Hard to believe, but it was three years ago today that we posted our first web pages! The level of change in the industry has been literally unbelievable, even in terms of "internet time." MANY THANKS to all our loyal readers who've helped make this site such a resounding success! We literally wouldn't be here without you, and your continued support of us and our advertisers helps make it all possible going forward.

We thought it might be interesting to run an article from time to time, entitled "This Week In Imaging" (TWII), showing just how far things have come since we started. Here's the first installment.

This Week, Three Years Ago:

Olympus dropped prices on three of their digicams as follows:

• D-220L: From $499 to $399
• D-320L: From $699 to $599
• D-500L: From $899 to $799 (A great price for the feature set!)

Now, check these out: The D-220L was a 640x480 camera, the D-320L was 1024x768, and the D-500L was a 1024 x 768 SLR. At the time, $599 was a bargain for an 800K pixel camera! (Today, the hot deal is the Kodak DC4800, offering 3 megapixels for a net price of around $500-600, after Kodak's rebate coupon and depending on what special reseller deal you might be able to find.) Pretty intriguing to think about what we'll be shooting with three years hence, and what the equivalent of today's top of the line 3MP units might cost!

This Week, Two Years Ago:

Big news was that Canon's A5 Zoom (800K pixel camera with a zoom lens) was showing up at resellers for under $400, and things were looking rosy for Kodak's Picture CD after its initial market tests. (Two years later, PictureCD never had the impact many (including ourselves) expected it to have, and we all know about digicam prices, as mentioned above.) Wolf Camera announced it would install PictureVision kiosks in 500 of their then-750 stores, allowing photo up/download over the internet. (PictureVision itself is no more, absorbed within Kodak. Kodak's PictureMaker kiosks are today slowly acquiring internet connectivity capabilities.) "Microdisplay" mini-LCD displays were making news, and we expected them to offer dramatic reductions in digicam power consumption once they became commercially available. (A number of cameras now use microdisplays for their Electronic Viewfinder (EVF) option, but we haven't seen the sort of dramatic power reductions many pundits predicted.)

This Week, One Year Ago:

A $100 rebate from Nikon dropped the net price of the Nikon 950 to $799. (Which now can be had for about $499 after Nikon's current rebate, and with some savvy shopping.) Zing announced a "camera a day" giveaway for the month of April, to build membership. (While one of the initially best-funded, Zing turned out to be one of the first major casualties of the dot.com photo space, in the internet/high tech washout.)