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Digital cameras hold value?



 
 
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  #31  
Old March 4th 04, 02:11 AM
Stacey
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Default Digital cameras hold value?

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 I normally buy the out of date film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bricks of out of date E100SW recently (and three 50 sheet boxes of 4X5),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
  #32  
Old March 4th 04, 02:12 AM
David J. Littleboy
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Default Digital cameras hold value?


"Stacey" wrote:

Here's an example -maybe- you can comprehend. I figiured out I almost

never
use 35mm anymore because medformat is "better". So I sold some of my 35mm
gear for what I paid for it


But you didn't recoup the money you spent on film: your actual cost of using
the camera was a lot more than just the cost of the camera. Film cameras
have a minimum per-frame cost that you can't get away from. If you don't
shoot a lot, it's nice that your fixed costs are low. But if you use your
cameras heavily, the running costs become significant.

because people still know it's useful and was
able to buy some more medformat stuff with that money. When a "better"
digital camera comes out, the old one is worthless.


But as long the digital user actually used that camera, at the point it gets
chucked it had a per-frame cost of use, just as the film camera did. But
that per-frame cost is inversely proportional to the number of frames taken.

So your claim here is incorrect economics.

It's a money pit at
this point, just ask people who jumped in early on how many times they've
replaced their cameras at a major loss every step already.


I went through 3 generations of consumer digital before I went MF, had lots
of fun, relearned a lot of photography I had forgotten over the previous 15
years. Every penny was well spent. And the total costs for all that digital
were a lot less than the costs for MF. And that's not including the almost
$1.00 per frame that Provia sets me back, even in 645.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan


  #33  
Old March 4th 04, 02:52 AM
Stacey
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Default Digital cameras hold value?

David J. Littleboy wrote:


No one expects a
digital to last 3 years. Except Stacey, that is.


No one? I'd like a $1500 camera to last longer than that and it's why I'm
not interested in a digicam at this point. I like the idea behind the
digilux 2 but it's already outdated and was just released last week.


The rest of us, who spend $900 to $1500 on a digital body, will shoot
enough that we get our money back.


Again you assume every digital camera owner would burn $500-1000 worth of
film a year. And see below, it would need to be more like $1500 to $2000
worth of film a year to break even. If I'm a careful shopper, I can buy
slightly out of date film for 30% of retail or even given to me. I've done
some custom printing for a guy that works at the camera store and he hooks
me up with free film every now and then...


and it is worth $29 salvage value after x
years, and I buy a $5k film camera, and it is worth $2,000+ after the
same X years (maybe more), then the difference in salvage value is pretty
significant economically IMHO ;-)


Again, the $5,000 camera is a straw man.


How so? I could easily find other Dslrs from a few years ago that are just
as worthless. What are those olympus "4/3rd's" cameras going to be worth in
2 years? Or the current APS sized sensor Dslrs?


The big costs in digital currently are the high rate of depreciation of
the camera, associated media and support items, computer and related
software, and the lost time invested in mastering digital techniques.


Other than the camera, those are the same for film for a lot of us. (The
media and support items can be used with the next camera.)


Please, they have so many different memory card formats, you're not likely
to get the same on the next camera (I never have), batteries are the same
deal. And the next gen camera will laugh at a 256MB memory card, you'll get
maybe 2 pictures on it. Also you'll need a faster computer to run the OS
the new camera is supported in and you're old printer isn't so you are
forced to replace it etc etc.

The problem is the "support items" are always left out of these figures. By
the time you include a -fast- computer that can deal with large files in
photoshop, a good monitor or two with calibration software, a copy of the
newest photoshop and the OS needed to run it along with a printer, (never
mind all the plugins, filter, neat image etc) you get $3000-$4000 easily
into this. And in 2 years it will all need to be replaced.

And mastering
digital techniques isn't lost time: much of that is stuff that can't be
done in the wet darkroom.


But then they change the software or add "features" and it all changes. New
hardware requires you to recalibrate everything etc.


