Costs of Going Digital

[sgy1962]

As a purely practical matter, will going digital from film entail more than the cost of just the digital camera? What other costs are involved?

 

[J. Borger]

Computer & software i would say .... 😉
Seriously it depends if coming from film means you did or did not scan, process or print images before.
You need a digital darkroom ... otoh you could also shoot jpegs and drop the SD card at Walmart like people did with film.
Morale of the story .... depends on what you came from and where you want to go!

 

[kaiyen]

Going digital involves a significant up front cost on a number of fronts. Obviously the camera. Then:

-media card (s)
-card reader
-software
-improvements to your computer or possibly a whole new one
-sensor cleaning kit

That's just off the top of my head.

allan

 

[vodid]

Pictures take up considerable disk space, so you'll likely need another hard drive, plus an external drive to use to back-up all your digital files, and backup software to do the job. If you don't back-up your work, it is inevitable that sooner or later, you'll lose it. I'd consider a back-up solution essential to moving into digital photography, and it's something that most folks don't consider until after they've got a camera and their hard drive begins to fill up with photos.

 

[devils-advocate]

Going, and staying, digital is seriously expensive.. You need:

-- a reasonably fast computer
-- more large external hard drives on a regular basis
-- a good LCD monitor
-- preferably a 2nd monitor for a much easier workflow
-- a calibrator for those monitors

-- a Photoshop licence (ouch!)
-- updates of Photoshop every year or two
-- maybe Lightroom as well

-- SD cards
-- card reader
-- a portable storage device for when you travel with your new baby

-- a good printer
-- expensive printer paper
-- really expensive printer ink

...and a bunch of expensive instructional books to try to figure out all this ****!!!! 😀

Oh. and don't forget, another $5K when the next model comes out in 18 months 😱

 

[Ben Z]

It all depends on your particular situation. For some people a 512 or 1G memory card is all they'll need in addition. Shooting JPEGs that will hold the equivalent of quite a few rolls of 36-exp film, and then dump the card at a lab and pick up the prints in an hour. For other people they'll need the latest and greatest Mac with extra HDs and a 21" monitor with calibration gear, and CS2 plus a spate of plugins and a couple pro-level printers (one dedicated for b&w) and several 2G cards and a portable HD and several spare batteries and a partridge in a pear tree.

 

[jaapv]

Most will do fine with PSE instead of full PS, for beginning digishooters a full version is daunting overkill. PSE 4 or 5 can do about anything you need. Or PictureWindow Pro. Or Lightroom. (all in the 100-150$ range)
As for a printer, I find that good online printing labs, like Kodak and Profoto, deliver a print quality that is extremely hard to reach yourself. No extra costs for a printer then.
For raw conversion, Leica will bundle Capture One LE.

 

[matt fury]

GIMP is a free alternative to Photoshop. You don't *need* much besides a camera and a memory card, seriously. There is lots of stuff that could be useful or you might want, but I'd also like a blackpaint MP and a Noctilux.

 

[kaiyen]

Well, I think the comments about backup solutions is pretty critical, and I should've included that my first time around. I think it _is_ necessay. You shoot film, and you have these negatives. Sure, they could be lost in a fire, but that's more rare than a hard drive crash. If you have all your pictures on a single drive, you're asking for trouble.

For me, I do a nightly backup of my "files" drive on my local machine to a RAID 5, fault-tolerant server with 1.2TB. I then do a second nigtly backup from the RAID server to two separate external hard drives. For the heck of it, I take one of those to work with me as an off-site backup.

Now, that's pretty hardcore, but I do some wedding/event photography and I don't want to take chances. But consider external hard drives, and backup often.

allan

 

[Socke]

I've lost more negs in the mail and had more slides cut in the middle of a frame or scratched somewhere in the lab than harddrive failures 🙂

Everytime I moved I lost something, a case with books here, a shoebox with photos there.

That's live 🙂

 

[Socke]

Going, and staying, digital is seriously expensive.. You need:

-- a reasonably fast computer
-- more large external hard drives on a regular basis
-- a good LCD monitor
-- preferably a 2nd monitor for a much easier workflow
-- a calibrator for those monitors

-- a Photoshop licence (ouch!)
-- updates of Photoshop every year or two
-- maybe Lightroom as well

-- SD cards
-- card reader
-- a portable storage device for when you travel with your new baby

-- a good printer
-- expensive printer paper
-- really expensive printer ink

...and a bunch of expensive instructional books to try to figure out all this ****!!!! 😀

Oh. and don't forget, another $5K when the next model comes out in 18 months 😱

And for film you need your own minilab?

