Digital BW, The Print

Claude writes:

> The camera did get hot in my hands and
> I kept cycling through cards and battery
> recharges. All Jepegs.

If the camera was that hot, I'd expect that you'd have an increasing problem
with thermal noise, especially in low light.  Did you?

> The clients were sorting through them on several
> workstations. This type of work absolutely demanded
> digital capture.

It sounds well suited to digital.  How did they do it before digital cameras
existed?

> Also, picture packages were printed on dye sub printers.

Dye subs look just like photo prints if they are from a decent printer.  My
ALPS printer produced beautiful results (better than any ink-jet), but it
was so difficult to get it to work with my PC and to get it to even load
paper correctly that I eventually gave up.

> This job would have been impossible (for
> me) without digital capture.

So how was it done before?  Or was it simply not done at all?