Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/03/10
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]What is the price of the digital film cartridge? I don't know but it has to be several hundred dollars. So you put one of these in your camera, go out and take photographs. How many can you take? 10? 20? It uses a 1.3MB sensor so if it can take 10 photographs at 1MB resolution, that's 10MB of memory just for image storage. 20MB for 20 images. This is a tiny device. There isn't going to be much room for very much memory. After you take the 10 or 20 pictures, you are out and about, what do you do? You have another in your pocket? Whew... expensive film. Especially when you are getting images that might make a reasonable 5x7. But not much bigger. If you are a rich happy snapper, this might work. This is a terribly inconvenient device. This is why digital cameras have an LCD on the camera. To see, keep, or delete images on the spot. Have a compact flash or smart media, maybe a micro drive, in the camera to store lots of images. Instead of a couple dozen mediocre images, you can take a hundred better than mediocre images. What's the advantage of having a 35mm digital cartridge? Absolutely nothing. Because it is very limited in capability, very expensive for what it is, and produces images a thousand times less quality than a simple $5 film cartridge. What you should do is think carefully of how you would actually use this device. And what to do when it's full. What you get for the price. And how you will use the crappy, oops, mediocre images. Digital cameras have a lot of stuff inside that make digital cameras very useful. A film camera is NOT a good candidate for digital use. The MF and LF digital backs require an umbilical and a shoulder bag full of electronics, and a computer close by. A tiny little digital film cartridge, in my estimation, is less than useless. Buy a cheap HP scanner, and use film. The results will be a thousand times better and a thousand times cheaper. Jim At 10:46 PM 3/10/00 -0500, Peter Jon White wrote: >> You should have ended with a smiley face :-) because the >> Imagek thing, or >> anything similar, even if available, is not worth thinking about. >> >> Jim > >What's your objection? The current version seems useless to me, because it >covers such a small area of the 35mm frame; I would guess about 1/7, judging >by the graphic on the web site. > >But if they could make one that covers all or say 90% of the 35mm format, at >the same dpi, wouldn't it be a useful device? They claim that future >versions will cover a larger area, and will be available to fit more camera >models. > >Peter Jon White