wiredfool

Say you’re going on a vacation to a very photogenic tropical island. You have the choice of taking a APS film camera or a Digital camera. Assuming that you have to take all your supplies down with you, i.e. no film down there, no internet cafe with compact flash readers and a fast connection, Which is cheaper per image, flash or film?

Well, since I’m bringing it up, you might guess that it’s not film. You might also guess that this is not an idle question.

Aps is about 80 cents an exposure when you factor in developing costs. Compact flash is about 70 cents a meg (for 128 meg cards), which is about 2 pictures at the good quality 2.1 megapixel setting.

Look at that again. Aps film + developing costs about 2x as much as compact flash per image, for one time use.

Next Lesson, look at the price to store you average music cd uncompressed on a hard drive. Prices now are roughly $2.50 per gig (80 gig for $200), and music cds are typically 500 megs. So, $1.25 per cd uncompressed. Factor of 10 for compression.

Analog is losing. Game is nearly over.