When I first heard about digital mammograms, my first thought was, “This could be good.” I thought of my daughter’s new digital camera and all the really cool things it could do — it takes great, easy snapshots, crops those images, colors them, even makes them look like an Andy Warhol print. It produced perfect pictures pain free. Pain free is the key phrase here.

Could this new technology keep a gal from feeling exactly like pizza going from the ball stage to crust — flattened? Alas, probably not. “So far we have not been able to obviate the need for compression,” said Dr. Carl D’Orsi, director of breast imaging at the Emory Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta. Loosely translated that means the “smooth” factor lives on. But there are some pluses with digital mammography.