[B]Tech is great - but are we letting ourselves down by not exploiting tech for the sake of quality?[/B]

With compact camera sales in nose-dive - reducing year on year between 25 and 50% - we shouldn't be surprised to see people using camera phones instead; I do and in one sense I make no apology. But in another sense I know that I am sacrificing image quality for convenience.

Even if you use a system camera with interchangeable lenses, the likelihood is that the zoom lens you are probably using is a lot slower than the f/1.8 and f/1.4 lenses that were commonplace once. Even f/2.8 is considered faster than average these days. An f/2.8 standard lens was once considered a low budget choice.

It's the same with audio. I used to be an amateur audio buff. It was such a struggle to get decent audio quality unless you had a big budget. Perception of the ultimate audio experience was rather esoteric and often required hardware minimalism - tone controls? Horror! Today, however, many of us rely on cheap and nasty headphones and speakers and digital audio quality that would send hifi purists running for the hills.

I can even add the TV experience to this high-tech is worse proposition. Standard definition (SD) TV on a shiny new LCD or plasma HD TV is, frankly, rubbish compared to what we were used to on the good old cathode ray tube TV. Get to near to an HDTV and you can see details obliterated by hordes of heaving pixels. Even at a good viewing distance and even with an HD source the problem of noise in dark areas of a scene can be all-too evident.

Yes, it's true that digital technology removes many of the nasties that were symptomatic of the analogue age. For photographers these would be things like limited ISO range, lens distortaion and aberrations that are so easily corrected now, image stabilisation for low light, very high optical quality of lenses thanks to modern digital design and manufacturing, almost limitless possibilities in post-processing and no need to wait for results. And you can get those results to friends and strangers in seconds via the Internet.

Of course, we now seem to spend most of our time appreciating photography on-screen. Again, I suggest that the luxury of enjoying and discovering a great image - on a superbly produced print - is just that - a luxury these days.

I would be the last to lambast technological developments. I am - at heart - a gadget and technology geek; I can't get enough of it. But I do find it bizarre to observe that for many people, maybe even MOST people today, technology delivers inferior quality. It seems the priority these days is immediacy and ease of use.