Bob Talbot <snapper@st-abbs.fsnet.co.uk> wrote/replied to: >Digital is becoming a great tool for photography BUT the one thing it ain't doing is improving the photographs. Maybe not the composition or subject, but have you seen the dynamic range and the colours coming out of these new digital cameras? They make Provia 100F look like crap. And blue skies with no grain - to die for! And not having to finish the roll, wait for processing, no scanning, oh ya baby! >Sure it's fast >But by god it's expensive (unless you're a pro taking hundreds of "rolls" per year). > >It really depends on whether you look at the whole picture. That's right. Digital is really really expensive. The camera, no matter how expensive, is a small part of the price of all the crap you need to make the system work. When you get a high end digital like the new EOS 1Ds, you're looking at investing in a portable device that has at least a 40 gig hard drive and monitor, just so you can do a day's shoot. 1 gig microdrives just don't hold more than 72 shots anymore. But you'll need plenty of microdrives too. Then, the computer needs a serious upgrade to handle those huge files. Where you going to store all those shots? Writable DVD? And plenty of them. Print it out? Going to need a serious printer, plenty of ink and paper. and on and on the expenses go - battery packs, car chargers, microdrives... The question is where do you draw the line? Is a D60 good enough? Can you store your shots on big hard drives for a couple years? What about backup incase the drive crashes? At least once you invest in all the goodies you need to shoot and store and backup, you can start counting the cash you save not buying film. Not to mention the time you save going to the lab, changing film, touching up dust, etc. This is where the big saving comes in. How much an hour is your time worth? Good grief. I'm sticking to film for a little while longer.
