Prints vs. Digital Images

Why should you purchase prints rather than a disk of your images? Printing as a medium is one of the most meaningful ways that you can enjoy photography. Here are a few reasons why:

A print will always be there.

Digital media go out-of-date and out-of-style, and the files that you have stored in these digital formats will also go out-of-style and become inaccessible. Imagine having your vacation photos from 1995 on a 3.5″ Floppy Disk – how might you access those “digital files” today? Of course this is hard to imagine because digital photography wasn’t around in 1995. More recently then, consider the fact that for years you have used DVDs and CDs to store digital files and now that Apple has decided not to install optical drives into their computers anymore, that medium is slowly starting to disappear. You’ll soon have a generation of images that were stored on discs that may not even be (easily) accessible. On the other hand, if you made prints as well, then these changes in technology wouldn’t have a negative impact on you being able to continue to enjoy your images.

A print doesn’t need to be enjoyed on a screen.

Being “in the moment” and away from technology is not a luxury that you get to enjoy all that often in today’s digital world. There is something nostalgic and romantic about being able to curl up on the couch with your children and look back at a wedding album, or old family photos, without having to flip open a laptop and press the “next” button dozens of times. When you look at a picture that is printed, you are free of distraction. There is no e-mail bouncing up in the bottom of your screen and no Facebook “dings” going off in another window. You can enjoy the picture and the story it tells in a quiet, distraction-free moment.

A print lasts a lifetime, and often even longer.

Physical prints give you heirlooms to pass down as you move on in your life. Often you are not recording (capturing a moment) and printing (preserving the moment) for today, but instead for tomorrow, for your children and your children’s children. Passing down a box of hard drives doesn’t exactly have the same appeal, does it?