Digital Camera Savings?

Cheaper Shots?

My husband and I are looking at buying a digital camera. I have heard that this can actually save money, but cannot find the proof or figure it out myself. We have a baby on the way and I know we spent a ton of money the first time on film and developing, especially when you have to get extra copies to send to relatives. I scrapbook and do want "hard copies" as well, but I also often am left with 5-6 pictures per roll that are not good enough to "archive" or give away and these of course are a waste of film and development that I could do away with by going digital.

Anyway, does anyone have experience in this and can tell me if the saving in development of only the pictures I want and the ability to send others by e-mail actually does offset the cost of the camera and the special paper needed to print out the pictures? Thanks for any insight!
Lori

Favorable Reviews

Having a digital camera has saved my family money over the last couple of years. My parents let us borrow his digital camera when my first son was born 3 years ago. They lived in another state and wanted to experience as much as possible the growth of their grandson. I took pictures of my son every day and emailed them daily to my parents and occasionally to other family members and friends. This saved me a lot of development and postage fees. I also have a near daily record of my son's first year or so.

We purchased our own digital camera right before Christmas last year in order to take my boys' Christmas pictures to send to family and friends. The only problem was that we didn't have a suitable printer to print the pictures, so I had to take a disk with the picture to our local drugstore which had a machine that you could print pictures from disk or from reprints. But that proved to be about as expensive as regular photo development. But the advantage was that I could zoom in and adjust the photo to be just what I wanted before printing.

This past year, we purchased a photo quality inkjet printer to print our photos on. This has been a blessing. I can print out pictures whenever I want to and discard the pictures that aren't worth anything. I also have a scrapbook software and can do scrapbooking right on the computer and print out entire designed pages including the pictures and the quality is really good. I highly recommend one.
Amy

A Happy Digital User

I have one of the least expensive digital cameras made, a HP C200 that cost me about $200 over a year ago. They may be less now. It is basically a point and shoot camera that takes very good photos. It has one mega-pixel, which I feel is good enough for most stuff. I have taken thousands of photos with it. I have the ones that turned out good archived on a CD. You need a CD burner for this. Any time I want to print one or more I can do it but mostly just send them to relatives (via email) who don't live nearby.

You can buy all different grades of photo paper but I usually buy Kodak Picture Paper which costs $9.99 for 50 (8" x 10") sheets. So far I have used just one package and am starting on my second one. If you want to spend more you can get better grades of paper but so far I haven't felt the need for that. You can print three or four photos on each page.

Another thing I like about the digital camera is that you can make a video of the photos (before you delete them from the camera) so you can view them later on like a slide show. I keep one tape and, after I edit the photos in the camera (while it is hooked to the TV), I just start the slide show on the camera and record the photos. After that I take the camera to the computer and download the photos there.

If you don't get the fancy stuff on a digital camera they can be very inexpensive and save you lots of money. I did buy an AC adapter and Radio Shack has one for digital cameras which cost about $12. You really need this. I also bought Nickel Metal Hydride batteries and a charger. You should get at least 1450 mAh or better. I paid about $35 for both the batteries and charger. I also have a second set of batteries but can't remember what they cost but I think somewhere in the teens. These cost more than normal rechargeable batteries and may have to be bought at a photography store but they last lots longer and I am not sure if you can use just any rechargeable batteries in the camera. I seldom use the photo LCD on the rear of the camera because it eats battery life. I just wait till I see them on TV to delete the ones I don't want.
Anita

A Great Option

My son suggested we use the service provided at OFOTO www.ofoto.com. He uses it to save the expense of setting up a new printer with quality paper, etc. He simply uploads his photos to the website into a secure album and then selects which prints he wants for a reasonable charge. He emails a link to his album to all the family so we can view the photos online. We can also purchase our own prints or send a set as a gift to someone. It has been a great way to keep in touch across the continent, especially since the arrival of our granddaughter.

I use a traditional camera and had the same situation with paying to print photos that weren't "good enough" and spending lots of money for additional prints and time waiting for the processing. Now I mail my film to OFOTO for processing and get an e-mail notice when the roll is online for me to see (usually a matter of a couple of days). I buy the prints I want and save a lot of money. They also send me a full set of negatives for my file.

There are other services online, I'm sure, but we've all been quite impressed with this one. And you get some freebies along the way!
Barbara

From a Photo Lab Owner

Well Lori, you're in luck. I've owned a photo-processing business (a mini-lab servicing primarily professional, commercial and serious amateur photographers) for almost 15 years and I have done the research into digital photography's true cost. We sell both conventional and digital cameras and print both conventional and digital images. I too was curious about how the costs compared for the frugal photo shooter, so I looked long and hard at the costs and here is what I found.

According to our various industry trade journals, the average consumer in the U.S. now shoots only about eleven 24-exp. rolls of film per year, roughly one per month, with more serious shooters going as much as 50 rolls of film per year and many other folks down in the range of 3-5 rolls per year. There are, of course, times when you may shoot many more pictures for short periods of time: the arrival of a new baby, a wedding or a once-in-lifetime vacation are typical events that cause spikes in typical film usage, but otherwise I think that roughly one roll per month is fairly typical.