Make that a decent PC from the last two years, I did a lot of RAW processing for my 6Mpixel pictures on a now five year old 1400MHz Athlon with 512MB RAM and two 40GB harddisks. You can buy those for some 50 Euro today.

My scanner is now eight years old and processing 50MB Tiffs was possible on the PCs we had then, i.E. 200MHz 128MB RAM 15GB HD. So why should one need more today?

A memory card is cheaper than film and processing, so you could store the cards instead of film, they are good for a couple 100 years if they are not written often.

And to printer and ink and such, the same labs printing films are happy to print from digital files, too. No need to own a printer if you didn't do your own printing before.


So my vesion of the usable and low cost list is like this:

PC over 1GHz with 512MB RAM, a 40GB HD and CD or DVD burner.

CRT or TFT with acurate colours, better a CRT because they are cheaper than TFTs and have better colours.

A handfull of 1GB cards cards and USB reader.

Everything else comes with your camera.

PC as described ca. 100 Euro used
19" CRT new ca 100 Euro
5 1GB cards (Transcend) and USB reader 80 Euro
Windows XP license if not bundled to the PC 100 Euro

All in all 380 Euro, roughly 90 rolls Elitechrome200 without processing at the cheapest store here.

B/W is a problem, but I have a reliable minilab around the corner with whom I worked out a way to get my B/W stuff printed without too much colourcast, i.E. most people don't notice it.

 

[jaapv]

For back-up, simply burn on DVD. Twice if critical and if necessary use archival quality disks.
I consider a good monitor calibration device necessary.

 

[Al Patterson]

Since I had two computers prior to going digital it was easy. I use Snapfish for prints, use the laptop to backup the desktop, plus archive to CD. I guess at some point I'll get PSE, but for now I'm using the software that came with the HP desktop.

 

[Finder]

And for film you need your own minilab?

And that costs about $10 on ebay.

 

[PeterL]

And for film you need your own minilab?

Just about the same reaction as I had.

PC as described ca. 100 Euro used
19" CRT new ca 100 Euro
5 1GB cards (Transcend) and USB reader 80 Euro
Windows XP license if not bundled to the PC 100 Euro

I would say 5 memory cards is quite plenty. Also, if you're slightly adventurous, you could try Linux. And if you know somebody who's into computers (no member in the family who's getting rid of his PC ?), you can also get rid of those 200 euro.

All in all, because most people have a PC already, I consider a digital purchase to be: camera, lens, memory card. Maybe some writeable DVDs or an external drive for backup.


Peter.

 

[jaapv]

If one uses PS it is a good idea to add some RAM. Anything less than 1 Gb tends to make your computer go very slow.

 

[rvaubel]

If one uses PS it is a good idea to add some RAM. Anything less than 1 Gb tends to make your computer go very slow.

If your on this forum, You have already got all the stuff you need except a camera and a couple cards and an extra battery pack. Don't go overboard until you find out what you wnat out of digital life. You may never need a printer and all the stuff that goes with it if you are happy with Snapfish-Costco (which do an really good job, cheap). On the other hand, if you have been scanning film and have all the stuff (and like doing it!), get a nice monitor and go for it.

My point is, there is no rush to buy a bunch of stuff behond the minumum to get started.

One thing, however. Next time you upgrade your computor, spend about $400 more than you did last time. For a laptop (which I use) I'd get 2megs of RAM. If you do that, you will automatically get a reasonable graphics card, large HD, etc.
Spending a little more money on the computor will save you a lot of time in the long run.

Rex

 

[devils-advocate]

While my post was intended as mildly toungue-in-cheek, I do think many underestimate the cost and complexity of mastering digital photography. With film, good shooting technique, coupled with consistent development (usually courtesy of a lab) was what you needed to extract the available quality from one's equipment.

