Digital Issues
I'm wondering more about trade-offs than advantages. There's some real losses with digital. For instance, CD-R media is showing itself non-durable, with some media only retaining data for a couple of years. Indexing systems are sparce, mostly inadequate. (I'm going to purchase a laptop this next month and create one -- a professional one. Finally. Period. $5,000. It's been designed but just not built & tested yet.) Few have reliable tape or CD-R backups installed. CD-R backup s/w for Win is about $50 & media is dirt cheap. Do it at least monthly. Weekly is better. DLT tapes don't cost that much and are practial as well. In that light I've designed an imaging system that accomplishes more than you could imagine. It's 24x36mm, holds 60 million pixels of information with unlimited color and gray-scale levels, the media lasts 50 to 150 years, take no hard drive space, are thinner than a potato chip, cost about 10 cents per image capture, and is retrieved by simple optical scan. 2 1/4" & larger cost more per image capture but all are handled in the same manner. Should have saved this for April 1. CRB
Re: Digital issues
>i have a minor problem once every 6 or 8 months. the printer is always turned off when not in use for more than about 15 minutes. this caps the heads and preserves the ink. i also print at least once a week because that is how often i have a batch of photos to print. i have concluded that i wore out my Epson 1270 printer by printing so much that the carriage friction wore irregularities into the rail and caused mistracking of the head. >Herb That's useful to know, thanks! Just turned off printer -- it was turning on every time I booted. Marnie aka Doe
Re: Digital issues
> Not really. You can get decent results from a dedicated film scanner > at around half the price of a *ist-D/D100/10D (or something quite close > to the price of a 300D), but the cheaper units are usually just flatbed > scanners with transparency adapters, which don't work as well. > You might consider the Minolta Scan Dual III for under $300 new. Check the reviews on this scanner and I think you'll find it is rated quite highly. No, it's not a perfect solution, but does offer the digital world to many of us at an affordable price. Since I own this scanner I am finding it quite hard to justify a DSLR at this point, since a good share of my motivation is controlled by my Wallet! Dave
Re: Digital issues
> > My (presently) biggest gripe with digital imaging is the cost. For a > process that is not significantly better, except in immediacy of > results, I am expected to pay a very significant premium? No, thank > you. I can do almost the same thing by buying a film scanner for about > 1/5th of the price. Not really. You can get decent results from a dedicated film scanner at around half the price of a *ist-D/D100/10D (or something quite close to the price of a 300D), but the cheaper units are usually just flatbed scanners with transparency adapters, which don't work as well. Then, of course, there's the sheer tedium of doing the scanning. You can get film scanners with bulk feed magazines, of course, but those cost about as much as a DSLR. By the time you've scanned a couple of hundred frames you'll welcome anything to relieve you of this task. Next problem; dust. Unless you live in a semiconductor manufacturing plant, there's going to be dust on your slides. Cleaning up dust spots is yet another tedious chore. You can get semi-automated software and hardware to help with this task, but this too is not without drawbacks. And, finally, cost. I'm sure that many of the DSLR purchasers here shoot enough that using the *ist-D will end up being cheaper than the cost of film and processing over the next couple of years. If you only shoot one roll a month, and if you are prepared to let WalMart or CostCo scratch your negatives, then a DSLR isn't cost effective. Shoot an average of more than a roll a week, though, using slide film, and take the film to a local pro or semi-pro lab, and the costs mount.
Re: Digital issues
On Sat, 25 Oct 2003, mike wilson wrote: > My (presently) biggest gripe with digital imaging is the cost. For a > process that is not significantly better, except in immediacy of > results, I am expected to pay a very significant premium? No, thank > you. I can do almost the same thing by buying a film scanner for about > 1/5th of the price. I moved away from film scanning a few years ago after getting sick one last time of dealing with dust on the slides. I really did like shooting slides and viewing them, but scanning them with anything less than a $1000 scanner just wasn't producing decent results. I don't know if prices for good scanners have come down and maybe that has changed. I was using a Nikon LS1000. I think my photography has improved as a result of using digital for a few years because I can preview right away and tweak the image by taking it again in a slightly different manner. The knowledge that I've picked up from this would probably carry over to film too. The only film that I expect I would shoot anymore is if my *ist D died on a trip, or if I was going somewhere that required I carried the smallest camera possible and then I would take my Ricoh GR-1. alex
Re: Digital issues
> The Epson C80 and other printers makes nice prints from 4 or 6 color inks, > due to the small nozzle sizes. The problem is the cleaning cycles. We have > central air heat, which drys things out, and at the moment the printer cannot > spray a single drip of ink. My own fault; I should have printed a test block > of colors once per week just to keep the ink flowing. The same thing > happened with the color on the HP printer, but at least you can get a new > print head when you get more ink. Too bad HP's older inks turn colors. I've had fairly good luck cleaning my Epson heads with a high grade of isopropyl alcohol. I simply pull out the print cartridges and take a cue tip loaded with alcohol and place a drop in the opening of each print head. I then take a clean dry one and soak up the excess. Replace the cartridges and run a couple of cleaning cycles. So far so good with this procedure. Whether or not there are any negative consequences to this I don't know yet. But what else to do? David
