Its simple quick and familiar way to capture images for the web. It requires traditional photographic skills, and a scanner, and that's about it. This method allows you to use all your old photographic equipment, bodies, lenses enlargers, darkroom techniques, and just take a copy of your finished photos for publishing on the web. This also allows for images of superior quality, as even 35mm film has about 100 times as many "pixels" as a good digital camera.
More and more popular, and cheaper and cheaper, especially for throwing away pictures - virtualy zero cost for wastage. No materiel wastage. Very handy for the cheap snap market. The cameras are as yet not of comparable quality to the 35mm SLRs used by amateur and professional photographers. Most cameras do not as a rule alow for lens swapping, and therefore lack the versatiity of the 35mm SLR. The digitising tablets are of limited resolution (quite enough for a straight display on a PC screen, but not for printing serious enlargements. For web publishing, they are great, as the image will allways have to be of a restricted size to avoid excessive download times
The images have to change slowly, or they cannot be downloaded over modem links quickly enough. This is more like having a collection of still images being updated periodicly. Very handy for checking snow and weather conditions before going skiing. Steerable web cams offer the facility to see which corner of the cage the gorilla is currently sleeping in, as long as someone else doesnt want to look the other way.
Digital Still Photography, with webcam steerability. Full 360 degree images are produced by stitching together multiple conventional imaages, rather like pasting snaps onto the inside of a big football. The finished image is stored in a conventional flat JPEG file. the file can be viewed directly through your browser, but will look a little odd. The bottom and top edges of the image are considerably stretched to make the image rectangular. This is the same problem faced for years by authors of maps. The stretching needed to flatten them makes the pole regions seriously distorted. However, if the image is viewed through a viewer that understands this distortion, then a selection of the image can be viewed in a very much normal looking view, including the polar regions, at your feet, and above your head. this allows pictures to be viewed with the full 360 degree spherical view, through a normal viewing window. To get the full view, the window is steerable, but unlike the webcam, there is no competition for the controls, and no delay while waiting for the new image - you have already downloaded the whole image, and just chose to view a different section of it - local processing only.