I have to admit that I am mostly digital now, and use some rather inexpensive digital cameras.
I used to argue and worry about the number of pixels, the quality you get from various combinations of equipment, but the bottom line is, since I don't do any commercial work, and the largest prints I make are 8X10 (for the family) there is virtually no reason for me to go to the expensive systems being discussed on this list.
I first bought an early (and sort of low-range) Olympus but it was really not so good so I gave it away.
I then bought my wife a nice little Panasonic DMC-FX9 but found she didn't care to use it so it became my every-day camera.
More recently a friend gave me a pocket Olympus, which has a few more features than the Panasonic and I use it because it has a slightly greater zoom range and I just happened to have a reasonably large collection of storage cards for it. (Remember when you worried about getting everything you could from a 12 shot roll? Now I never think about film and can snap away at will with as much as 400 frames available on one card.)
For "Really Serious" work I have an Olympus E-500 SLR with two zoom lenses and it indeed more than meets my needs. It cost around $500 at Costco in San Diego, an impulse buy, but now better versions sell for about half that price. The major part of the cost for that system is their lens costs. They seem to still be high, and the add-on flash units cost about as much as the camera system.
My scanner, the only one I have had, is a Canoscan D1230U, bought on sale at Fry's. It came with the capability to scan flat pieces, as well as negatives and transparencies of various sizes. I have build adapters for additional film sizes and which move the film closer to the scanning plane. Works just fine for me.
My printer was bought, first of all, because it can print on the backs of CD's and DVD's which have paper labels on them or which come as printable blanks. Epson Stylus Photo R200, (bought on sale at Fry's) for a couple hundred bucks.
It works just fine as a photo printer on glossy paper and I really don't notice the difference between prints made with that printer and the prints I get from negative stock processed by Kodak (they say) at the CostCo stores. I only had the processing done at Costco (Store processing or Kodak send-out processing) to save the time it takes to get a fully scanned roll on a CD.
Now I can get film processing, if I want to stay with 35mm, at a local Wal Mart outlet, just a mile from here and get processing, prints, and a good quality digital photo CD, all while I shop. (We had two Wal Mart stores in San Diego, 27 here I think)
Software, of course now it comes with just about all cameras, scanners, printers, etc. For quick transformations to email size I use free IrfanView but also still use PhotoShop elements 2, which doesn't need upgrading for my needs.
The only digital shots which really suck are those made with my cell phone camera (came with it, I didn't want it, I wanted computer editing of the phone numbers and thus had to get a phone with the camera and I have actually had some uses for it).
That all said, I have a couple of questions and a comment-1. What ever happened to all the technical articles from Olympus about their added rear lens element that was supposed to cause the light to hit the sensor at a 90 degree angle?
2. What happened to the Bayer(?) pattern sensor that was in the news so much a couple of years ago?
As a comment, I can say that there are some things PhotoShop can do that could never be done with chemistry. I have a fairly large collection of transparencies shot during a year in The Netherlands (1963) and about half are on Agfachrome 64 [overnight mail processing in Germany, believe it or not] and the other half on Ektachrome 64. The Ektachrome slides are mostly faded to pink, and I have been scanning them and tuning them up a bit. As a trial I sent two very bad pink scans* to Todd Belcher on this list, who is a PhotoShop expert, and he not only restored them, but put the grass and blue sky back in, using the editing tools in PhotoShop. I seriously doubt that what he did could be done with a chemical process. I think some of these slides were on the old Rollei site, but it seems to have gone away.
Conclusion: Total cost for going digital, for the common man, meaning me, about $400. That's the cost for one acceptable camera and PhotoShop elements 2. Add $200 for the scanner, which isn't really necessary if you use a digital camera. When I learn what a "layer" is, I may upgrade to a later version of Photo Shop.
Well, you might want to add $260 for my new external 1Tb Western Digital back up drive, which serves as backup for this box and via RF Link, two other computers elsewhere in the house. (Using Microsoft Live OneCare, which maintains all three computers, keeps them up to date, tunes them up, and backs them up, includes firewall protection, does virus and worm blocking and scanning, all hands free.)
Yes, I still have my 3.5F and Rolleimarin, but since moving back to OKC I don't think I will be doing much diving so these will be here for rainy days and tornados, where they will be useful. I also still have several 35mm cameras, including a waterproof Nikon Action Touch, once we find everything, which hasn't happened yet (been here since October 2007, still unpacking).
*If anyone wants to see the "pure pink" transparencies and the restored images done by Todd, let me know off-list and I'll send them along. I can guarantee you that you just can't see any color than pink in the originals as they existed at the time I scanned them.
Don Williams Oklahoma City, OK 73160-0703
