Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Digital is cheap compared to film

Not including various digicams, these are the digital cameras I have owned since 2002 (camera: buy date buy price, sell date sell price):

Minolta D7i: 2002/5 $1000, 2004/4 $400
Canon 300D: 2003/10 $900, 2006/5 $400 (should have sold it earlier for more money, but KM 7D was a lemon so kept this one too)
KM 7D: 2005/2 $1500, 2006/9 $1500 (2 KM 7D bodies, 1st an unfixable lemon, KM replaced, 2nd also an unfixable lemon, Sony finally gave me full refund)
Canon 30D: 2006/9 $1180, 2008/7 $650
Sony A100: 2007/1 $640, not sold, maybe unsellable?
Sony A700: 2008/2 $1230, not sold, maybe unsellable?
Canon 60D: 2010/11 $930, 2012/7 $670
Panasonic G3: 2012/4
Olympus E-M5: 2012/5

Except for KM and Sony my experience is that digital cameras are very cheap compared to film cameras. I buy them, use them, and then sell them. All my photos are pretty much free. I recall that in 1993 on a trip I used 100 rolls of 36-exposure slide film and the film + processing + taxes was about $1500 ($2392 in 2012 dollars). Also, think about how big/heavy 100 rolls of film is compared to a couple of SD cards!

Keeping all these digital files safe requires some effort and somehow I have lost a couple of dozen photos that I have taken since 2000, but most I still have. After I die though they will probably all disappear. Or maybe much earlier if I don't keep up with transferring them to new media. Oh well.

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