(Untitled)
Today's CNN:
Nikon is going to stop making most film cameras
This is a scary thing. For those of you who don't know it, because I really don't update my journal with pics that often, I am a photographer. Its all on the side, and its nothing steady necessarily, but its there ( Read more... )
Nikon is going to stop making most film cameras
This is a scary thing. For those of you who don't know it, because I really don't update my journal with pics that often, I am a photographer. Its all on the side, and its nothing steady necessarily, but its there ( Read more... )
Canon, Pentax, and Konica-Minolta will probably take similar measures in the not-so-distant future.
Can't say that I blame them -- around 90% of all SLRs sold these days are digital SLRs.
I've still got film cameras and I love them, but my biggest complaint is that good quality processing is getting harder to find and more expensive. The little mom & pop photo labs that always did an amazing job are having to either kill their lab services or close all together, and big labs like Kodak/Qualex that used to be "pretty good" now suck ass (scratched negatives/slides, prints that look awful, etc.).
Let's say you shoot two rolls of film a month (a pretty conservative amount). Let's say they cost $3 per roll, and $10 for processing and 4x6 proofs. That's about $300 a year. If you shoot four rolls a month, it's over $600 a year.
Needless to say, even though $700 may seem like a shitload of cash to spend just on a camera body, you will recoup a LOT of that because you won't be spending money on film and processing; you'll only have to pay for the shots you want to print. (I get my regular everyday digital shots printed at Winkflash [http://www.winkflash.com/] -- they do an outstanding job and 4x6 prints are 12 cents each. If I'm doing work that I plan on selling, I use Mpix [http://www.mpix.com/] which is a bit more expensive but offers several choices of professional papers, and they have a nice copyright notice watermark on the back.)
So... even if your $700 camera is obsolete five years from now (which I don't think it would be), you're still ahead of the game because you would have spent anywhere from $1500 to $3000 over that period of five years to buy film and have it processed.
It IS scary, but times change and we must move forward. It's OK to be cautious and to drag your feet for a while, though. : )
Reply
Leave a comment