[rollei_list] Re: Decline of Rollieflex/Film
- From: "Richard Knoppow" <dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:34:14 -0700
----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Dernie" <Frank.Dernie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2010 2:09 AM
Subject: [rollei_list] Re: Decline of Rollieflex/Film
Marc,
you are about 10 years out of date in your "knowledge" as
far as this list is concerned, and, as you have explained in
other posts, infinitely out of date with your experience ;-)
Frank
Whatever criticisms of digital photography one can come
up with are likely not to be true in five years. This
includes cost. One can get a very competent computer now for
under $500 US and a very powerful one for a couple of
thousand. Memory, both mass storage and RAM has become
cheap. I can buy a 1 _terabite_ disc at the local computer
store for about $75 US and two or three Tb are available for
not a lot more. The first storage device I ever saw that had
one Tb was a juke-box using digital cassettes made by Ampex,
it was a very large machine and did not have continuous
storage, just a lot of tape cassettes. I don't remember what
it cost, a couple of million dollars I think. Now, I have
one one sitting next to my couputer about the size of a
small book.
As far as image editing software goes, the industry
standard is still Photoshop but one can get Gimp for nothing
and it is quite competent. There are also cheap desktop
publishing programs of all sorts. Printers have also gotten
cheap although large ones are still costly. They have you
with ink: this is what Kodak did with film, sell the cameras
cheap and make the bucks on the film. Paper, OTOH is very
competitive so there is very good paper available cheaply.
I think film still has an advantage where very long
life is required but that is likely to change also. However,
much professional work is evanescent, once its published it
has no value. Record photos are a different matter but some
current storage media is pretty long lived. CDs and DVDs for
instance, can store the data in mechanical form (pits in the
CD) and the reflective coating can be renewed if necessary.
Both plastics and coatings with very long life are known. I
am sure when the folks from outer space get here in a couple
of million years they will find all sort of food containers
floating around.
I happen to like darkroom work and have spent much of
my life learning how to do it fairly well. However, if I
undertook anything for publication, say a technical article
requiring illustration, I would do it digitally: fast and
one can be sure of what one has quickly.
The problem with digital is that there is no romance or
glamour in it whatsoever.
BTW, while I am far from being an expert in anything
digital I do work here for a major television network in the
engineering department and virtually everything in the plant
is either a computer outright or a computer pretending to be
something else (like a production switcher). Sometimes it
become confused, as who wouldn't with so many soft keys, so
a big part of my job is knowing how to reset stuff.
Computers are only as smart as the humans who program them.
--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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