teve Hoffenberg, director of Digital Photography Systems Advisory Service at Lyra Research, says that in some applications, digital photography is already replacing traditional film-based photography. According to Hoffenberg, "For professional photographers already using digital cameras, digital photography is already almost directly replacing traditional photography. One reason is replacement film costs. But a key reason is to save time. "For example, at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, the Associated Press used digital cameras to shoot the vast number of events. This way, they could dump the pictures directly into their wire services, hours before they could if they were shot on film and had to be developed. "Professional use of digital photography is growing because the end result of the picture is usually something that's going to be digitized and put on a computer anyway. An advertising photographer might shoot products in his studio digitally, because capturing images electronically can save time by sending the image directly to the client via e-mail or on disk without having to wait for processing. The client doesn't have to go to a pre-press house, scan the photo at high resolution and turn it into digital data. They're also saving the cost of the film and the film processing. And with today's professional digital cameras, the quality is there for most applications in studio photography and photojournalism." Hoffenberg adds that digital photography is growing in acceptance among business users as well, "Most businesses are heavily computerized. Real estate companies can file photos of the houses they've sold, or insurance adjusters file images of cars involved in crashes. Businesses can also use digital photography to create corporate newsletters, real estate flyers, electronic presentations and World Wide Web pages. In many applications, the photos will end up on a computer eventually, so the fastest and easiest way is to shoot it digitally. There are also a number of unexpected uses, such as in identification applications, like a health club putting photos of all their members into their database. "Digital photographs are basically images that will be used on a computer. And the motivation to shoot digitally is to get the photo into the computer, whether to print the image out, save it on the database, or transfer it electronically via the Internet." Hoffenberg notes that digital photography will impact traditional photography in two ways. In some applications, such as professional photography, digital may actually replace film-based photography. In other applications, new uses will be created, such as the e-mail postcard or the database of images for insurance and identification purposes. Hoffenberg says, "There's been a lot of talk about the paperless world, but we're a long way from being there. But with the proliferation of multimedia computers at home and in schools, children in elementary school are already browsing the Web, and, as they grow older, it will be more natural for them to use photos on computers. This is an indication of the inevitability of digital photography."