I recently had some family portraits made. There was no film used for the entire shoot, and there was a computer in the studio with us, so we could see the pics immediatly. After the shoot, we went into another room and got to play with the images for a while. We could zoom and crop and change to B&W and back to color. Within minutes of finshing the shoot, we had selected and ordered our photos. I don’t know if Digital will replace film for the average home user, but it’s the best way I’ve experienced to get pro photos done.
Semi Hi-jack:
There’s been lots of talk about Zip disks’ reliability. I’m a Zip disk junkie…I use them all the time, and I’ve never had one fail or lose data. What are the problems with Zips? Is it a question of long term storage or what?
From what I’ve heard, reliability is more an issue with the drives than the media - though I’d be very interested in hearing about media issues.
My personal concern is with obsolesence and making sure I don’t let things slip through the cracks as products reach end-of-life, companies merge and/or go out of business, and technology changes.
I was recently looking for some old documents and found that although I’d archived the disks, I’d migrated to different software without thinking about doing a conversion. Now I can’t find the old software (I don’t even know if Win 98 would load it) and my current version of the new sw won’t read this old format.
Well, I just got a brand new digital camera (mavica 95) and it takes absolutely beautiful pictures. On the screen of the computer the photos look absolutely beautiful. (the camera takes pictures at 1600x1200 – 2.1 megapix) When the pictures are printed out on my HP 722C using the high dollar glossy paper they look as good as film until you get right next to the picture to tell it is made of dots.
As far as storage goes, thats what CDRW’s are for. Some people keep photo albums – I keep albums on CD
Most full featured word processing programs like Corel Wordperfect 9 or MS Word 2000, in order to conserve space, do not load all the translation filters with the standard install. By going back to the install portions of the programs on the install CD you can add lots and lots of document import filters. I have not run into a document format (yet) that WordPerfect 9, with all filters installed, cannot at least extract the text out of.
Digital’s here, yeah. It’s fine for some things, like news photography (as for the NY Times) and other images that you need “right now.” But, at least in my family, digital photos will never replace our U.S. Postal Service-powered photo exchange. Very few of my elderly relatives can or want to purchase a computer, let alone a digital camera. And the nostalgia of pulling out a photo album with digital photos just wouldn’t be the same. (One of my cousins recently sent us a picture of his son and himself with the Stanley Cup that had been printed from a digital negative - ecch!) I contemplated borrowing a university-owned digital camera for my recent trip to France (since it was school-sponsored and all ), but then I realized that all the fun would be taken out of it if I had instant gratification as far as getting pictures back goes. I get my pictures back on Friday afternoon, and it’s one of the best feelings in the world to curl up in an armchair with 10 new packets of photos, all glossy and stacked neatly. Nothing digital can ever replace that.
Check out the HP 900 series. The 900 series, and G series OfficeJets, are Photo RET (resolution enhancement technology, developed in conjunction with Kodak) III printers, which means that they have a 5 picoliter dot size (smaller than you can see with the naked eye), and they do color layering of up to 29 layers. The prices are:
$199 for 932c at 9ppm black and 7.5 ppm color with fold up paper tray
$299 for 952c at 10ppm black and 9 ppm color and 4x6 tray
$399 for 970cse at 12ppm black and 10ppm color with duplexing (print on both sides at once)
$399 for P1000 at 10ppm black and 9ppm color with CompactFlash and Smartmedia slots and 4x6 tray
$499 for P1100 at 12ppm black and 10ppm color with CompactFlash and Smartmedia slots and 4x6 tray and duplexing.
$499 for G55 with 10ppm black and 9ppm color with 1200x2400 scan and copy
$799 for G85 with 10ppm black and 9ppm color with 1200x2400 scan and copy with sheetfed fax, copy, and scan
I’m somewhat biased on brands. From personal experience, I’ve seen Best Buy (my evil, hated employer) sell approximately 75% HP, and seen approximately 50-75% of returns from Lexmark, and Canon. We sell almost 0% Epsons.
Now, I don’t know the figures for professional prints, but a HP black cartridge for the series above are, at Best Buy:
$29.99 for the C1845D cartridge, which is 40ml of ink. It lasts approx. 1k pages of 5% coverage, or about 250 pages of 8x10 average color saturated photos
$34.99 for the C1678D cartridge, which is 28ml (??) cartridge, translating to approx. 500 pages of 5% coverage, or ~75 8x10 average color saturated photos
Do the math yourself, and, also, YMMV
Oh, poop on them! You can see the color dots in the page if you look closely, because they focus on DPI, and don’t do any color layering. The 875DC (??) is a pretty good printer, though.
Absolutely. For the 900 series, use the 9mil matte paper. It is the thickest sold by HP, especially for this series printer, and does a KICK ASS job. It’s about $17 for a 8x10 20 pack, though. A 4x6 20 pack is $8. Do the math yourself.
I’m looking at, no, no, make that touching, a SparQ 1.0 GB SYQUEST drive right about… NOW.
