Hi Bob, Your post was very interesting and I thought I would take some time and address the issues you raise...
><< http://www.luminous-landscape.com/parable.htm >> >If you read the above (1 page note) and Cotty's recent reference to a >luminous-landscape article (longer) comparing the Canon digital D60 to 35mm >and the images from the Pentax 645 & 67, you have to wonder... That parable didn't affect me one way or t'other. Horses for courses. It raised a grin which was about all. >The digital guys are convinced digital is gonna get us all. Cotty's >reference (sorry I don't have it any more) makes a case for 35mm film being >on the verge of replaced. The D60 does about the same on 8x10's. Hmm. I must pause here, because it would be only too easy to straightforward agree, or disagree with this. Like most folk, I think it's bound to happen, and it's just a question of when. >From my own personal viewpoint, it can't happen fast enough. Allow me to explain... In fact, I was only this morning spending yet another two hour chunk of my limited spare time trying in vain to get a Microtek 45t scanner going that I bought from a US eBayer ('as seen'). It sorta works...just. The scans are full of lines, so i took the thing to bits and found an inch of dust on the internal mirrors, sigh. Cleaned it up, but it makes little difference. The bulb is on the way out for sure. Not enough light to read by from the little fluorescent tube. Not to mention the 3 whole minutes it takes for the preview scan to start from the moment of hitting the preview button in Photoshop. Life is too short for this. Why am I doing this? Because I thought I'd caught the MF bug and bought a Bronica setup: body, couple a lenses and backs, a few bits. I spent about 500 UKP doing it, more like 900 in the shops, judging from Amateur Photog. ads... Why? Because of the quality! And how will I see this quality? Well, actually I won't. Why not? Because I'm wasting my time getting a pile of poor quality junk going so I can scan my 120 shots into an abysmally small file size, and then (just to add insult to injury) end up printing a few from an Epson inkjet printer. Somewhere along the line, I've completely lost the plot, big time. I better look at this in a bit more detail to try and understand what my needs are, and what will best satisfy them. 1/ I like quality, everyone likes quality. I'd love to be able to wet print a humungous colour print of a shot taken on MF that was stopped right down to pinprick and exposed long enough to put a blur on growing plants in a dead calm. Unfortunately, I do not have a darkroom. Worse, I have no ambitions to build one, or even go into one anytime soon. I spent my student years in one and I'm damned if I'm going back in there (unless I could get up to what I did when I was a student, of course :-) 2/ Ok, I like quality, but don't like darkrooms. That can only mean one of two things: rely on shop processing and / or printing, or digital. Can I cope with shop prints? Sure. The accumulative cost would perhaps soon surpass the cost of building a darkroom, but we simply don't have the space. My problem with shop stuff is time, and control. I want it fast, and I want it my way. 3/ Ok, looks like I'm going to have to compromise. If I want speed and control, I will have to trade off quality...or will I ? Let me look at exactly what sort of quality I want. Hmm, what sort of pics do I do, and what do I do with them? Aside from very few exceptions, I am a complete amateur when it comes to stills. I do not make a penny from it, and I am completely happy with that. My day job pays well enough, and stills photography makes a sedate and welcome change from the hectic chaos of shooting tv news footage. Simply put: I shoot my stills for my own pleasure, and the pleasure of others. I'm always making prints of gatherings, events, cub scouts, local families, you name it. If I shoot monochrome, I can process it, scan it and print it within a day or two. If colour, an extra day or two added. Inkjet prints are fine for me - the Epson Stylus Photo EX (A3 max) was a great printer in its day. It still does fine prints, especially in colour, especially tweaked for optimum output. They could be better, but not by much. The trouble with shooting, processing, scanning, optimising, printing, is that it seems to me that there's a couple too many steps in that there flow. Seems like I might be getting a bit tired of spotting out in Photoshop. Every time I sit through another session cleaning up some scans, it makes me wonder why I'm doing all this when I could be just plugging a camera into the Mac and simply pumping out some winners with minimal manipulation. Aha! It's the quality, or so I am told. Film is better, film is great. And so it is, but better for who? I have slowly reached a decision that it is not better for me. And now I've gone and plunged into the MF world again, and now I'm questioning my motives. If all I'm gonna do is slap some A4s and A3s (10X8s and 16X12s for you wet-types) up on the wall, and fill a few portfolios for drunken guests to oggle, well, why in Hell did I buy a Bronica??? Sure, I've processed some cracking negs on Pan F recently, but unless I go into a darkroom and print them up nice and big, I'm surely wasting my time? The older I get, the more I have noticed the 'future shock' syndrome: time goes faster the older you get. I'm only 42, and it's breezing past at an alarming rate, so God only knows what it's going to be like in 10 years, let alone 20. Without doubt, the one thing I value above all else right now is time. It is very precious indeed, and to choose to spend it sat with my but in front of a screen cleaning up endless scans is not making me Mr Happy Turnip. I've decided that I'll be buying into digital before the year's end. I hope it's a Pentax DSLR, but I sadly don't think it will be. Oh, I think one will be announced, maybe even at Photokina. IMO, it's got to be *at least* as good as a Canon D60, for a similar price. I'll accept less spec, but only at a huge saving on cost, which won't happen. I've seen the Canon output. It is marvellous. Please, oh please: Pentax, give me a D60 with a Pentax badge on it, make it look like the sexy MZ-S, and let me put my Pentax and K mount glass on it. Then I'll most definitely be Mr. Happy Turnip. If not, I'll be offering some gear to the list in the autumn. I won't be buying much Canon glass though: too expensive. D60 with some Tokina bottles. We shall see. >So where are we? Some of us crave the latest and greatest digital >technology. These folks will be the early adopters and push the tech >development. Others of us are hobbyist or maybe semi-pros (part time pros?) >on a budget. They will continue to be content with 35mm film and pictures >from it as a cheap, convenient way to get images. They might even be happy >with old screwmount lenses. <g> Completely agree. >My point? I feel that digital is a consumer consumption targeted, >manufacturer driven strategy to sell something that has very little or NO >cost-benefits yet for most of us. I don't begrudge the manufacturers this >effort to sell me something, but I'm gonna let somebody else fund their >developments. We are all watching the train coming, but it ain't here yet. >Plus once it gets here, that new diesel passenger train ain't gonna be much >better than that old steam locomotive...which is whole other story. You may well be right. Problem is, when my heart and my head get together for a chinwag, there's only one winner, and I'm afraid there's no prizes for guessing who... >Cotty, just don't spend too much for a digital. Some day it will be on the >shelf right next to the Pentax ME-F. <g> Point taken. But what cost my backside slumped in a chair, the Wacom tablet riddled with holes as I run through yet another blob of dust! (Don't talk about ICE - if I could afford a decent scanner, it still wouldn't get past the printer. Links in a chain, eh?) _______________________________________________________ Personal email traffic to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MacAds traffic to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Check out the UK Macintosh ads http://www.macads.co.uk - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
