A while back someone asked about *istD frame counts, and I understood why most people bitch about DSLR prices.
As I've stated, the economic factor that drove newspapers to DSLRs is film cost. Our newspaper was shooting color film (say $4-5 per roll buying cheap film in large volume from a large dealer) and taking to the local lab for development ($3.50 per roll) since we didn't have a color processing machine (most dailies did, because they could justify the $50,000 machine and the cost of a lab tech). Prints aren't in the economic equation because we had long since switched to negative scanning. This seems fair in general in that it is now possible to get prints from digital media at the same price and in the same place as you get prints from film, so print costs are basically the same for film vs digital. So, we were spending about $8/roll to buy and process the color film. We were shooting probably 70 rolls a week. If you do the math, you find that this costs roughly $1000/5000 exposures or $1000/140 rolls. In other words, our film use cost the company about $1000 every two weeks or $2000/month. The DSLRs that the company bought cost, with accessories, about $4000 each. We bought 4 of them, plus 2 new computers, for a total cost of maybe $25,000. That is almost exactly our annual film budget, given the numbers in the previous paragraph. The cameras should last three years, although they will eventually cost some money to repair. My personal D100 is at about frame 6000, which is about the break-even point ($400 N80 body + $1000 dollars of operating cost vs actual $1500 price). This is after about 2 years. My company-issued D1h is at about frame 18,000 after almost 4 months. Temporarily ignoring the fact that I'm shooting about 50% more exposures with the digital than I did with film (and producing more pictures in the paper) that is also approaching break-even point. ($1000 F100 body + $3000 in operating costs vs $3000 camera plus several hundred dollars in accessories). The *istD, then, should pay for itself after about 7500 exposures (just over 200 rolls of film) if your operating costs look like mine. (B&W is of course a lot cheaper, slides more expensive) Since the frame count survey was showing a lot of two-digit numbers and not a lot of three digit ones it looks like it will take a while for the average *istD to make sense purely from an economic point of view. Even the Canon and Nikon cameras at that sexy $1000 price point might, from a purely economic standpoint, not make sense. It is quite possible that the people who buy them will never shoot the 5000+ exposures (140 rolls equivalent) that it would take to break even. I doubt my mother has put 140 rolls through her ME super since she bought it (new). Of course, there are a number of reasons besides economics to buy a digital camera! The above numbers do show, however, why the ME super of this decade is probably has an optio in its name and not an asterisk. DJE
