Because of lowering costs, colour output and projection from microcomputers is now a viable option for many more educators at all levels of instruction. Producing colour overheads and display originals at the smaller sizes is faster, much easier to generate, and comparable in quality in most cases with photographic output. Even though many new graphical options are now available to professors and instructors, sometimes free of charge, they are often underutilized. This underutilization is not because the importance of colour illustrations has lessened, but because of a lack of knowledge on how far the cost and quality of the output has improved over the last few years. Other common reasons for underutilization are lack of information about instructional services and resistance to change, although more fundamental reasons are related to formal and personal theories on how students learn.
Many educational researchers consider visual aids inferior to more abstract verbal material.
To put it another way, visual aids are often seen as not academically challenging, redundant or even misleading to students. This attitude is sometimes more common among academic circles, although many training consultants also appear to prefer pure verbal as opposed to visual learning. Medium format is a major factor contributing to this perception of instructional visuals as not meaningful or necessary. Visuals are often so strongly associated with entertainment that they are considered incapable of stimulating or organizing thought toward cognitive objectives. By this definition intelligence is the ability to sustain concentration and thought without the aid of illustrations and the nature of knowledge is defined by the main medium of communication that is adopted by society.