Launching this week is a Fujifilm media campaign that aims, according to the company's press release, 'to increase consumer awareness of the new digital revolution hitting both cameras and processing'. Specifically,the national advertising campaign, which will run through to mid-December, focuses on the Finepix digital camera range and Fujifilm's FDi digital processing technology.

The details of the campaign are best left to the advertisements, but the thinking behind this strategy has greater ramifications. It is rapidly becoming a tired debate to discuss whether or not digital photography will have any great impact on photography as a whole – just as it is tedious to speculate when (if ever) film will finally be pronounced dead and buried. It is inevitable that digital technologies will feature strongly in the future of picture making: the danger is that the specific set of skills that define photographers today may not. As picture taking becomes easier, so the skills required to get acceptable results diminish – yet the skills required to get great pictures actually expand, drawing together the possibilities offered by the action of both light and pixels.

But the general public, as George Eastman so astutely recognised many decades ago, seeks only to press the button, and is more than happy to let somebody else do all the hard work. The odds are that while the majority of people might like the idea of a reusable film cartridge,they will not want a PC and inkjet printer at home: what they will prefer is to take their 'digital film' to a High Street outlet for printing.With luck, this will be very good news for the photo-labindustry, for as pictures become more immediate (thanks to on-camera display screens)so more pictures will be taken – and more reprints will be ordered. Some people say that images will be e-mailed around the world en-masse, but the greater likelihood is that they will be posted. If that is not the case right now, then what better proof could there be that digital cameras have yet to expand beyond the realms of computer peripherals?