What is the cost of taking a picture? Well, that depends a lot on what you expect. You can take what we call in the industry "junk photos" very inexpensively. You can often find budget film in the $1-2 prince range for a 35mm 24-exp.200 speed print film. El cheapo (mass production or unskilled typical X-mart or drug store) processing can often be found for as little a $3-4 per roll.

Then you've got batteries too. So roughly speaking, if you paid $4 for your film and processing, your pictures are costing you about 16.6 cents each and by the time you factor in your cost of batteries, each shot is probably costing about 20-22 cents per shot. We'll be conservative and say a quarter each. ($66/yr. for the 11 rolls average)

If you want the kind of custom-quality photo processing we do (each photo individually color and density corrected), you probably should buy good film too. So let's say $3-4 for your 200/24 film. Your processing will set you back about $9-12 per roll. If you paid $12 for your film and processing and add in the batteries you're probably around 55 cents per print or a little over double the cost of the el cheapo service. ($140/yr. for the 11 roll average)

However, as you noted there are frequently a few photos that don't come out on each roll? You should be aware that custom-processing does make a difference in how your pictures come out both in general quality and from the perspective of perhaps saving some of those less-than-ideal images that will be unusable from a budget processor, so the actual cost per useable image is likely closer to 53 cents per print for custom quality processing.

So how does digital stack up? Well, first you should be aware that if you already have a working conventional camera the likelihood of you ever recovering the cost of buying the digital camera in potential savings is almost nil, assuming you want hard copy of your images.

Let's assume you'll be happy with an inexpensive, non-zoom digital (digital zoom is not a real zoom and doesn't count). Your initial investment will be approximately $200. First, be sure you get rechargeable batteries because most digital cameras will use 10-20 cents per image worth of conventional batteries (if you store the image or not). Only budget-quality picture takers should ever expect to be at all happy with this kind of digital camera's quality. Here is the big problem, buying the camera alone costs you as much a three years worth of conventional pictures. This doesn't even begin to consider the money you'll pay for photo printing paper and ink cartridges, which at typical prices is at least the same as the cost of having your pictures budget processed.

If you are serious about the quality of your pictures you'll need to spend at least $400-800, so the proportions of the equation doesn't change much. To compare picture quality in real terms you should understand that a 200 speed 35mm film frame has about 70 mega-pixels of information. A typical digital camera on the market today usually has about 2-4 mega-pixels, enough to make good 4x6's, but enlargements will be not be close to the quality from 35mm.

In addition to the quality difference for enlargements, getting a large digital print is typically significantly more expensive than a conventional enlargement. Print longevity is also a very significant concern for digital prints made with conventional inkjet printers. Today's conventional print and enlargement papers will last 30-80 years without fading significantly, because they use dye, not ink. Digital inkjet prints made on regular paper fade significantly in only a few months and those on photo paper will fade significantly in a year or two with most printers and may last up to ten years with special inks and papers now becoming available. There are dye-sub printers available for digital printing that have good longevity, but these printers cost $300 (4x6 only) to $900 (up to 8x10) and require special materials which are not inexpensive.

Storage is another concern. You can throw a strip of negatives in a shoebox for a hundred years and come back and print a good image from them. Digital images, because they require technology to store and reproduce, are far more problematic. Be aware too that once you jump to digital you'll be forever on the upgrade bandwagon. Gone out and gotten any new 8-track tapes lately? The images you burn onto a CD today may as well be on an 8-track tape if you miss one jump in technology somewhere up the line. Do you back up your hard drive? If not, you too could learn the hard lesson one local mother of a one-year-old learned when their hard drive crash took the entire first year of photos of their child's life to digital oblivion with it.

Finally, what everyone seems to forget is that a significant proportion of what you're paying for when you have prints processed is labor. If you enjoy coming home and reading a good book, spending time with your family or doing anything other than printing pictures, a digital camera may not be for you. Printing twenty photo-quality images will take at least an hour and more likely two by the time you get done throwing away prints that don't print out right. That's right, despite what the printer manufacturers would like you to think, often you'll print an image more than once to get it the way you want it.

As you can see there are many potential problems and costs that are not being addressed by those hyping this new technology to the typical photo shooter. Here is what I recommend. Digital photography can be very inexpensive for those who never or only rarely need hard copy of their images, if this is you, go for it.

If you want both prints and the ability to email or digitally manipulate your photos and quality and longevity are important to you then save a bundle and buy a flatbed scanner. They are very inexpensive now (often well under $100) and will generally give the same quality output scanning from a conventional photo print that is produced by a $1,000 digital camera. This path really offers the best of both worlds. In two or three more years digital photography will be a more mature and settled technology by which time hopefully some of these problems will have been addressed. In the meantime the old technology rule-of-thumb applies, the early-adopters will pay far more and get far less for their money than those who are patient . Doesn't sound like a good fit for the frugal shooter to me.
Thom

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