With digital, the paradigm has changed. Capture is only the beginning. Conversion and sharpening (leaving aside any adjustment of the image analogous to filtering/dogdging/burning etc. with analogue media) are critical to realizing the full potential of the equipment. Unless you know what you are doing, and do it well, don't bother buying a $5,000 camera. You might as well get a good P&S camera that is similar in size, since the results will be pretty much the same.

And yes, going digital does require the equivalent of buying your own minlab, as you must process each final image yourself to get anything approximating maximum quality.

Shooting jpegs with an M8, for instance, is like driving to get groceries in a Bentley. Possible, maybe even enjoyable, but kind of ridiculous.

I say all of this from painful and humbling personal experience with the Canon 1DsII. You will shoot vastly more with digital than you ever did with film. You have to store it somewhere, twice. (a friend who seriously shoots landscape on a part-time basis now has over 5 Terra Bytes of HDDs in storage after four years of fully digital work). Unless your time is worthless, you need a decent computer to crunch the ever-increasing file-sizes that these camera generate.

Don't get me wrong, digital is great -- I much prefer it to film as a capture medium, but one has to understand that, if artistry or professional competence is your goal, it requires a real committment to digital technologies well beyond the camera, and this is seriously expensive.

By all means buy an M8 even ifyou have no intention of going down this road (we all want Lieca to thrive financially, after all) but please don't think that a few jpegs shipped to Walmart will do this gear justice. Digital is a demanding mistress, both in time and money.

- N.

 

[jaapv]

While my post was intended as mildly toungue-in-cheek, I do think many underestimate the cost and complexity of mastering digital photography. With film, good shooting technique, coupled with consistent development (usually courtesy of a lab) was what you needed to extract the available quality from one's equipment.

With digital, the paradigm has changed. Capture is only the beginning. Conversion and sharpening (leaving aside any adjustment of the image analogous to filtering/dogdging/burning etc. with analogue media) are critical to realizing the full potential of the equipment. Unless you know what you are doing, and do it well, don't bother buying a $5,000 camera. You might as well get a good P&S camera that is similar in size, since the results will be pretty much the same.

And yes, going digital does require the equivalent of buying your own minlab, as you must process each final image yourself to get anything approximating maximum quality.

Shooting jpegs with an M8, for instance, is like driving to get groceries in a Bentley. Possible, maybe even enjoyable, but kind of ridiculous.

I say all of this from painful and humbling personal experience with the Canon 1DsII. You will shoot vastly more with digital than you ever did with film. You have to store it somewhere, twice. (a friend who seriously shoots landscape on a part-time basis now has over 5 Terra Bytes of HDDs in storage after four years of fully digital work). Unless your time is worthless, you need a decent computer to crunch the ever-increasing file-sizes that these camera generate.

Don't get me wrong, digital is great -- I much prefer it to film as a capture medium, but one has to understand that, if artistry or professional competence is your goal, it requires a real committment to digital technologies well beyond the camera, and this is seriously expensive.

By all means buy an M8 even ifyou have no intention of going down this road (we all want Lieca to thrive financially, after all) but please don't think that a few jpegs shipped to Walmart will do this gear justice. Digital is a demanding mistress, both in time and money.

- N.

I gather from your post that you had the same learning curve as all of us had, with a minmum of one year and in that light your original post might be read as an end result. But to advise a digital beginner to start out with Photoshop CS2 and start printing his own prints is inviting disaster. One should indeed start by editing Jpeg's in Elements 4 or 5,albeit on a calibrated monitor, maybe using the automatic features,upload them to a really good printing service and then graduate to raw conversion, full editing, using plug-ins for curves, decent sharpening etc. and then -well, we are really there already. Should this beginner turn geek at that point, all is fine:CS2, multiple computers, computing power to launch a space mission to Sirius, the works. At least he'll have an inkling of what he is doing.

 

[Ben Z]

The whole discussion makes the assumption that everyone is interested in prints. I have shot almost entirely slide film over the years, and almost no print film. The number of prints I've had made are probably under a hundred. I have always had limited wall space and only some of it devotable to photographs so most of those prints were quite small. If digital projectors were as good as slide projectors for the same money I would consider one, but more likely I will put my money into a large HDTV and that will be how I show my photos in the "digital age". So the issues and criteria for digital for me are different from those whose end goal is to have large prints, and my need for equipment and peripheral devices and software somewhat different as well.