Technology has really changed the way all of us live our day to day lives.

My first cheap camera took a 120 format film. I was a child at the time and this camera was a present from my parents before we moved to live overseas for a year. This 120 format was the most common for photography back in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. I later acquired my father’s more expensive Rolleicord camera which also took 120 film. The film used in these cameras was black and white. If we wanted coloured prints we had to hand colour the black and white prints after they were produced.

I purchased my first 35 mm format camera in the 1970’s before a trip I had planned to Canada and the United States. It was a Nikon, and most of my subsequent 35 mm cameras have also been the same brand, mainly for ease of interchanging lenses etc.

Digital photography has only been common in the last decade or so, and until the recent new generation of high resolution digital cameras, the quality of the results of digital photographs compared unfavourably with what could be obtained with film cameras. Many professional photographers, especially those using large format cameras, still prefer to use film for the superior results obtained.

However, digital photography has made photography inexpensive and available for almost everybody. Cameras can even be connected directly to ink jet printers to instantly print colour prints.

The traditional method of obtaining prints from negatives was a chemical process which used special photographic paper coated with light sensitive silver halide. These prints were made by shining light through the negative in an enlarger in a darkened room. This light was focussed through the enlarger lens onto the light sensitive silver halide coated paper. The image on the paper was then developed, fixed and washed in trays containing special chemical solutions before the print was hung up to dry.

Compared with printing using ink jet printers straight onto paper or card, it was quite an involved, time consuming, and expensive process. But the results obtained were much longer lasting and superior. Ink prints don’t have the same vibrancy and exposed to light will fade considerably in a few years.

Well, technology has once again come to the rescue. Special machines have been developed to print photographs stored on digital media onto light sensitive silver halide coated paper. So digital cameras can now be used to produce long lasting silver halide prints. But there is one draw back restricting these machines from being in common use. Their price tag in 2009, is around the $200,000.00 mark.

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