It's just like deleting computer files, since that's what the photos are. You can pipe them right into your PC with a cable and admire them on the screen. Too many purchasers, say industry insiders, think a digital camera can replace their film camera. The problem is that the images are just fuzzy enough to be annoying. An afternoon birthday party can become E-mail to distant relatives the same evening.
Prints are another matter.
At this point in the evolution of digital photography, matching the degree of detail provided by film is simply unaffordable. Circuits in the camera convert each pixel's charge into a number representing digitized information. The more pixels, the sharper the picture. The CCDs in most mass-market digital cameras break up an image into 640 pixels horizontally and 480 vertically, or a total of slightly more than 300,000 pixels. If the grains of silver halide on 35-mm film were pixels, one frame of sharp film would contain 100 million.