Originally posted by jigsaw
What's it called? It might be worth my looking in to. I agree on the cost savings. Since I've gotten back on the photo wagon, I can see where film processing would get quite pricey.
Current lenses are the Quantaray's that came with the N80 kit back in December 03. I was thinking they should work fine since it was still a Nikon body but, she was saying I'd need a new set "because it's a digital lense." I'm not real up on knowledge for high end digi stuff, so I wasn't sure. Thinking about trying to find a more experienced sales person to talk to next time I'm in there that I can get more info from. I knew about the 1.5 multiplier, but that's about where my knowledge ends on the difference.
The program that I use most is called MGI PhotoSuite 4. I’m not even sure where I got it; I think it may have come with my old HP camera that I bought in 2000. I’ve seen and tried out a number of programs that were free with cameras: (my Cannon, and at work an Olympus & a Sony) as well as a few others. The light freebie Photoshop program is comparable, but I have yet to use the full blown Adobe Photoshop. From what I’ve seen and read, Adobe Photoshop is as good as it gets (for regular consumers) but it’s also pretty spendy. Even though I haven’t seen one, I can’t imagine that there are not plenty of other photo editing programs that are every bit as good as MGI, and also cheap. Word of warning however, a lot of these programs have their own file management systems that do not have anything in common with Windows. I can’t imagine why in the world they would think that a Windows computer user would want to relearn new terminology and a new file locating concept, it’s really annoying. In one program it took me over 30 minutes to locate my flash reader and then another 10 to realize that you couldn’t select files with the mouse, you had to use the keyboard arrows. WTF were those programmers thinking?
The bottom line is: MGI is good and cheap.
Probably many others are also good and cheap.
There are some pretty poor programs out there as well.
Cost effectiveness:
I have a degree in photography. Even so, my wife and I would take about 4 months to shoot a roll of film. I just hated paying through the nose for film and processing. In 2000 we bought the cheapest 2 meg. camera that we could find (HP 315) and a decent printer (HP 932C). Since then, we take dozens of pictures every week, sometimes even dozens a day. It completely changes the way you think about taking pictures. Want a great picture of something? Take 100 shots and pick one. It’ll cost you 17 cents for the 8 ½ x 11 photo quality paper that you print the best shot on. Save that shot on your hard drive, erase the flash memory, reuse it 1,000,000 more times. I have a complete B&W darkroom setup that I will probably never use again because I can do everything faster, cheaper and better on my PC.
I sold all of my high end film cameras in 96 when I realized what was going to happen to film photography when digital took over. I miss my 180 degree fisheye lens, and nothing else.
eskimo
