And unlike the early adopters of digital photography's nascent period, casual snapshot photographers aren't interested in fiddling around with cables and drivers and whatnot. They just want to take good pictures and print them, with as little fuss as it took to get a roll of film printed at the drug store. Individual camera manufacturers have been trying to simplify the click-to-print process for consumers for a few years now, with systems such as Kodak's EasyShare and HP's InstantShare, as well as proprietary direct-printing technologies. But at this year's PMA show, we're finally seeing the herd start to move in the same direction and implement nonproprietary standards and technologies.

Like all the other big camera names, Sony's new cameras are all PictBridge-compatible

PictBridge pros and cons
At the forefront of this ease-of-use movement is broad support for PictBridge. Just about every consumer camera released at PMA 2004 is compatible with this new standard, which lets you connect your camera directly to a PictBridge-compatible printer and just push a button to print. However, PictBridge is a mixed blessing. It does a great job of making home photo printing quick and easy, but it also encourages the unfortunate practice of printing pictures, then blithely deleting the image files that serve as digital negatives. If we have one word of advice for snapshot photographers taking pictures of their child's first steps or their once-in-a-lifetime vacation, it is archive. You may have printed all of your favorite shots and put them in a nice album, but if your inkjet prints fade or turn out not to be waterproof when little Madison spills her apple juice on them, you'll be in for an unpleasant surprise.

Epson's portable, PictBridge-friendly 4x6-snapshot printer

Home archiving made easy
The good news is that we're not the only ones concerned about this. Epson's new PictBridge-compatible PictureMate inkjet printer includes a port for connecting a standalone storage device or CD burner. This means that--having made the worthwhile investment in a USB CD burner--you can archive your images on disc with the same computer-free, one-touch ease that PictBridge affords you for printing. We wish that all the snapshot printers introduced at the show offered that feature. Another easy archiving product that has made a stealthy entry into the consumer digital-imaging market over the past year is the standalone CD burner with a flash memory slot. Alera brought its $229 Digital Photo Copy Cruiser to market late last year, and at PMA 2004, the company granted one of our long-standing wishes by unveiling a DVD-burning version. Both devices accept six kinds of flash memory card and burn image files directly to a disc--no computer required. At $599, the DVD/CD Digital Photo Copy Station won't be within reach of most snapshot photographers, but it's an indication that as higher camera resolutions and flash memory card capacities trickle down to point-and-shoot camera customers, easy-to-use, high-capacity archiving tools will come along with them.

SanDisk's shady archiving solution
Heard the one about the guy who didn't know he could download pictures from his flash memory card and use it again, so he kept buying new ones for his digital camera? Apparently, SanDisk failed to see the humor in that little anecdote and got to work developing the new "consumable" media unveiled at PMA. The consumable cards are no different from other flash memory cards, but SanDisk puts them in a package emblazoned with "Shoot & Store" and sells them at a nearly impulse-buy price: $14.99 MSRP for a 32MB card and $24.99 for 64MB. The company is also making handy little cases for storing the cards after they fill up with images.

Now, we're glad that SanDisk is encouraging people to save their image files, and we're curious to see how this marketing scheme will pan out, but in the long run, it's a rip-off. Storing images on flash memory is both less stable and--unless you take very few pictures--more expensive than storing them on CD or DVD. So if you're a snapshot photographer and you want your images to last, be a savvy consumer and make the initial investment in a CD or DVD burner--then you can pick up one of those cheap 64MB cards and use it a zillion times.