I'd pay $3K.
Rick "depending on the big details" Denney
I'd pay $3K.
Rick "depending on the big details" Denney
Regardless of data reliability, I have issues with physical reliability in regard to SD cards. I've had a very nice name-brand SD card just disintegrate into several pieces in my hand after plugging and unplugging it into my camera/card reader a couple hundred times. If they made them out of stronger stuff I'd probably be more willing to use them. Meanwhile I also have several old as dirt CF cards still kicking. They are much more robust.
As for the digital back - if it's "scanning" then I'm not interested. Too many variables with wind/water to bother. Personally I'd rather have a high-quality but "dumb" digital 6x7 back. I mean a simple capture device that had minimal options and niceties like the Phase One backs but just captured RAW data. Maybe 40-80 megapixels. ISO 25-400 or thereabouts. Attached via Graflok preferably. I'd pay a couple thousand for that. Older P40+ backs are still at $8k.
While the card connector is hard to kill, the male counterpart inside drives is rather vulnerable - I damaged one Nikon D80 and killed a couple of PC drives that way. By the way, I would not plug/unplug SD cards a couple of hundred times (or indeed more than three times) - at prices below film in its heydays even when you consider them single use, the most trivial way to avoid data loss and maintain an backup archive of unaltered originals is to treat them like negatives, "exposing" each SD only once and archiving it (physically, by labelling it and tossing it into a drawer) after computer transfer.Originally Posted by Corran
In my experience CF cards are pretty bullet proof. I sho ot tons on them and the ones I first bought are still working fine (though I have now invested in bigger cars for the bigger native files of current model DSLRs)
Thanks,
Kirk
at age 73:
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep"
You obviously have too much money to burn, if I had to buy two 16 gig SD cards a week for each shoot I would be homeless....
That might make sense on large commercial shoots where the cost of the card is passed on to the client (and subsequently given to them as extra backup? That's what is often done in digital audio with the original files on harddrives). But that doesn't work for me now. I'll keep on using CF cards though instead...
Well, buy 4GB cards, then - at two shoots a week, you won't even be able to fill these... Even 16GB cards are so cheap that you can barely buy a single sheet of 4x5 colour and processing for their price. If there really are photographers that get through 32GB worth of pictures a week (enough to waste a shutter when shooting JPEG on a consumer DSLR, and upward of 300 even when shooting RAW on the biggest MF backs), without making enough money out of that huge amount that they could have afforded a single shot on film, it is no surprise that photography, whether digital or analogue, is sometimes said to be a dying art...
Even CF, at 50€ for fast (and 20€ for reliable) 16GB cards, currently still is cheap enough that any pro ought to be able to use them like film. The risk with CF is that unless the mainstream camera makers stage a big comeback for CF (unlikely - on the contrary it rather looks as if they would prefer to retire all physical storage media in favour of WLAN directly to the computer/tablet/smartphone), it will probably continue to dwindle, and going by the fate of other obsolete card standards, we'll eventually see a rise in media prices as they grow scarce. With that risk ahead, a new camera or back that is priced as a investment for more than half a decade should not omit SD, even though it would be nice if it also featured CF.
Come on now...a typical wedding that I shoot is about 40GB of files now from my D800. RAW + JPEG of course. A portrait session with maybe 50-60 shots or so uses up 10-15GB.
YMMV with older DSLRs with less resolution.
Let's not get into this debate. It's pointless, and I'm sorry you aren't going to convince anyone to use SD cards only once. Again, that's one of the reasons pros use CF cards.
Sevo, basically what corran said.
I don't do weddings as often but I would guess about 1,000 pictures plus 800 or so from the assistant 2nd shooter I always have. I don't shoot JPEG, only RAW but that's still 25-30mb per file.
When not doing weddings I shoot models for portfolio sets that require about 100 images to the client, but that's 100 of the best, so I probably shoot 350-450 to ensure there's enough to play with.
If I did simple portraiture giving the client 5 images then your theory might work sort of, but these are more dynamic images, I also don't and wouldn't shoot color LF film for clients, only for Landscape since I hate C-41 and prefer chromes which aren't really good for portraits (for what's still made).
Ok I'm babbling a lot and it's not really what the thread is about. We all have our own process, I just personally have had enough bad experiences with SD that I prefer CF.
to sum this whole thing up
- there is small market at the present, where people would be ok spending 3-5k on 8x10 scanning back that can produce decent result.
- there is real desire for it to be light and self contained and preferably be as thin as regular film holder
- there is no way in hell in would work for anything that is really moving or got flicker-ish light. Which reduces applicability of whole thing quite a bit, hence the market size.
- it will have to be computer tethered or work with large CF/SD cards (CF is easier, sorry - SD format is flakier than snowflake on the planet of Flake in galaxy of Flakiness) b/c your typical scan of 2400dpi from 8x10 will produce fairly large 16 bit tiff.
- there is more than one way to make it work. Even with moving objects. Some of us do work on ideas.
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