This Space for Rent

Digital cameras vs the Railfan Photographer, Pt 3

The railfan magazine The Railroad Press is primarily a photographers magazine, and, as such, has a regular photography column. The fellow who writes this column is not fond of digital cameras, and has been explaining, in great detail (if not completely coherently), why digital cameras are crap compared to chemical cameras.

He's finally gotten around to actually test-driving a digital camera, and he doesn't like it. His reasons are good; he claims that the images coming off the camera have compression artifacts while the film cameras just don't (I've seen people claim that the Nikon NEF format is not exactly lossless, but I don't think he's saving his images as NEF because he mentions that the staff at the camera place told him that he needed to buy a program to convert NEF to something else, but, gosh, they just didn't have it in stock!) and, yes, it's true, if you store something as a jpeg you're going to get nasty compression artifacts. But the route he took to get to this point was, um, irregular and littered with roadblocks put up by greedy camera salesmen.

Did you know, for instance, that digital SLRs are incredibly fragile and break at the slightest bump? That's what the salesmen said when they were trying to sell him a $330 two-year service contract (I spent $120 for a 1 year service contract on my *istDS, but, despite carrying the camera around in my purse and occasionally dropping the lenses on the floor (oops!) have not gotten anything broken past getting the optics covered with soot from steam locomotives, and that brokenness I could fix by simply propping the mirror open and using an air squirter to blow the soot off the CCD. But I went in having already decided that I was going to get the *istDS + two lenses kit, plus whatever storage I wanted, and I only let myself get talked into spending the extra $120 because I was planning on buying a service contract in the first place.)

But, ignoring the greedy salesmen who tried (and succeeded) in flim-flamming this poor photographer into spending an additional $400, there are a few peculiar complaints he makes about digital cameras (and keeps making over and over);

First of all, he's really got an obsession about things, in that if you take a picture with a film camera you end up (after processing) with a slide that you can hold in your hand and keep other people from having unless they pay you for them. And he claims that you don't get that with a digital camera, which makes the resulting images worthless unless you can sell them right off the bat. Personally, I find it difficult to believe that people will only pay money for slides, because I don't have to go very far to see people making money selling prints of almost any subject you might want. And I'm sure if you really wanted to, you could find a developing shop that would cheerfully print your digital images onto slides, so you could have your things that you can hold on to and not let people have copies of unless they pay you for them.

Secondly, he first (reasonably) says "what happens if you're out for several days and you fill up your memory card. Why, you have to buy a computer or more memory cards!" Why, yes, this is true, and that pushes the initial cost of your first digital camera up a bit, but when he mentions elsewhere (when commenting on the startup cost for his experimental digital camera) that $1400 will buy him 127 rolls of Velvia 100 with processing, but he mentions elsewhere that if he shoots two (36 exposure) rolls of Velvia 100 a month it would take five years to catch up with the cost of the camera (when I got my *istDS, it took me about 8 months to run through about 6000 images; even assuming that half of those images are junk, I'm still looking at a film+lab cost of around $1000, compared to the $1200 I spent for camera+sd card+warranty). A single 1gb compact flash card should hold about 160 6.1mb images, or the equivalent of 4.5 rolls of Velvia. At two rolls a month, that means he's away from his lab for 2 months, or he's actually consuming film at a rate much much greater than 2 rolls a month? Once you're up to 4.5 rolls of Velvia on a trip, you're up to around $50 in film+lab (he mentions $11-12 for film plus lab, which is why I keep mentioning lab costs), which is almost the price for a 1gb compact flash card from some vendor who is not a photography shop. (The other alternative he mentions, which is to buy a laptop, is only useful if you're planning on doing some photo processing when you're out in the field because for the cost of even a dinky little laptop you can buy about 8gb -- space for 1300 images (the equivalent of 36 rolls of Velvia) -- in compact flash cards, and if you're not dying to clean up your pictures right there, it's pretty pointless.)

There's the usual round of snark about how nobody keeps a computer more than 5 years, which I just laugh grimly at; the current motherboards in Pell and Gehenna predate Russell (turns six next week!), and the system board in Pete is rapidly approaching the five year mark, even though the speed of code bloat in the desktop world is rapidly making the machine obsolete before its time.

But, to be fair, it's asking a lot to expect a non-computer person to know about this, when they're being constantly bombarded with Buy Something New! Buy Something New! from the computer and consumer electronics industries. Shoot, I can't even get programmers to report back the context for kernel panics when their machines belly up ("it died, and you have to fix it now!" "okay, what was the error message?" "I don't know. It just died." "Okay, let me go look at the console." "You can't; I rebooted the machine."), and they don't even have the excuse that they don't have any experience working with computers. But it would be nice if, before you write an article slagging on digital cameras, you spent some time getting a more accurate view of the costs of the media compared with the old fashioned chemical methods.