Sorry, but HP has demonstrated their waterproof-osity with their new 9 mil paper (described above) by holding it under a running faucet.
I’m looking at, no, no, make that touching, a 5.25" drive right about… NOW! Maybe it’ll be funny this time…
I’m looking at, no, no, make that touching, a Sony BetaMAX VCR right about… NOW! Nope, nope, still not funny.
I’m looking at, no, no, ahhh, screw it.
Correct, not very impressive. Incorrect, halve the price.
Worried about fade, quality, and got $2000 to spare? Buy a HP wax printer.
I don’t think it’s an inherent problem with the ink, I think it’s finding a way to create a paper that not only protects the ink from UV radiation, but will still allow the paper to be impregnated with such ink.
Screw them. Lesse… $100 for the drive, $10 a piece for 100 meg… or… 250 for a CDRW, .50 for the discs, the ability to create and copy CDs, play in any drive, play in your car… a non magnetic medium… yeah, I’ll take the CDRW.
Must… stifle… giggle… No, I’m just kidding. The 700 series are really stable printers. IIRC, your printer uses the C1845D black, and the C1823D color… that means… somewhere around… 6ppm black, 3 ppm color… 10 picoliter dot size, 16 color layers… 7.5mil max paper weight…
No, it’s not a shabby printer.
HA! Go to a Best Buy and ask for the HP training book (under the Answer Center) (use those words, and the BB Zombie will stare and wonder). Take out the demo prints on 9 mil paper for the PRetIII series, and compare to your prints. Your prints? Good. Clean, quality. RetIII prints? You can’t even SEE the ‘dots’.
I apologize to any slighted in this post, remember, please, that I am a complete and utter bastard.
Please, please, PLEASE, if I’ve screwed up, point it out. I’ll be more than happy to post a correction.
Okay, so a 4X6 20 pack is $8.00. Ink to print those 20 images will set you back maybe another $5.00. That’s $13 for 20 pictures. AND, to get those 20 pictures I have to sit and dick around with my computer all night long. And I’m probably going to ruin a couple of those photos along the way because they were misaligned, or I chose the wrong print setting, or the printer didn’t feed right, or something.
Currently, I can drop a film off at London Drugs, and for $7.99 I get 24 4X6 pictures back, of higher quality than the home-grown stuff. AND, I can go to their website and download all 24 pictures in one zip file for free.
When I’m taking these pictures, I don’t have to worry about filling up memory, because I can just pop a new film cartridge in. Battery life is a non-event as well.
Digital technology for general-purpose snapshots still has a way to go, IMO. It’s great for lots of things, but it isn’t going to replace someone’s Canon T1 with 200mm lense any time soon.
If you want all the funtionality of your SLR with the expensive glass, just get a digital back for your Cannon or Nikon. They’re expensive, but they work great.
For snapshots, there are great benefits to digital if you don’t need to print all of them out. And your 24 pictures includes ones that were blurry, or didn’t get framed right, etc. Since you preview your digital shots you can make sure you got the right shot.
Right now I shoot approx 50 rolls of film a year. I mainly use them for a web site and to share with friends. The film plus processing is about $750, or just under the price of a top of the line camera. I don’t need to print out very many if I can share them online, and the images are much better than my scanned images or the cheap photoCDs that most developers offer. If I need to print them, I have a good printer, or I can use places like ofoto online.
It’s not a question of if digital will or won’t replace film, it’s a matter of when. Right now, 3 Megapixel cameras have about half the image capacity of a 35mm neg, plus all the post processing benefits. In two years, there will be no difference. Right now, you can “blow up” a 3 meg digital image to 11x14 with no noticable difference from film. If you print posters or calendars, image quality is still an issue, but that’s about it.
Medium and large format are still out of reach, but they don’t share too much with 35mm photography right now anyways.
You are forgetting one HUGE thing. With a digital every single picture is one that you wanted to print. With film, you get 24 pictures, 20 of which did not come out the way you wanted because you had no idea what teh photo looked like when you took it.
Sure, you can get pretty good at guessing the delicate balance of your f stop, film speed, filter, and shutter speed. But no matter how good you are, it is still guess work.
And once you get back that photo that was a little to dark, you are screwed. with digital, not only do you know what it will look like, you can put it into the editor an edit it 100 different ways.
Also you can switch from B&W to color to sepia, take videos, take moving panorama shots…SLR’s are great for some things, but digital are a lot more user friendly.
Unfortunately it wasn’t a word processor, it was DTP software that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m currently going through conversion from Corel to Photoshop but this time my hard disk is big enough to have both installed until I’m sure everything is at least in a neutral format.
Personally, I find photos more useful digitized. What do I ever do with my old photo albums? Nothing. The only print photos I use are the ones that I blow up and hang on the wall.
Most photos I put on my web site or use as wallpaper. The digitized ones I use all the time. ANd if I ever need paper, I can print. A hassle, but it won’t happen often.
In the future, count on it, digital will be The Way.
