MikeWhy wrote:

"Stacey" wrote in message


It's really not that much if you don't print every frame. Also keeps the
"shoot everything that moves without thinking" mentality at bay. :-)

That's the converse of your recent "If I only had a lens" refrain. And why
not shoot everything that strikes your fancy?

Because I end up putting no thought into the shot. Probably why I used to
get a low % of keepers with 35mm and get a larger % of keepers with
medformat.



You assume that everyone shoots a ton of film. I'm "lucky" to shoot a
roll or 2 of 120 on a full day of shooting.

He addressed that. Twenty five bucks is twenty five bucks. Pretty soon,
you could almost buy a Hassy.

$25 for 2 rolls of 120 developed? Maybe retail...


It's one thing to buy it a roll at a time, and pay the quickee mart to
develop one roll at a time. It amounts to the price of a bad cheeseburger.
But stack up the B&H invoices at month's end and it tells a different
tale. I spent more on film and chemistry last month than I did on the
gigabyte card.

But you aren't including the costs to print the digital images or don't you
ever print any?

Film doesn't have to be that expencive. I normally buy the out of date film
from my local store. They keep the stuff in the fridge, it's cheap (30% of
retail) and works great. I actually had a friend -give- me about a dozen
bricks of out of date E100SW recently (and three 50 sheet boxes of 4X5),
that should last me a while! :-)

Privately, though, how can a thinking person not recognize that
digital has reached a usability, affordability, and maturity threshold?

Why resort to insults? I never said "How could anyone with a brain... -not
agree with my POV-?" type of thing. I expect that from Rafe. BG

You honestly think digital has reached it's maturity threshold?? They
haven't come to any standard for sensor size, still are using single chip
sensors and haven't come up with a sensor large enough to get a real wide
angle POV with yet.


Every generation or "smaller format" went through the same thing. This 6
cm crap is tiny compared to the "real" photographs of its era. But it
stayed around on its own merits

Actually it's because film got better. And film will continue to get better.
They want to keep selling film and to do so they have to improve it to keep
people like me from switching to digital. To upgrade to the newest
technology then, I just have to buy some new film. I can take a 1940's
camera, put in some 2000 film in it and get very close to the same results
you'd get with a 2000 model camera. This is why film camera hold their
value.

as will digital. And beyond that, digital
has the potential to eventually surpass its predecessors in image quality.

Sure it does, it's not there yet. And again you assume film is going to
stand still. My guess in a few years we'll see 800asa film that looks like
todays 100.

That was never possible at any point in the past.

Sure it was. By the 1950's a good med format camera with "modern" film at
the time was as good as a large format camera was 10-15 years earlier.

Medium format and
smaller was always a compromise.

See above. Film improved and it made the smaller formats as good as LF was
decades before. 35mm in the 40's was poor quality because of the film back
then.


All that aside, I now have to confess to shooting a lot more film lately
than I did digital. Before you ask why, when digital is all that and more,
I'll explain. Twenty square inches; 200 megapixels if you care to scan;
dorm-room poster size at a very reasonable 8x enlargement. No mere Hassy
or Kiev will ever hold a candle to that.

Nope but shooting 4X5 is a totally different thing than
medformat/35mm/digital and always will be. BTW I've been shooting some
Eighty square inch film lately. :-)


And if you really want to know
where the cheap, first quality German glass is, you'll find it in used
large format department.

Yep but they aren't giving them away, unless they are in a barrel mount.

The huge irony is that it's very definitely a
buyer's market. This "recoup your investment" thing isn't washing there.

Well it does apply if you bought used and sell used. My 90mm SA is still
worth what I paid for it 10 years ago. Checked what a supper graphic is
worth on ebay? I paid $350 for mine over 15 years ago and they can still
bring $300+.


You are stubborn.

Yep :-)

--

Stacey