rpsawin said:
Sure, as long as you don't count the cost of the computer, monitor and whatever back up device you use film is extremely costly in comparison.
Bob
Asus board from Ebay 25 Euro, Intel Celeron 1400 CPU from Ebay 60 Euro, big tower case salvaged from a defect computer in the office, silent powersupply 60 Euro, two 4 port S-ATA cards from a store nearby 35 Euro, LG dual layer DVD burner 60 Euro, 2 256MB SDRAM modules 75 Euro, ATI VGA card salvaged, 2 120GB drives 210 Euro and 2 240 GB drives 190 Euro.
RAM, powersupply and drives were new when bought, everything else was two to six years old. I could have used the old powersupply but I wanted a very silent one powerfull enough to feed eight harddisks and a DVD-RAM. Since I use it for storing all of my data I bought new drives 120 drives two years ago and new 240 drives this year, don't know what is current in 2008.
It doesn't need a monitor since it is hooked up to my TV and I have a TV card in it so it works as an harddiskrecorder, too.
So, let's look at it this way, Internetrouter, mailserver, fileserver, homeentertainment for a total of 715 Euro spent over two years and if it weren't for my videos I'd have saved the 190 Euro for the new drives this year.
A roll of slide film including processing costs somewhere between 5 and 15 Euros here, you wouldn't want to duplicate Velvia 50 on Senia 100 and Kodachrome 64 on Elitechrome 100, would you?
So for my use I come to an average of 8 Euro per roll, since I allways have two copies on DVD thats 16 Euro per set of duplicates.
1 roll of slides a week in a year is more expensive than my storage setup and there is enough money left to pay for the DVDs.
I scan with a Canon FS2710 scanner hooked up to a 2001 Fujitsu Siemens PC with 512MB RAM and a 1400MHz Athlon CPU, the scaner was made when a 233MHz Pentium II with 128 MB RAM and a 10GByte harddisk was considered a very fast mashine, so my vintage setup is certainly fast enough to scan my slides and I got the computer for free, I bought the Acer 17" TFT for 200 Euro in march to replace another 17" TFT from 2001 which shows some signs of use now.
I have all the programs and the operating system in sourcecode, in the more than unlikely case that nobody makes Linux distributions anymore, I just port the source to whatever mashine is available in 10 years.
There is just one small fault in my reasoning, I scan with 2720dpi on a very old scanner so I don't get the best out of my slides but good enough fior my needs. If you need more than that and you have to buy a drum scanner or an Imacon, slides may be cheaper.