There is also evidently a lot of time spent editing out lots of digital
shots after the shoot. Time is also money in most activities...


I assure you, the time associated with scanning it is a lot worse than
editing digital shots.


You assume everyone who doesn't capture digitally must scan their film
because you do. None of my images get digitized. Everything is printed
analog or just used for projection.


And waiting for the film to come back from
processing is a serious irritation. Other than Maniac, getting MF slide
film processed is close to a week.


Where do you live? In a poll in the 35mm group, most people have access to 2
hour E-6. The labs I've used don't care what the format is. Now getting
print film "proofed" by someone good does take about a week, but I try to
avoid that.

With scanned MF, I have
to wait for next year (for things like spring flowers).


????



Most serious amateurs shoot a roll or so a week; even the pros & serious
amateur mix at shutterbug shoot only 4 rolls/week, with $11.5K photo gear
investment; see http://www.shutterbug.com/images/mediakit/mediakit.pdf
The cost of prints for similar numbers/sizes is essentially the same,
esp. at labs which scan and print film ;-)


If you are shooting 4 rolls a week, you get your $1500 investment back in
well under a year.


As he said most serious amateurs will average around a roll or maybe 2 a
week. And again you leave out all the support gear needed.


There's really very little to like about film, other than one can get
better results by using MF or larger.


I enjoy looking at projected slide film. I have a medformat and 35mm
projector with a nice 4X8 foot screen. Doubt any digicam images can do this
with any sort of quality?

I've bought a couple of digicams over the years, both times the salesmen
(and reviews) promised results as good as 35mm. Neither were close. I'm not
dumping any more money into this until they reach a level where they don't
change every 2 months.

--

Stacey
  #34  
Old March 4th 04, 02:57 AM
Stacey
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Default Digital cameras hold value?

Raphael Bustin wrote:



I don't throw away or "salvage" my camera gear,
I generally keep it until it's no longer useable or worth
fixing. I often buy pre-owned, etc.


So where do I get a good deal on a high image quality used digicam?



Time spent in mastering the digital techniques is time
well spent. I also find it generally fun, but that's just me.



Yep that's you.


Time editing is no worse in the digital domain than the
analog. And if time is money, digital wins hands down --
no time spent acquiring film, loading or unloading it,
schlepping it to or from the lab to have it processed, or
waiting for it to be processed. Goodbye middleman.
And good riddance.


But the middle man does most of the time consuming work. And really how much
effort is it to load a camera? I think downloading the images into a
computer takes more time than that.



But with digital capture there's no longer a one-to-one
assocation between frames captured and prints made.
And images can be enjoyed and shared without
being printed.


Same with slide film. Most of my slides have never been printed, just
projected.



--

Stacey
  #35  
Old March 4th 04, 03:05 AM
Stacey
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Default Digital cameras hold value?

Bob Monaghan wrote:

My suspicion is that you don't get
significantly more great shots in a given day of shooting, mainly because
I think we are limited more by our vision than by how fast we can shoot.
;-)



It's true for me. I've learned if I carry less film on me, I get more % of
quality shots. Makes me slow down and make sure I've composed it right etc
before I fire the shutter.

--

Stacey
  #36  
Old March 4th 04, 04:37 AM
Raphael Bustin
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Default Digital cameras hold value?



"Stacey" wrote:

It's a money pit at
this point, just ask people who jumped in early on how many times they've
replaced their cameras at a major loss every step already.



Fools (ie., those easily parted from their money) come in
both analog and digital flavors.

Please don't fret over my spent or wasted dollars, Stacey.
That's a cross you needn't bear.


rafe b.
http://www.terrapinphoto.com
  #37  
Old March 4th 04, 04:37 AM
Mxsmanic
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Default Digital cameras hold value?

David J. Littleboy writes:

But you didn't recoup the money you spent on film: your actual cost of using
the camera was a lot more than just the cost of the camera. Film cameras
have a minimum per-frame cost that you can't get away from.


