This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for quite some time. The birth of my son massively influenced my perspective on gadgetry, and a recent loss in my family has cemented this opinion. The digital camera is the single product I own that is creating long term value in my life, one which cannot be measured by any known metric.
Without going into too many details because I try to avoid such things here (I’ll even skip ranting about a certain Vaio and how much you shouldn’t buy one), my 94-year-old grandmother passed away this weekend. She’d fallen in July, and never recovered. Thanks in advance for the sympathy, but that’s definitely not the focal point of my post.
My wife and I managed to hop on a plane a few day later, and we took dozens of photos and videos of her holding my then-three-month-old boy. It’s barely two months later, and those pictures are already some of the most valuable in my collection. I look forward to the day when I’ll sit my son down at the computer (or hopefully some very cool holographic virtual device that’s the size of a cell phone. it should also have a lasergun in it, but I digress), and get to show him the time he met his great-grandmother.
Cell phones are very practical and probably are in the #2 slot for me (and I’m not counting cell phones with cameras built-in yet, not until they hit 5MP or higher resolution). The computer doesn’t count as a gadget in my world. MP3 players aren’t even close.
As I was once told, and very much like to repeat: the value of a photograph is zero the moment you take it, and gains infinitely over time. What a good investment!