needs complicated digital Camera when you can rely on the classic camera you know and love? The Vivitar 35 millimeter film camera gives you everything you need to capture precious moments with friends and family! Don't bother with expensive, complicated computer software and wires. Simply point and click! It's just like the good old day... and with built-in flash and focus free, taking pictures has never been this simple!"

I got quite a chuckle going over to the Vivitar site and checking out the video - but the reality is that companies like this wouldn't have a business selling film cameras if digital cameras were easier to use. For anyone reading this site, using a digital camera and getting your images printed (or shared) is second nature. But I firmly believe that the overall ecosystem for digital cameras still isn't as easy as it should be. The flow from snapping the picture to getting a print is still confusing for some people; the simplicity of taking the pictures, then taking out the roll of film and giving it to someone, then getting back a bunch of pictures, hasn't quite been duplicated in the digital world yet.

Yes, you can take your memory card to a store and put it in a machine and select the images you want printed - but given the low cost of memory cards today, I wonder if we shouldn't try to step back into that old way of doing things? As in, people buy a two or three pack of small-ish (2 GB to 4 GB) memory cards, and when they want to get their pictures printed, they take out the memory card and put it in the envelope at the photo printing store. They use their other memory card in the meantime, and when they go and pick up their photos, they get their old memory card back, freshly formatted and ready for more pictures. That's so crazy that it just might work!

It's tempting to look at this problem and think it's purely a generational one, but I know more than a few people in their 20's and 30's that are intimidated by the process of taking a digital picture, moving it onto their computer, editing it, then getting the images printed somewhere via an online upload. It's easy for us to think that photos stay digital because the user wants them to remain that way, but I think if the flow of taking and printing digital photos were easier, we'd see more people getting physical prints.