On 2008-11-17, Christopher Tidy wrote:
DoN. Nichols wrote:
[ ... ]
Hmm ... my Nikon D70 is probably around 5 years now, and it is
still working fine. And -- it uses lenses from the earlier film Nikon
cameras.
In my mind the 5 year figure was referring to compact digital cameras,
as opposed to digital SLRs. With a good digital SLR you may do better.
But any digital camera suffers from the problem that it is usually
impossible to repair and refurbish faulty parts, so when the supply of
spare parts dries up, you can no longer fix the camera.
With a DSLR, by the time that point is reached, you will also be
very tempted to move to a newer one -- higher resolution, more features,
etc -- and keep your glass (lenses) and other accessories. When the
quality stabilizes at some physically-imposed limit (quantum mechanics
and such), you will probably find that the repair parts will remain
available for much longer.
And the
repairman's task is not helped by the fact that a digital camera is so
complex that a single person cannot be familiar with the detail of how
each part functions.
Granted -- but typically repairs are like those with computers
these days -- not component replacement, but sub-assembly replacement,
so as long as the ability to trace the problem down to a given
sub-assembly is present, the ability to repair will remain within the
capabilities of a single repairman.
It's a personal thing. I like the idea that I've got a camera that I can
always get fixed.
Perhaps -- though the number of people capable of working on
them is slowly reducing.
I know of two good repairers at present, and they weren't too difficult
to find. But I think it's easier to find repairers who specialise in the
higher quality film cameras.
O.K. Of course, certain parts are no longer available for my
Nikon F cameras and it's lenses.
Also, I find that because film isn't free, the quality
of the pictures I get is actually better.
Note that film is becoming less available and more expensive as
time goes on -- along with photographic paper. The reason is the silver
in the emulsion plus the reduction in the number of users over time.
Personally, I pay less for film today than I did 5 years ago, and the
film itself is better. Online shopping means that I can get better deals
on film than I could in the past. But I don't use the most unusual types
of film, and I have heard that some of those are being discontinued.
And the number of typed discontinued will increase as the number
of users decreases.
I get the film scanned by the laboratory, as the results are far better
than I could get scanning at home. Today's scanners are far superior to
the scanners of just a few years ago. Here's an example of a picture I
was particularly pleased with:
http://www.mythic-beasts.com/~cdt22/north_bridge.jpg
That's Edinburgh, Scotland.
A very nice shot -- and the scanning is at a level which makes
the grain typically a bit larger than the pixels -- though JPEG
artifacts do show up in places like the illuminated windows, and there they
are larger than the grain.
I've got an old Nikon LS-3500 scanner (35mm only, and very slow
and hot -- the reason that the later versions were called "coolscan"),
but it produces .BMP or .TIF images of about 71 MB (no compression of
course). On that, the grain of Ektrachrome 64 was much larger than the
pixels (and of course there were no JPEG artifacts in those formats,
since they don't use the lossy compression that JPEG uses.
Even back in my film days I probably shot a lot more exposures
in a given day than you do. (Typically three 36-exposure rolls between
two cameras in a given weekend day.)
It depends on whether you mean a typical day or a very productive day.
Once or twice I've been known to shoot 5 rolls in a day. But on average,
three rolls per month is more typical.
O.K. The 3 rolls per day was typical of when I was with
friends. When I was at home alone (pre marriage) I would only typically
take a few experiments with extension tubes and such. :-)
Enjoy,
DoN.
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