Ott-computers

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Picture this: you can now take digital photos and transfer them directly to your computer, to post them on the company Web site or include them in catalogs, brochures and other documents headed for print.

With digital photography there’s no wait, you don’t have to use a whole roll just to get one picture, and there’s essentially no cost for processing those pictures.

With advantages like these, you might wonder if it’s time for your company to go digital for any photography you use. The answer, however, depends on what you need.

Digital cameras offer speed and convenience, but for many uses, film is still more versatile.

Digital cameras have been around for about five years now, and some of their earliest users have been people like real estate agents and small-business owners who need to take photos of property or products and get them online or in print fast. Digital cameras do the trick.

Depending on the type of storage your camera uses and the resolution of your images, you can store anywhere between four and several dozen photographs and then transfer them directly to your computer.

With Apple’s latest lines of computers (the colorful ones, including the iMac), as well as some Windows 98-ready models, you can drag pictures out of your USB-compatible camera as if it were a hard drive. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

There are drawbacks to digital cameras, however. While they work well outdoors, many digital cameras still have trouble with low-light conditions indoors and strong contrast, like an indoor picture with a sunny window in the background.

You may also pay four times as much for a digital camera that produces the same results you would get with a 35-mm camera. This price difference is especially significant when you consider that you can buy a color scanner for as little as a $100 to scan prints made from 35-mm film and wind up with basically the same results as with a digital camera maybe better.

If you need the speed and convenience that digital photography offers, however, what should you look for in a camera? You’ll have to choose from among the usual options lenses, flashes, etc. but there will be some new choices as well.

One is the choice of storage medium for your pictures. Options include conventional 3.5-inch floppy disks (used by the Mavica line, from Sony), removable PCMCIA cards (the kind that many laptops have built-in slots for), and another called SmartMedia cards.

These media can hold between about 1.4 and 8 megabytes of data. Other models have built-in non-removable storage options that can hold more.

The number of pictures your camera and its storage media can hold depends on the camera’s resolution. Typically available resolutions range from 320 x 240 pixels to 1920 x 1600. By comparison, the resolution of a VGA computer screen is 640 x 480.

Some cameras also advertise their resolutions in millions of pixels, or megapixels. This is simply the number you get when you multiply the two numbers of a camera’s resolution together. The resolution of a 1280 x 1024 camera has about 1.3 million pixels.

If you’re interested in making your own prints, it’s also important to consider the resolution of your printer. Taking high-resolution photos may not do you any good if your printer can’t print at that resolution. As an alternative with removable media, you can also take your pictures to some photo stores to have them turned into high-quality prints.

Another important difference between digital and film is that digital cameras use more energy because of extra features like LCD panels that allow you to preview your pictures, and because they continue to use power while connected to another device to transfer or print your pictures.

It’s also worth checking to see what software your camera includes (some models include versions of software like Adobe PhotoDeluxe) if you’re planning to use it with a computer, and it’s important to consider how you’ll be connecting to your computer.

Digital photography is fast and convenient. Someday it may even replace most film photography. But for now the decision to go digital still depends on what you need to use your camera for.

Easy access

Pretty much everybody hates typing Web addresses. Even when they are relatively simple, like microsoft.com, they suffer from drawbacks.

For business names that are more than one word, you can’t even enter something as basic as a space. You also can’t use accented characters or the alphabets of languages like Japanese.

The RealNames Internet Keywords Service (www.realnames.com) aims to change all this. RealNames overcomes these drawbacks by linking keywords to specific URLs.

Something like this already exists in services like America Online. You simply enter a single keyword and are taken directly to the page you want (within AOL) without having to navigate there yourself.

RealNames does this by allowing users to enable their Web browsers and search tools to check the RealNames database first, for a match with what they’ve typed: something like “Ford Explorer,” for example. If there is a match, you’re taken to that URL without having to type a “www” or a “.com,” and without having to make guesses like “fordexplorer.”

Of course, various other options have already made it relatively easy to get where you’re going online by typing in what seems to be the most sensible keyword. If you type a major product name into your Web browser or search engine and don’t at least get a good lead, then the company you’re trying to reach isn’t doing a good job of making itself easy to find.

If you’re a business with a name or a product that doesn’t lend itself well to search-engine guesses, however, a service like RealNames may be for you, especially if it becomes more widely adopted.

A few search services already use it, such as AltaVista and the Go Network, and Microsoft Internet Explorer has the technology built-in. For other browsers and search tools, you may need to download the RealNames enabler yourself.

Registering a “RealName” costs $100 per name per year, and you have to abide by a set of policies meant to restrict the use of RealNames to holders of existing trademarks, or those with another legitimate claim to a name.

For example, the company refused to let opponents of San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown register his name as a keyword for their own use, as happened with williebrown.com.

Christopher Ott is a freelance technology writer and can be reached at [email protected].

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