Unless you never print your images on paper, the per-frame cost of film
is trivial compared to the cost of actually printing any image
(irrespective of how it was captured).

--
Transpose hotmail and mxsmanic in my e-mail address to reach me directly.
  #38  
Old March 4th 04, 04:50 AM
Bob Monaghan
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Default Digital cameras hold value?

rafe noted:
But Stacey's oft-repeated complaint is irrelevant to
those of us who actually use cameras as tools, or to
produce income -- as opposed to being collectors...
endquote:

If I buy a $5k digital camera, and it is worth $29 salvage value after x
years, and I buy a $5k film camera, and it is worth $2,000+ after the same
X years (maybe more), then the difference in salvage value is pretty
significant economically IMHO ;-)

The big costs in digital currently are the high rate of depreciation of
the camera, associated media and support items, computer and related
software, and the lost time invested in mastering digital techniques.
There is also evidently a lot of time spent editing out lots of digital
shots after the shoot. Time is also money in most activities...

Most serious amateurs shoot a roll or so a week; even the pros & serious
amateur mix at shutterbug shoot only 4 rolls/week, with $11.5K photo gear
investment; see http://www.shutterbug.com/images/mediakit/mediakit.pdf The
cost of prints for similar numbers/sizes is essentially the same, esp. at
labs which scan and print film ;-)

For a handful of high volume shooters, the benefits clearly outweigh the
costs. For the majority of modest volume shooters, today's high
depreciation of digital photography offsets the losses from paying for
film and developing.

Most of us who continue to use film do so partly as a result of such
factors, and because we like using film ;-) I also have digital cameras
(still and digital video). When 4 MP+ cell phones become common, I don't
expect many serious amateur photographers to give up their film cameras
and lens kits and try to shoot exclusively with a cellphone - do you? What
is the fun in that? ;-)

grins bobm

--
************************************************** *********************
* Robert Monaghan POB 752182 Southern Methodist Univ. Dallas Tx 75275 *
********************Standard Disclaimers Apply*************************
  #39  
Old March 4th 04, 05:24 AM
Neil Gould
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Default Digital cameras hold value?

Recently, David J. Littleboy posted:

"Stacey" wrote:

Here's an example -maybe- you can comprehend. I figiured out I
almost never use 35mm anymore because medformat is "better". So I
sold some of my 35mm gear for what I paid for it


But you didn't recoup the money you spent on film: your actual cost
of using the camera was a lot more than just the cost of the camera.
Film cameras have a minimum per-frame cost that you can't get away
from. If you don't shoot a lot, it's nice that your fixed costs are
low. But if you use your cameras heavily, the running costs become
significant.

Again, this equation only works if you don't print your images from the
digital camera. If you get the same number of prints from both film and
digital cameras, then the difference in cost is the cost of film +
development - the cost difference of the camera.

You earlier stated that 2 rolls / week = the cost of a Digital Rebel.
Well, 2 rolls / week of film + development (no prints) is under $20. That
pays for the Rebel, but not for prints. Meanwhile, for that same $1,000
you can buy into MF and a couple of lenses. The costs for printing half of
your digitally captured images will more than pay for the MF film +
processing. So, the obvious difference is that in 2 or 3 years, you can
recoup a reasonable amount of your investment in the MF camera, but at
this point, not so with the digital camera.

But as long the digital user actually used that camera, at the point
it gets chucked it had a per-frame cost of use, just as the film
camera did. But that per-frame cost is inversely proportional to the
number of frames taken.

As long as you don't print those images. The more you print, the more that
equation reverses itself. Print them all, and you're in a pretty negative
space (pun intended). ;-)

Neil


  #40  
Old March 4th 04, 05:35 AM
Gregory W Blank
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Default Digital cameras hold value?

In article ,
"David J. Littleboy" wrote:

the running costs become significant.


Unless your being paid.
--
LF website http://members.bellatlantic.net/~gblank

 




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