Laurent Daudelin wrote: > When I see the ongoing prices for digital cameras, it strikes me that > something is still wrong. To get a good camera, not even matching a good > SLR, you will pay the price that you would pay for an advanced-amateur/pro > SLR. $1000 will almost get you the Minolta Maxxum 9, the top of the line at > Minolta, or a very nice Nikon N90. To get similar result of those of a SLR, > you would have to plunk over $5000. > > I don't know, maybe I'm not getting it, but still, you would think that > digital cameras should be cheaper than SLR, since they have far less mobile > parts that require precision engineering (like with a 1/12000th exposure).
Five magic words for you, Laurent: "What the market will bear" While the CCD chips on these cameras are expensive, particularly the larger ones, accounting for a goodly portion of the final cost, a lot of the pricing is that the demand for digital cameras is very high, which keeps prices up. There's also the relentless pace of technological innovation in digicams. A state of the art digicam two years ago was 2 megapixels. Today it's 5 or higher. These companies cannot economically sell these older cameras like they can, say an EOS body which has been made with few changes for what, a decade or more? These are all new electronics, mechanicals, and assembly lines. Finally, there's the question of the rest of their camera lines. 35mm and APS film use nearly the same size negative, at least compared to the CCD chips in most consumer digicams. http://www.minoxlab.com/Don_Krehbiel/mpl/dknegsiz.htm shows the negative size of various film formats. Let's take, for example, my latest digicam lust object, the Canon Proshot 90is (Because of it's gorgeous,long, bright zoom lens.) it's ccd chip is 8.1 x 6.4 mm. (2140 x 1560 total pixels, 3.34 Mpx). At equivalent resolution, a 35mm frame (24 x 36 mm) is 9510 x 5850 pixels or *55.6* megapixels... That means digital cameras can't use the same optics and mechanicals as their established, amortized 35mm and APS production lines. A smaller 'negative' means that a shorter focal length lens is required to give the equivalent performance. CCD chips are finally approaching the size of 35 mm and aps negatives. This means two things: Big Honkin' File sizes: a 56 megapixel image is huge. A raw 56 Mpx image at 24bit color is 160 megabytes in size....suddenly that IBM 1G microdrive looks like the 8 mb card that came with my little camera...it'll hold 6 shots. The camera makers will be able to leverage their investment in 35 mm and APS tooling and optics, which, in theory, should bring down prices and improve performance. This is years down the line, though, IMO...there are a lot of other stumbling blocks, like moving that much data around in a timely fashion, compressing it in camera (which they'll have to do, and mild JPEG compression does wonders for camera card file size!) and storing it, all without something like a belt-fed battery compartment spitting dead AA cells out the side like a machine gun...;-) -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- G-Books is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Check our web site for refurbished PowerBooks | & CDRWs on Sale! | RoadTools $30 PodiumPad available at Apple retail stores, $20 Traveler CoolPad at Staples. Both in white for iBooks at <http://roadtools.com>. Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-Books list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html> Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-books%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
