75MB Isn't That Expensive
Feb 27 (commentary)--It appears that not enough of you have read my article on shooting less. I write that because one of the "complaints" about the D800 is that it creates 75MB raw files (it can do better than that with judicious use of compression, but for the sake of argument, I'll just use the largest size).
Back in the days of film, taking each image cost me out of pocket about 28 cents. That includes film, processing, and some courier service (I'd drop it off at the lab on my way home from the airport because it was convenient, but then have it couriered to me at the office the next morning). Even the most frugal person probably paid at least 17 cents a shot (and got random processing at that price).
What took me down this nostalgic road was far more than a few people making the contention that storage costs, especially once considering backups, would eat them alive if they shot with a D800 with it's 75MB a whack penalty.
One man's penalty is another man's gain. As I've written many times, I'll take as many pixels as I can get assuming all else equal. More sampling equals better processing choices, amongst other things. But is that 75MB really a penalty in the first place?
Let's take what some view as a relatively expensive storage option: Amazon S3. Worst case, for a fully backed cloud storage system: 12.5 cents a GB/mo, or less than a penny a D800 image a month. It would take two years of storage before I even equalled my out of pocket film costs. Actually, less than that if I did critical editing out of shots that don't make the cut (in film, the cost was already incurred; in digital, if you delete the file, the cost isn't incurred).
But wait a minute, 12.5 cents a GB is US$125 a terrabyte a month. That sounds like a lot. After all, I can buy a 1TB hard drive from NewEgg for less than that. Okay, I'd need two, because I want a backup. Actually three, because I'd want an offsite backup, too. So call it three months worth of S3 storage costs to do it at home for a longer time. I'm starting to lose track of what fraction of a penny my D800 image is actually costing me.
I've written elsewhere about how expensive digital photography is. The camera body cost is just the tip of the iceberg. And the per image cost is pretty darned cheap, even with 75MB files. But this does raise an issue: the incremental cost of all those things--camera, lens, support, travel, computer, storage, and so on--does start to overwhelm more and more people. That's one of the reasons why I started predicting flattening sales of DSLRs way back in 2003. From the film days, we have a pretty good metric on how many households eventually go SLR and how many eventually stop using it for something simpler and cheaper.
A lot of the folk complaining about the D800 are candidates for getting off the DSLR escalator.
