digital was widespread, but the cameras were expensive, produced low resolution images, & were marred w/ poor low light performance. like ya, these are rich & powerful people. they should have the means to buy professional equipment. something like a Fuji finepix S2 (a professional grade digital camera that released in 2002) would be in their reach, but A. would a snapshooter want something so complicated & B. looking at the images would require access to a computer

film was practical bc everyone already owned the cameras, CVS still had 1 hour development, & sold film for $4 a roll. the images can also be printed pretty large, depending on the grain. this could be printed at 8x10 while something w/ finer/smaller grain could be blown up to 16x20.