With a color processor in house and several film scanners, the photo dept. could turn a roll of film into digital images ready for publication in a half hour or so. Even the few photos made on deadline, whether a fire, sports event or similar, only get on the page a little bit faster today. With the film cameras, if a breaking news photo was that big a deal, the paper would go to the presses a few minutes later than scheduled.
It's definitely a money issue. No more chemicals, no more processor maintenance, no more film expenses. And in newspaper photography, where we used a 180 dpi resolution for photos but could go to 150 dpi without any noticeable difference, quality was never the top consideration.
Joe
> >That's why newspapers have gone digital. Speed.
Nothing to do with speed. It's money. Digital saves me maybe 15 minutes on deadline over film. It's more important if you are a daily and have guys transmitting from the field, but I've talked to guys on dailies and they also say that speed is not the real issue.
We're a weekly. Speed is never an issue. We went digital because somebody upstairs finally did the math and realized that 4 $3000 digital cameras and a thousand dollars in assorted peripheral support would pay for itself in less than a year at the rate we were going through color film. Back when we were all B&W film and developing were cheap enough to make digital less obviously a financial win. A lot of papers switched to digital or partially digital (scanned not printed) when they switched to color. The switch from printing to scanning which we did some years back also saved a ton of money.
Suppose those 4 $3000 cameras last three years (that's about par, from what I can tell). We save two years worth of photo operations expenses.
Every pro I've talked to looks at a $3000-4000 digital camera as a $1500-2000 SLR with a lifetime supply of film, and knowing his operating expenses sees this as a big win economically. For those folks who don't shoot a lot of film, I can see why the current price of DSLRs is offputting.
DJE
