Derrel
Mr. Rain Cloud
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2009
- Messages
- 48,225
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- USA
- Website
- www.pbase.com
- Can others edit my Photos
- Photos OK to edit
Don't be silly. Everybody knows digital printers are free and ink and paper
grow on trees. Computers and internet services (to send or post pictures) are free too and so is Photoshop. And, of course memory cards, DVDs, external hard drives and other storage media fall out of the sky into ones pockets. Digital cameras also never become obsolete and always maintain their re-sale value. And, all you have to do to get professional digital prints is to take your image files into a photo service shop and they'll be glad to give you all the prints you want at no charge. Yep, just buy a digital SLR for $500-$3000 and you can shoot all the digital images you want forever without ever paying a another dime.
Uh, nobody said "free" except you in your sarcastic look from a film-shooting POV. Let's look at some current prices, shall we? Some real numbers, not just B.S., okay? Let's shoot 1,000 frames, shall we? Let's price it out, okay?
E200 135-36 Ektachrome Professional ISO 200 $9.95
35mm 36 exposure E-6 slide develop and mount $10.00
1,000 divided by 36 equals 27.7777 rolls. Let's call it 28 rolls, for a total of 1,008 frames with film. 28 rolls of professional slide film costs $278.60 to buy at $9.95 per 36 shot roll, with no shipping costs, no gasoline costs, no travel costs. Processing at $10.00 per 36 exposure roll of slides will run $280.00. So, film cost and developing cost for 1,008 35mm slides is $558.60. That is a little bit over 55 and four-tenth cents PER SHOT with a 35mm film camera.
So, for the cost of a low-end Nikon D40x AND a Nikkor 18-55mm lens, you can shoot and develop 28 rolls of E-6 slide film. Oh, but if you need to pay shipping on the film, add in extra money. And how much money and time will it cost to make all the trips to and from the lab to drop off film, drive home, then drive back,pick up the film, and drive back home? How about when only a few frames are needed? With film, you can shoot 1 frame or 36 frames and the slide developing cost is basically the same. If only 12 exposures are needed on a 36 shot roll , the cost will still be the same for the film and the developing: $19.95 total for the roll of film and the developing and mounting cost; hey, only $1.66 per frame when you need to shoot 12 frames!!! Film is such a great deal!
(Oh, did you want to shoot 200 ISO slide film at 400 ISO? Add the lab's Push/Pull fee of $3.75 per roll)
I bought a FujiFilm S2 Pro d-slr body a number of years ago, and it has shot the equivalent of over $80,000 worth of film and processing. And the camera STILL functions. Cost savings just to create the images, compared with film? $77,501. Sure, there were hard drives that had to be bought to archive the images, and DVD discs to back up the images as well. But nowhere near $77,501 worth of media is or was needed to archive that many digital images. The slide mounting pages, notebooks,and cabinets to house 143,000 35mm mounted slides would probably cost $10,000 quite easily.
So, one single d-slr body that created roughly 143,000 images, shot over four years, at a cost of $2,499 for the camera; a camera that in today's marketplace, could be purchased new for only $500 or so, due to the huge drop in d-slr prices since 2002. A D40x is easily the equivalent of the S2Pro.
A Canon 7D or Nikon D300s is easily,easily a vastly superior camera.
Yeah, film is economical compared to digital capture. Sure. Right. Oh, and if you want to push-process some slide film, add that $3.75 surcharge per roll.