----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Spirer" : Just for starters, TLRs were only produced as a novelty - you could : buy a collector's model for $3000 or a barely functional toy for : $100. Not that much of a choice... The mamiya TLR's weren't really in the novelty class, nor were they cheap. flash synch at all speeds, a nice choice of lenses, fast, allowed the photographer to maintain eye contact with the subject throughout the exposure. MPP's with paralax correction were fantastic too. : And I have two printers (excluding my two 4x6 printers) that are 7 : and 4 years old respectively, both of which are easy to service and : buy supplies for. that's nice. : A 48mp camera is pointless. Nobody gets that close to a : billboard. And a b&w camera, what point would that serve? It's much : more controllable to convert the colors yourself, instead of letting : the film force it on you, with no choice. a 6Mp colour camera is actually a 24Mp B&W camera with a series of filters over the pixels and a device to fuzz the light before it hits the sensors. I'd like a 24Mp camera that was sharp out of the box without having to resort to algorithms for a couple of hundred dollars! Or to put it another way - how about an 8Mp B&W camera in a keyring for $20.. : And most people mail (or SMS) photos from their phones, or use : bluetooth. It's really simple if you read the manual. nope, not all have bluetooth, SMSing doesn't get it to your PC with all networks either. So I changed my relatively recent nokia because I couldn't get the images off. I bought the special synch cable, installed the software and backed up the phone.. but no images. Turned out I needed the 'other' special cable.. so I bought that. Oh no - my software needed an upgrade so I was informed. downloaded it and then discovered my OS was incompatible.. apparently I needed a new operating system to see my pics! Goodbye Nokia ;) Not so simple Jeff.. : And other than sensors, most companies do their own : electronics. Even with sensors, Sony and Canon do it themselves. Ah - the two electronics companies.. of course they do. : If you look at the pre-digital world, it was formats and : manufacturers disappearing. Nothing new there, except that now we : have new formats, and even manufacturers. I'd see that as a : positive, not a negative. APS was new. all the rest of the formats we had for the last 15 years were still there right up until digital so I'm not sure which ones went missing. Konica gone. Minolta gone. Bronica gone. Mamiya ? Fuji MF gone fuji 35mm gone - they made some really nice lenses too. Who's new to this - HP, Sony.. OK, we have more LARGE format makers today than we had ten years ago, but the choice of 35mm and medium format is certainly less. : One can always look at the world as a lot of opportunities or a : disaster. Photographically speaking, I'd rather look at the : opportunities and focus on the photographs, rather than think of the : equipment only and view it as a disaster. we'll see in a couple of years. k
