How do you decide if digital or 35 mm is best for you.

and how many pictures can you get on 1 floppy.

-- leslea robles (okiedoky@aol.com), July 20, 2000

Answers

You read these and other forums and you read magazines and you ask users and you INQUIRE...

The 2 kinds of photography are different. From my limited perspective, for less INITIAL money, 35 promises higher ultimate quality with more work (sometimes someone else's) and for more processing money and with less flexibility about printing (ie, it's harder to get exactly what you think you want because you have to have someone else do it). Digital photography (DP), I think, is more vertically integrated for more people. YOU take the pics, YOU get them into your computer, YOU massage the pics, YOU print the pics (or e-mail them, or upload them...). Also, it's easier to share your pics with more people digitally (using e-mail, one of the photo- sharing websites, etc.).

I've told people that one doesn't buy a digital camera, one buys a digital-photography HOBBY. I've also said that after you spend several-thousand dollars on cameras, lenses, filters, printers, softwware, etc., it's quite inexpensive to make gorgeous 11x8.5" (and smaller, of course) prints (for about $1 each).

FLOPPIES are used by lo-resolution digicams. Hi-res digicams use solidstate memory cards named SmartMedia or CompactFlash or MemoryStick (SONY only) or miniature harddisc drives called IBM Microdrives. Any of these cards/drives are available in many different sizes, and the pic files can be created in many different sizes. If forced to answer your question, I'd say the number ranges from from 1 (yes, one) to hundreds if not thousands, DEPENDING. Worst case is a huge (say, 9MB) file created by a hi-res digicam on its highest-quality setting, using a lo-capacity card (ie a 16MB). Highest case might be with a 340MB Microdrive and 200K files, = 1700 (yes, seventeenhundred!).

So, lots to think about...

Write again. We'll help.

-- jeffrey behr (behrjk@uswest.net), July 20, 2000.

It may be a bit self serving, but if you're trying to decide whether to go digital, have a look at the introductory article I wrote for Toshiba's Digital Imaging website at:

http://www.toshiba.com/taisisd/isd_svc/svcdsc/training/gp_godig.htm

you might get a kick out of it, then again, I might just get kicked... :-)

As for your second question "and how many pictures can you get on 1 floppy?" I'd say that depends on how you stack'em... ;-)

Seriously, it depends on the original resolution of the images and the amount of compression that's been applied to them. For more on resolution or compression, I once again refer you to a couple more articles I penned for Toshiba's website:

http://www.toshiba.com/taisisd/isd_svc/svcdsc/training/gp_resol.htm

http://www.toshiba.com/taisisd/isd_svc/svcdsc/training/gp_jpeg.htm

You won't get many very good quality images on a floppy unless they're rather small in terms of resolution to start with. Companies, like Sony, who make floppy disk based cameras are forced to use higher than normal compression levels in order to fit very many images on a disk because a disk can only hold 1.44MB. Most people would be better served with larger capacity media choices like smartmedia or compactflash instead of floppy based cameras. You can get Smartmedia as large as 64MB currently and I think compactflash is available as large as a few hundred MB's. You can also swap them out, and erase and reuse them after transferring images to your PC or MAC.

Give me a while, and I'll also detail the cure for the common cold and suggest whether the chicken or the digicam came first... [not to give anything away, but I'd put my money on the chicken.] ;-)

Good Luck!

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@surferz.net), July 20, 2000.

Wow, great reply from Jeff!

On a more serious note, as he suggested, there are still a lot of reasons to consider film. Primarily, it still has higher resolution and quality, but I see the lines blurring at 3.3 megapixels for both issues compared to conventional film prints as large as 5x7" or even a bit more. Digital is the wave of the future. Kodak, Polaroid, Fuji, Nikon and all the rest acknowledge it by their actions...

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@surferz.net), July 20, 2000.

Leslea--another idea (I'd call it a brainstorm, but mine are more- usually brainwhiffs). Post here, and on www.dcresource.com, and on www.dpreview.com, your general location and see if some experienced digisnappist would be willing to show you around his/her hobby. We're a friendly lot; I'll bet someone will help.

-- jeffrey behr (behrjk@uswest.net), July 21, 2000.

I keep surprising myself with things that I do with a digital that I never dreamed of doing when I bought it. For instance, someone e-mailed me and said they'd like to see my remodeled kitchen. I got up, shot the pictures, loaded them in my computer and e-mailed them within a half hour. Another example; my daughter asked if she could have one of my old 35mm cameras. I couldn't find the instruction book so I shot pictures of the 35mm with my digital and then annotated the pictures using Photoshop and a graphic pad pen (in theory I could have done it with just a mouse).

I agree with Jeffrey, it's two different worlds in many ways.

-- bill (this_old_house@pobox.com), July 22, 2000.