Tom R. wrote: > To paraphrase and old saying; figures don't lie, but salesmen do figure.
First of all, Tom, I'm not a salesman, not in any way, shape, or form. I have no connection, official or unofficial, to any company and no financial interest at all in selling anything except my little newsletter. Secondly, you're using convenient figures to prove your case, which I suppose you could argue that I did myself, albeit in the service of the opposite argument. Still, I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers. The cost of a Canon D30, which is an "ubercamera," a digital to die for, capable of exceptionally high quality prints, is $2,300 at B&H. You do have to add a lens and a CF card, and probably a card reader. It's expensive, but it's not $5,000. But to duplicate your traditional setup detailed below, here's what I'd do: I'd get a good "deluxe p/s" for $400-$700. I'd buy a Canon S600 printer for $150 and Epson Matte Heavyweight paper, which is 25 cents a sheet for 8.5x11. If you want to be really strict about duplicating what you're getting on traditional media, I suppose you'd tell me I could really only get two 4x6 prints on a letter-sized sheet (if I got to optimize things, I'd fit four slightly smaller prints on an 8.5x11 sheet, but what the hey). Inks are indeed fairly expensive, but you can get each ink tank for $8.95 if you know where to look, and a set of tanks will do for about 70 8x10s. Count the true dimensions of the 8x10 print as 7.5x 9.5 inches, and we'll say that's 71.25 square inches printed times 70 sheets, or 4,987.5 square inches printed per inkset. Each 4x6 requires 24 sq. in. of printed area, so that's 207 4x6s per inkset. Your actual yield would be somewhat more than that, but never mind that for now. So calculate the cost of prints: inks, $8.95 x 4 = $35.80, and add a few bucks for shipping, call it $40; divide $40 by 207 and you get about 20 cents; add the cost of one sheet of paper for two prints, and you get 32.5--call it 33--cents per 4x6. So shooting and processing are free, and 4x6s cost 33 cents each. So I don't agree when you say "24 4x6 prints are going to cost you about $25 if you print them yourself"--24 prints are costing about $8. But here's the real rub for your argument. IF you could see a full-color proof the size of your computer monitor for each shot you took, would you really need to print every single photograph you shot? If you could somehow preview your 24-exposure roll before you had it processed and printed at the Wal-Mart, do you think you'd still ask them to process and print each and every frame? Honestly now. With your 24-exposure rolls, you get one chance per exposure, and you have to pay for it to be developed and printed whether you'll end up wanting it or not. With the shots from a digicam, you see a large proof of each shot for free and you choose to print only what you want a print of. How many pictures out of each 24 Wal-Mart prints do you really want to keep? One? Three? Ten? Twelve? Whatever, it's not 24--at least it wouldn't be for any photographer I know. Here's the way digital shooting actually works for me. Since shooting is free, I shoot anything. I don't care. Poke the camera around without looking through it, take dopey shots I know I won't want to print, try flash on and flash off, indulge myself, take twenty shots of one subject and then decide it's not a shot worth taking--it doesn't matter. There's no cost. You do whatever the heck you want. Now, for me, I know full well that 90% of what I've shot is crap. As I go along I'll delete maybe 40% or 50% of what I shoot, mistakes or accidents or things that just have no promise whatsoever. This isn't hard, and it's no loss. In many cases I'll take 15 shots of something and delete all but the three that look the best. I do keep EVERYTHING I even slightly want to see. But in any case, by the time I get to the computer I've already deleted 50% of what I actually shot. Then I download it to the hard drive and open them all up. I have an iMac, so my screen is only 15 inches. But my digipics open to about 7x9+ inches. At that size, you can really see what you got. At that stage, probably about 40% of what I've kept goes in the trash--motion blurs, eyes shut, obvious defects or just plain dull pictures or ones I don't like. So now I've kept only 30% of what I shot. At that point I stuff it in a folder marked "[name] Unedited." Over the next few days or weeks I open up the folder a few times and look through it again, making decisions--deleting more, but more selectively now. If something's not a terribly good photograph but might make a meaningful memory, I shunt it to a folder marked "Memory Snaps." By this time, with additional deletions and the "memory" shots removed, I've got maybe 7% left from what I originally shot. Of those 7%, I never print everything. So, at that rate, if you do the arithmetic, I'm actually printing only the equivalent of about ONE shot from each of your 24-exposure rolls. Not 24. So am I really that poor a photographer, that I get only one good print out of 24 exposures? Ah, not at all, grasshopper. Because you are paying for film. You are paying for processing for every single picture whether you'll end up wanting the print or not. I shoot more than you, that's all. You need to be careful, make every shot tell, not "waste film," because the meter is running at all times. I play around. I try anything. I don't stop after three shots of something because I think "that's enough." I shoot ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Who cares? I might come in to the computer, review the proofs, and go back out to reshoot. No cost. I photograph any dumb thing that catches my fancy. A few of them actually turn out to be pretty cool. And if not, no worries. So you get a higher yield off your 24-exposure rolls, but I shoot three, four, five times as many exposures to equal your yield. I experiment more, I get to shoot more...and more shooting more = more fun in my book. Yet another advantage is that I get to preview the print in detail before I make it. You have to accept whatever Wal-Mart's automated machine decides is the right color balance and density. I'm not the greatest digital printer yet, but I can tell you my first prints look good much more consistently than drugstore machine prints look. Now let me cost out my ACTUAL printing costs. I have a Canon S800 which cost me $300 with tax. It takes six ink tanks, and (because they deplete unevenly) I get roughly 250 8x10s for every 9 ink tanks. I tend to print one picture per sheet, not two, but I usually use about half the area of an 8x10 or less; so let's be very conservative and say I get 350 prints out of every nine ink tanks. Run the numbers, and that works out to about 25 cents per print for the ink. Because I use a whole sheet for each print, that's another 25 cents for the paper. So I had an initial investment of $300 and I pay 50 cents for a print that's 5,6,7, or 8 inches in the long dimension floated with a lot of white around it on an 8.5x11 sheet. But I print only about 3% of what I shoot--only what I really KNOW I want a print of--and an unlimited amount of "film" and "processing" is free. Now tell me I'm not running cheaper than you are. I think everything considered it's a _lot_ cheaper. --Mike P.S. To Mafud's earlier comment that I'm running through AA alkalines at a steady clip, no way. I have two sets of 1800mAh rechargeable AAs. The two sets with the charger cost about 50 bucks in initial investment. No more battery costs after that. I keep one set of Lithium replacement batteries in the camera bag for emergencies, but they came with the camera and I've never used them. Tom R. wrote: > Maybe, if you do nothing with the pics except look at them on the computer. > > Now let's look at it from my viewpoint. 2 ME Super Bodies, 24/f2.0, 50/f1.4, > 80-200/f2.8, Strobe. $700. > > 100 rolls of Fuji Super Delux 100 24exp. from Wal-Mart with coupon inside > four packs. $100. > > 100 rolls process and print 4x6 from Wal-Mart, send-out. $400. > > Total for first year $1200. Per year after first $500. > > Price of digital with the same capacity $5000+. > > Why the digital will pay for itself in only 9 years, if you do not count the > lost of interest on your money. Or, in my case, the impossibiliy of coming > up with that $5000+. > > And, of course, if you want prints to show your friends and family the > digital is even more expensive, because 24 4x6 prints are going to cost your > about $25 if you print them yourself. > > To paraphrase and old saying; figures don't lie, but salesmen do figure. - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
