Finally, A Cure For Shooting Pains Digital camera companies seem ready to end the megapixel wars. Their new campaign: building cameras and printers even Luddites can love.
By Peter Lewis

(FORTUNE Magazine) – If a picture is worth 1,000 words, when it comes to digital photography, more than a few of those words will be vulgarisms for most consumers. Sure, digital cameras have many advantages over their old-fashioned cousins, but for the average shutterbug, going digital can still be confusing and frustrating.

The problem is that the new cameras are basically little computers with lenses attached, calling to mind the adage "If computers are so smart, why do they make things so hard?" Now digital camera makers are trying to lessen the pain. At the recent Photo Marketing Association show in Las Vegas, where the coming year's new digital cameras, printers, and imaging technologies are put on display, the next phase of the digital photo revolution came into focus: ease of use.

No, the megapixel wars aren't quite over, even though basically all the new consumer cameras are capable of producing prints worthy of being enshrined on a refrigerator door. In fact, with some of the new eight-megapixel models that made their debut at the show, like Nikon's very impressive Coolpix 8700 ($1,000, available later this month), you can make prints literally the size of a refrigerator door. That Coolpix and its semipro sibling, the six-megapixel D70 digital SLR camera (coming soon for $999 for the body only, $1,299 with lens), are destined to be among the more popular cameras of the year.

But market studies reveal that only about 25% of the gazillions of digital photos taken each year are actually printed. The rest apparently are relegated to digital limbo, waiting for something electronic, like a computer monitor, to light them up. Some day physicists will discover that those unseen digital photos constitute a good chunk of the missing mass of the universe.

It makes sense that so many photos go unprinted: Lots of shots are unworthy of the ink and paper needed to print them. Some of the new cameras shown at the PMA show have a fix for that: The five-megapixel Hewlett-Packard Photosmart R707 (coming in May for $350), for example, incorporates software that HP claims will make it hard to take a bad photo.

The R707 is smart enough (or, depending on your point of view, impertinent enough) to examine the picture you just snapped and suggest that it may be too blurry or underexposed. It recognizes when you're about to take a tricky picture, like an indoor shot of the family in front of a bright background, and automatically compensates to bring the faces out of the shadows. And after you take a shot, it can suggest ways to take a better photo next time.

The R707 also intensifies the battle against "red eye"--the effect when using a flash that makes sweet Aunt Effie look like an escapee from the Village of the Damned. Lots of cameras today try with mixed success to reduce red-eye mechanically, by altering the flash. What's new in the R707 is the ability to exorcize red-eye in the camera, via a menu command, thus eliminating the need to touch up the photo afterward using editing software on a computer. (Nikon goes a step further by automatically detecting and fixing red-eye in its new Coolpix 4200 and 5200 models.) And anyone who has attempted to manually stitch together a panorama from a series of sequential snapshots will be grateful that the R707 now does it automatically, in-camera. It has even added on-screen help menus, giving definitions or explanations of common but baffling digital camera features.

HP was not alone in adding ease-of-use features to the new crop of digital cameras, but it deserves credit for attacking the problem so aggressively. By the way, new HP cameras did surprisingly well in picture quality too, winning a couple of shootouts at the show against digital models bearing traditional camera brands.

But cameras are just one part of the digital-imaging system. For many people extracting the pictures from the camera--sending them to the personal computer for editing, storing, or sharing, or to a printer for printing--is still too much of a chore. Newer cameras and printers are designed to let the photographer bypass the PC altogether.

While men are slightly more likely to be the primary buyers of digital cameras, women are the ones who take the most pictures and manage the digital photo albums. And women, being generally more sensible than men about technology, typically have little patience for needlessly complex processes. A recent survey by the Consumer Electronics Association revealed that only 1% of women felt that technology products were designed with their needs in mind.

Epson's PictureMate photo printer, which will be available this summer for $200, is one of the first photo products designed specifically to counter that impression. Epson asked women to describe the problems they had with photo printers, then tried to find a fix. The result--which even men will be allowed to buy--is a simple, no-nonsense printer designed to take the hassle out of making lab-quality, four-by-six-inch borderless prints. About the size of a lunchbox, it even has a handle, making it easy to carry to a party. It doesn't require a PC; all the major digital camera card formats are supported. A software print wizard gives the user the option to make simple crops and edits, and to print single photos, proof sheets, wallet-sized shots, black-and-whites, sepia-tones, and so on. The PictureMate uses a Print Pack ($29) that loads like a videocassette. It contains 100 sheets of heavy four-by-six photo paper and enough archival-quality ink to make 100 glossy prints. In other words, prints cost 29 cents each (not including the cost of the printer itself), about the same as at the neighborhood photo lab.

Imagine that: Digital cameras that are smart enough to keep us from taking bad photos, and portable printers that eliminate the hassle of making prints. Note to camera makers: The only thing you forgot is the automated "suck in your gut and smile" wizard.