About my 722C, it is a great printer, not quite as good as the new HP’s, but I wouldnt trade it for the world. Using the high gloss paper, and the highest quality print, if you get right next to the paper you can tell where the dots are on some of the color combinations.
I am sure that the newest printers will have greatly removed this problem, if not completely solving it.
You wont catch me going with anything but Digital anymore. If I feel like curling up next to the fire with a picture album, I’ll put a CD in my laptop and look at my pictures
Kinoons: Oh, I was just teasing you. I agree, you do have a really nice printer. In fact, I had one just like it until a few weeks ago when Dad picked up a 932c.
sorry for the misunderstanding – I knew you were teasing me, I just didnt want anyone out there thinking the 722c was the endall be all to the world of printers (but its damn near)
just in your last post you said…aw hell I’m rereading the post and it makes sense…dont mind me, I’ll just go sit in the corner and feel silly now…
To me digicams is the best thing since sliced bread. I’ve got both a regular SLR and a digicam. It’s completely revolutionized my way of thinking.
With my old camera I had boxes and boxes of photos that I had to drag out to show people.
With my new digicam I also bought a CD-writer. Now I simply save all my images on a CD. I can save 5000 pictures on a single CD. Think of how much developing costs I’ve saved. Plus I can edit my photos, I can send them to friends via e-mail or in a CD (which is only a couple of bucks). Anyone with a computer in their home can see my pictures. Why even bother with print? Print can fade. CDs are forever. Plus special shots, I can see the result right away and can recompose the shot immediately if it doesn’t turn out right. If I want to show people my photos at home, I just take them to my study and show them on my computer, just like a slide show.
I wasn’t aware there were any digital backs for 35mm SLRs. Can you tell us where we can get more info? Well, there is the SiliconFilm, but we all know that’s a classic example of a vaporware. They’ve been saying “available real soon” for the past two years.
Or maybe you were talking about digital camera bodies that work with Nikon or Canon lenses. I hear the Nikon D1 is a superb camera, works with all Nikon lenses. It costs about $5000, as I recall. Canon has announced the D30 which is supposed to be cheaper (around $3500) and, unlike the D1, has a full 35mm-size imager.
I think plenty of people are having good luck with them, but from my experience, they are very unreliable. I bought one when it first came out ('95?), my father bought a couple too. Many disks from then are no longer readable.
I believe that is what he means. A digital camera body for an SLR camera.
Take it from someone who’s been in IT for years. Syquest, Iomega and the other makers of these personal data storage solutions for consumers sell crap.
Best solution: CD-R, CD-RW, if you’ve got TONS of stuff to back up, use a DVD-RAM.
I think you might also be able to trust the Iomega Jaz drives and media, but I have no experience with them.
I would disagree that it’s guess work. When you’re setting up lights and the such, there may be a small amound of guessing, but when you’re taking photos outside a studio, if you have a decent lightmeter and experience, there is very, very little guessing involved.
Negative film is much more tolerant to over- and underexposure than digital. Shooting digital is very much like shooting slides. You either got it right, or you didn’t. However, with newer software coming out, you can rescue underexposed digital pictures fairly well.
The thing is, negative film gives you a lee-way of about 2 to 3 stops overexposure, and about 1 1/2 stops (maybe even 2) underexposure. So you gotta screw up royally to get a neg that is not salvagable. Don’t trust what you get back from K-Mart, Wal-Mart or whatever your local photo printer is. Chances are they haven’t tried their best. I would never in my life trust my photos to these people, cuz overall they suck.
Digital cameras behave more like slide film. With slide you get about 1/3 - 1/2 of a stop leeway, if that much. You gotta be pretty spot-on to get the photo perfectly exposed.
That said, digital cameras also give you the luxury of previewing your image on the LCD screen on the back. The Nikon D1 and Canon D3 all do this. These cameras also accept the standard array of Nikon and Canon lenses. They’re wonderful. So if you have a Nikon system or Canon EOS-era system (Canon changed their mounts several times in their history, so you can’t use 60s glass on an EOS-3, whereas you can use an old Nikon lense from the 60s on a D1) you simply buy a new body and you’re on your way.
The digital backs are nice as well, but they’re terribly bulky. I’ve used the Kodak ones, and they work quite well, but the extra weight and space really is a pain in the ass.
The other thing one should know about digital cameras is that your lenses’s focal length multiplies by a factor of 1.5 in the 35mm system terms. What this means is that your 50 mm lens, although still technically 50mm, acts like a 75 mm lens on a 35mm film camera. And hence, a 200mm becomes a 300mm, etc. Your wides will also become less wide. So a 24 is now a 36, and you need a 17mm lens to act like a 24mm.
Hope this is not too confusing. But there is also no loss of light, so your 200/f2.8 is not a 300/f2.8 Great if you’re shooting lots of sports!
), but then I realized that all the fun would be taken out of it if I had instant gratification as far as getting pictures back goes. I get my pictures back on Friday afternoon, and it’s one of the best feelings in the world to curl up in an armchair with 10 new packets of photos, all glossy and stacked neatly. Nothing digital can ever replace that.