Immediacy is as important as quality when it comes to newspaper photographs, as millions of grainy wire pictures over the years bear witness, and there is some excitement at Eddie Shah’s forthcoming national daily, The Post, over the latest Japanese innovation in photography, the floppy disk camera: the UK Press Gazette reports that Shah’s photographers are playing with the system made by Canon Inc, which records up to 50 pictures on a 2.5 hard shell floppy disk, and can shoot a monochrome picture down a phone line to a special receiver in 90 seconds – colour takes three minutes; whether The Post goes ahead and uses the system will depend on the results it gets in the trial, but if it does, it will be paying UKP2,000 to UKP3,000 apiece for the cameras, around UKP7,500 a time for the acoustic coupler transmitter, and UKP14,000 for the receiving machine, which sends them for printing on an ordinary wire machine.
