This is reminiscent of a recent thread in which a person asked why it took so long for the internet to gain wide acceptance when, in fact, the technological and social progress had been incredibly fast.
Ten years ago, you couldn’t even get a digital camera (at least, not one of any real quality), unless you were prepared to drop incredible bucks. Now you can get them pretty casually for the same price as a high-end film camera. That sounds like pretty incredible progress to me in quality and pricing. The speed of improvement and acceptance is at least comparable to that of cellphones.
What may make it seem like prices aren’t dropping is that $400-$500 (or so) is being set as the “comfort level” for a fancy-schmancy top-of-the-line model. The $500 camera today, though, is an immense technical improvement over the $500 camera of 1997.
I’m sure it can. But it’s far more convenient for me to just plug a memory stick into my computer and have all my photos available to me instantly. I rarely make - or want - physical copies of the photos I take… and on the rare occasions that I do, a 3.3 megapixel camera happens to make quite decent 8x10s.
No advantage to digital? How bout automatic white-balancing? If you ever have to deal with flourescent, tungsten and mixed-lighting (e.g. tungsten-daylight) on a regular basis, you know how annoying it can be to get natural colors, especially if you don’t have a colormeter handy. The better digitals are especially amazing at providing natural results in fluorescent lighting, and I dare say digitals have much nicer contrast and produce punchier pictures in low-light situations.
How 'bout, if you use external lights, the digital equivalent of having a Polaroid back on the back of camera at all times?
With fractal imaging software, you can produce some pretty damn amazing enlargements. Last year I saw a print of a file on a Nikon D1X (5.47 megapixels) blown up to, oh, about three feet by two and, from a professional standpoint, it looked bloody amazing. Not film quality of course, but beyond simply “acceptable.”
andyrose - A lot of pros do still use film, but it depends on the industry. Photojournalism has gone pretty much 100% digital. It’s almost impossible to compete without a digital. Too slow. Too much hassle.
Just yesterday I was watching an interview with a professional photographer who has switched to mainly digital photography. He said used to shoot over 1,000 rolls of film a year and it would cost about $20 per roll for the film and developing and he would only get a few good shots from each roll. Now he shoots only a few 100 rolls per year. He’s saving tens of thousands of dollars a year. So that $4,000 for a digital pro camera is cheap.
I agree with you there. I don’t ever make 8x10 photos, so that isn’t really an issue for me. I just print out 4x6 photos, and they turn out lovely. My boyfriend has a 5mp camera, so if I ever wanted to make 8x10s I can just use his.
You are just not going to use a digital camera to shoot a picture that will be enlarged to poster size. You also don’t need to wait a week to see the pictures here, it takes an hour for the film to be developed. If you want a more professional job (say with slides) it’ll be a day.
BTW, have you seen how a professional photographer taking pictures?
Cardinal, the Sigma SD9 uses a Foveon X3 sensor and is already available here in Japan. I looks like it’s not available in the US yet, but Amazon has it listed for $1710 which is close to the street price in Japan.
Here’s another advantage to digital cameras: My oldest daughter is interested in photography. If she uses her film-based Nikon 35mm to shoot a roll, the film has to be developed (and because she’s just learning, most of the shots aren’t very good) at a cost of about $4.00. By the time the pics come back, we can’t remember the exact circumstances under which she took the pics so that we can advise on what to change to fix the problem. With a digital, she can view the pics immediately, having a much better chance of figuring out exactly what she is doing right and wrong.
As to the OP, Wal-Mart, right now, is offering a 2mp digital WITH a color printer for $150.00!! You can’t tell me that isn’t a huge drop in price over the past 5years.
2 Mega Pixels is a pretty good match for 35mm film.
A $50 35mm camera will not take a high fraction of quality pictures, and is nearly a waste of time.
A good digital camera can take very good quality pictures. Also, in case you missed it, you can drop your digital pics on to a CD-R now and take that “for developing” to alot of labs today. You can do that at Wal-mart today and walk out with real prints that I promise you could not tell what type of camera took them.
This allows you to snap, snap, snap away. No film to buy, no film to develop, and you get see the results on a monitor right away. As you find images that are worth printing, burn to a disc, and get them printed.