I wanted to open up a can of worms I've seen both here and many other places (not even related to photography).

When someone enters a field, either as a trainee planning to start their career, or an established professional, or a hobbyist, there's always the question of what tools to get for the job.

Do you get something cheap and simple, figuring that as you learn and improve, you'll upgrade and replace your "starter set" with more professional level gear? Or do you get professional level tools, learn to take care of them, and grow into them as you learn and improve?

When I lecture university students (on non-photography related subjects), I am very clear on following the second path - despite the cost, it's better to cry once than fool oneself into thinking it's cheaper to buy cheap tools and upgrade later (in many cases ending up spending much more than what a good quality tool would have cost in the first place). That applies pretty clearly to engineering, to music (you get the best instrument you can afford), mechanics (cheap tools often make the work that much more difficult and time consuming), and many other fields. We don't recommend that people go out and buy the cheapest second hand computer they can find to see if they like computers and would like to learn programming :-p.

Now photography isn't engineering (although it seems to me there are an awful lot of gear-focused engineer types practicing photography), and there are many approaches and ways of working, as well as sub-fields (landscape, architecture, portraiture, etc), which is something a little bit different than in many other disciplines. I also recognize that the vast majority of the people here, everyone shooting LF, are amateurs (myself included), which in my opinion muddies the debate somewhat. I'm not sure amateurs need professional grade tools.

So I'd like to hear people's views on this.

For someone who's been shooting film for a while and knows their way around a light meter, developing B&W/C-41/E6 and using a darkroom, but is new to LF - there are used Intrepids, Wistas, Sinars and the like for a few hundred dollars, or things like Ebony's and Arca Swiss' for many thousands of dollars, and that's just for the camera, not the lenses or anything else. What would the arguments be to aim for one end of the scale vs the other?

Looking forward to learning more, and hearing peoples opinions and experience.

Thor