jonathan pollock wrote:
1) I have visited most of the professional shops in London for test runs and frankly I have found the salesmen disappointing in their lack of knowledge of the systems they are selling. So can anybody out there point me in the direction of a company that understands the product that it is selling and has a good back up service?
I can't speak for the situation in UK, but when I was researching similar equipment a few years back, my observations were much the same. The decision to purchase high end gear is such a major capital expenditure (at least for my business) that you owe it to yourself to become fully acquainted with all the possible options available. If you do it right, you're probably going to know a lot more than most (certainly not all) of the salespeople I've run across. I found that, at that time there was a lot of gear on the market that wasn't commonly known about. Do your homework. Look into every possibility. Jenoptik (eyelike), Imacon, Sinar, Leaf, Fuji (and probably a few more that I'm forgetting) all make high-end backs that are perfectly suited to your type of work. I'd take a good look at backs that are capable of both single shot and multiple shot captures for the type of studio work you've described. In our studios, if it don't move, it gets multiple shot capture. No matter how good an algorithm is, creating two out of three colors per pixel is never going to give you the true color of a multiple shot capture.
2) The next question is to do with costs to the client. They know what to expect with conventional photography but in my limited experience they do not know what to expect when it comes to digital, only that it should be cheaper!
Bob Marchant covered this one nicely. What we've found is that the total cost to the customer hasn't changed all that dramatically (when you factor in the savings in prepress for most of our clients), yet we are more profitable that ever. We're charging for image editing, archiving, and converting for multiple usages. Our client base was used to paying a little more for our services to begin with, the added savings in time to press and the overall quality of their projects is worth a little more to them.
We've found that the initial investment seemed a little steep (three years ago the costs were probably 20% more than currently), yet the savings in film and processing costs alone (averaged over an entire year) paid for the lease on the back. At this point, three years later, with the lease paid off, that same cost is now increased profit. And the equipment, while not exactly state of the art is still churning out work day after day without a problem.
So how does one charge for shooting digitally? So that one can recoup this investment on top of all the other associated costs of running a studio.
Look at your current costs. It made sense for us to invest at the point that the average monthly cost of film and processing (include polaroid and even the cost of deliveries and pickups if applicable) was roughly equal to the cost of having the equipment in the studio. Seems like, with the current batch of equipment out there this number should be even easier to hit than it was three years ago. We based our original decision on the new equipment only handling 75% of all our work. What we found was that it almost immediately handled 90%, and currently handles 98% of everything we shoot.
I very much look forward to receiving your comments.
Regards
JP
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