During a recent trade show, I was walking across the exhibition floor with Joe Hall, sales and marketing manager for Jobo Fototechnic, Inc., when we heard a speaker say: "You can make a 5-foot print from this 2MB file. And it will be gorgeous," the voice trailed after us. "I'm sure you can," chuckled Hall. "In fact, you can make a 10-foot print, and it won't bog down the printer at all."

The exchange brought me back to an earlier conversation with Ronn Brown, Calumet Photographic, commercial/portrait marketing manager. "There's a new era of mediocrity in this industry that is going to slow down the evolution of professional photographers moving into digital imaging," warned Brown. "With companies making promises that can't be substantiated or introducing vapor-ware that make everything currently on the market appear obsolete, the decision-making process is becoming increasingly difficult."

And while the technology is complex, confusing marketing ploys further complicate matters by rearing their ugly heads. Take for example the 65-foot, man-eating tyrannosaur rex hovering over Times Square during the past holiday season  . . .

Walk into any store that sells digital, and chances are you will find a selection of scanners offering to do everything from digitizing flat art, prints, and film - to converting characters to editable text, providing instant e-mail uploads, as well as push-button transfer to fax software. Scanners are becoming the means and media to digitize the volumes of film and prints left behind by nearly a century of silver-halide photography.

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Prices range from as little as $100 to $500-plus, while film scanners, usually appropriated for professional photographers . . .

Other than resolution, color management is one of the primary concerns photographers face when making the move to digital. Guaranteeing that the client's digital file will translate accurately from RGB to CMYK and then to the printed page is a gamble many photographers do not want to face. However, as large, bottom-line-oriented retailers continue to go digital, smaller companies are forced to do the same . . .

Resolution is a measurement of the information captured by a scanner or digital camera for display on a monitor or for making prints. It's not the only quality factor. Ignore bit depth (the number of shades and tones captured), and you lose the smooth tonal gradation and color fidelity in an image. Forget dynamic range, the qualifier for details in highlight and shadow areas, and all of the resolution in the world won't deliver a good-looking print. However, because resolution is the quantitative qualifier . . .