Please keep in mind that file sizes for scanned digital images vary according to their intended use. If you scan your slides at 72 dpi for use on your web page or other low-resolution application, you will not be able to reproduce these same images as larger photos in magazines without rescanning the image at a much larger file size. Little original photos (slides) blown up into larger photos need whole bunches of hard disk computer memory for storage and many megs of RAM for viewing or manipulation in, say, Adobe PhotoShop. You will have to store all of these data from the slides onto 1.0 GB Jaz or 100 MB Zip disks (or something similar) in order to send them to the magazine or printer for their use in making their publication. A large color image can fill up a single Zip disk, and may be too large to view on your home computer without adding sufficient RAM. There is a whole lot more to all of this digital photography than first meets the eye.
Newspapers that print color photos scan in the images from color negatives shot and developed the old-fashioned way, but digital cameras are being used more as their quality is improved. Newsprint is a very low quality paper that does not support high resolution photo printing, so you see these digital cameras being used here first. Today, with digital manipulation, you can get a better quality b&w magazine photo from a color slide than you can from a high quality b&w 8x10 print. Some book publishers are scaning in b&w negatives and manipulating these images without even making a b&w print for scanning. As to the digital camera, they are getting better but still are a long way off in being able to freeze a fast-moving subject with enough quality to reproduce as a cover photo on a magazine. Someday... By the way, since you mentioned it, we audio purists still prefer tube amplification for our vinyl records, and no transistor can yet match the quality of Les Paul guitar sounds pushed through the valves (tubes to us Yankees) in a Marshall full-stack amp. The Russian air force still uses tubes in its military aircraft, but we in the USA are not sure if this is because they are behind the times or ahead of the times. You see, in an air-burst nuclear explosion the EMP will burn out all of our solid-state communications devices for hundreds of miles around, but will not affect the good old vacuum tube so prevalent in Russian society. Sometimes older IS better. John B. Corns --> SPORRS: Serious Photographers of Railroad Related Subjects
