Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/03/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Come with me now to a place where the concept of "workflow" does not exist and "bokeh" might be some kind of sushi you haven't tried yet. Come with me to the world of the "consumer digital market." Episode I Tuesday night, I got a call from my sister, who lives a few hundred miles away and sees me as her personal IT department, which is fine with me. I am one of those sick puppies that actually seems to enjoy fixing Windows for others. Somehow her JPEG program default had been switched to something other than her preferred photo viewer/editor application. At the moment she called me, she was on the verge of running a system restore utility to try and fix the problem. Rather like a diving-to-save-the-girl action hero in a bad movie, I yelled "NOOOOOOOOO!" and explained that doing such a thing was a VERY bad idea and that I would call her back with the right Windows fix later in the evening. By the time I called her back - you guessed it - she had gone ahead and run the system restore. ALL of her pictures were gone. ALL of them. She was in an absolute panic; her 5 year old son has been (successfully) battling cancer for the past year and the photos she has taken of him during this nightmare are extremely important to her, because - who knows? - he still might not live all that long. Her PC is now in the hands of a local service tech, who for a couple hundred bucks will almost certainly be able to restore her JPEGs. Object Lesson I: How do you lose your 35mm negatives? You have a FIRE in your home. Episode II Wednesday morning, my Toshiba PDR-3310 digital camera died. Probable cause is a failed sensor; it takes "black" pictures now. A few minutes of web research revealed that lots of people have experienced similar failures and there is no practical remedy because: a) Toshiba has exited the digital camera business b) Toshiba no longer supports their former line of cameras (which they didn't build to begin with) c) Toshiba refers support inquiries to a third-party company that wants $20 before they will even talk to you d) If parts were available (and they do not appear to be), the cost would vastly exceed the residual value of the camera I bought the camera directly from Toshiba on May 31, 2002 for $600. At the time, it was the smallest 3+ MP camera on the market. It made pretty decent pictures, and of course provided me with all that new-digital-user "oooh and awwwh" factor. A quick check using Picasa2 shows that I have about 1200 pictures taken with the camera on my computer. Note that these are not necessarily "good" or "keeper" shots; that's all the shots I've ever downloaded from the camera. Overall they are at least acceptably good, because I threw away the obvious flops right after they were taken. Still, I think I've printed somewhat less than 50 of them since day one. Oh...and did I mention that the camera that died on Wednesday morning was actually my THIRD? Yes, I had the original camera replaced TWICE under warranty, the second time after a long argument with Toshiba. So...utilization over the 32 months of the camera's life was roughly equivalent to a 36 exposure roll of 35mm a month, which is about right for a casual snapper. If you do the math, the cost of shooting 35mm color prints comes out at just about the half the price of the Toshiba camera. And that's before adding in at least part of the cost of a decent color printer, ink, paper, etc. An equivalent camera costs less than $200 today, so the theoretical economics of P&S digital are a lot better now. A Canon Powershot A75 is a much better camera than my deceased Toshiba; whether it is any more reliable is an open question. Although I'm a lot more technically sophisticated than my sister, I'm not all that much less likely to experience a catastrophic loss of data. I'm only occasionally a "serious photographer" (although this is starting to change...again) and I have no "digital workflow" (although I do burn CDs a couple of times a year for backup; whether that will turn out to be enough in the long run is another open question). When I do shoot for real, I use a 10 year old 35mm SLR and a handful of primes that have produced thousands of acceptably good images and have never seen the inside of a repair shop. Object Lesson II: Convenience is expensive...and possibly not all that convenient. And maybe even dangerous. Most average people, including me, consider their casual snapshots as one of their most important possessions. The "Film-Processing-Prints" model is, given the way most people are likely to (mis)manage digital, more reliable and vastly more permanent than Pixel Wonderland. It leads to a nice, safe packing box full of negatives and a line of albums up on the mantle, ready for the next generation (and historians, for that matter) to discover. Of course, right now no one cares about this, because the good things about P&S digital tend to make people ignore its problems. But I've come to think that a lot of what used to be called "Kodak Moments" are going to go up in digital smoke and decided that, even as a casual shooter, I'd rather retreat from digital cameras than "get serious" about them. So I'm buying an M4 and a decent film scanner. (Please note: Leica content above.) ---- pld (i've seen the light and become a luddite)