Lev Manovich: Points

How digital images differ from analog images.

"They exist as mathematical data which 

can be displayed in a variety of modes -- 

sacrificing color, spatial or temporal 

resolution."

How older technology is slowly overcome by new

technology.

"Traditional film editing and optical printing are being 
replaced by digital editing and image processing which blur 
the lines between production and post-production, between 
shooting and editing....Thus, film may soon disappear -- 

but not cinema."

Even when an old technology becomes insufficient, 

it still finds new roles and value. 

"digital imaging promises to completely replace 
the techniques of filmmaking, it at the same time finds new 
roles and brings new value to the cinematic apparatus, the 
classic films, and the photographic look. This is the first 
paradox of digital imaging. 

How degradation differs between the two.

"in reality, there is actually much more degradation 
and loss of information between copies of digital images than 
between copies of traditional photographs. A single digital 
image consists of millions of pixels. All of this data 
requires considerable storage space in a computer; it also 
takes a long time (in contrast to a text file) to transmit 
over a network. Because of this, the current software and 
hardware used to acquire, store, manipulate, and transmit 
digital images uniformly rely on lossy compression -- the 
technique of making image files smaller by deleting some 
information."

Difference in information 

"There is an indefinite amount of information in a 
continuous-tone photograph, so enlargement usually reveals 
more detail but yields a fuzzier and grainier picture... A 
digital image, on the other hand, has precisely limited 
spatial and tonal resolution and contains a fixed amount of 
information."