Photography: Backwards into the Future

There are purists who claim that compact disks and solid-state amps will never exceed LPs and vaccum-tube amps for purity and depth of sound. They have a point.

Now come comrades in arms in photography who are embracing the venerable daguerreotype for more or less the same reasons. Pixels just can't duplicate, let alone surpass, the character of the old process.

Which begs a question: Might there have been more characters (like Edgar Allan Poe, above) when the old process was the state of the art?

In any event, The Economist takes a look at this phenomenon here.