Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/05/20
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]A lot of posters missed the point. For the professional, digital makes a whole lot of sense, it shortens the cycle time, is easily transmitted, eliminates film expenses, vastly reduces time and cost to verify exposure and composition. For the amateur who shoots 5-10 rolls of film a year what do you get. You spend $300 to get the equivalent camera you could have gotten for $100. You will end up spending $30 to $100 for memory just to take 30 pictures at the elementary school graduation. You will drive yourself nuts keeping up with charged batteries. Ok, now that we have a full memory card we get to futz with the hated Windoz machine and software that put the images in a Windows temporary file. Our lucky consumer figures out where the files are and just wants to make a print. You know, they just don't look very good on copier paper so it's off to get "photo paper". Well you know, the colors are really off with this stuff so now I get to figure out how to adjust the color and by the way what is with all the choices for glossy, matte, semi-matte paper. At this point the happy camper wanders into a store to get prints made and asks for number 6 and 22 on the memory card. Oops, was that in sequential order or jpg6? Wrong prints again. Lets review the situation, consumer A buys a film camera with zoom for $100, 6 rolls of 24 exposure film for $9 and takes pictures for most of a year. A brings her film into a Costco and has the choice of two day service for $2.99 or one hour for $6.99. Lets choose one hour so we have spent $151 dollars and has 140 some odd prints that can be given away, put on the refrigerator, hung on the wall. And, they will probably last 30 to 70 years based on current studies. Customer B buys a digital 2 mp camera for $279, a 32 meg card for $25 dollars, rechargeable batteries for $15, that photo paper sampler for $10 and spends 30 minutes to a week installing the software and downloading the images to the computer. Finds out the 2 year old HP printer isn't so photo realistic and is faced with another $100 to $300 to purchase a new printer. So, customer bleeding edge b has spent $329 and has nada to put on the wall plus is pulling down the Excedrin bottle to ease the pain. Lets not even mention high end Hilda who buys a Nikon Coolpix 5000 and an Epson 2000. Most of the members of this list are fairly sophisticated to find and join this group. Most members of our society just don't have the time or energy to figure out digital. It is selling because of peer pressure and the cool factor when you show off the little LCD at a party. However, where are the prints? True story, SWAMBO was building out a ten story building for a subsidiary to use as headquarters and needed to document progress on such mundane things as switch closets. I loaned her an old XA, had the film printed, then scanned the prints and put them into a PowerPoint presentation for the folks needing reassurance that all was well. There were many digital cameras present but no results a week later. Just another perspective Don dorysrus@mindspring.com - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html