Originally posted by drewdlephone You need to keep double or triple backups of everything you shoot, and then another double of triple backups of each modified version in addition to the original.
But surely this is an advantage, in that you have the choice. With only one negative of a shot the chance of losing it to fire, theft, etc. is increased. One can avoid the worst of this by not being anal about keeping every shot.
I routinely delete the junk files immediately, keeping only decent images, plus some marginal ones if I know I have no better take of that shot.
Of course, many film pros need to scan in their negatives for retouching, archiving, transmission and printing... which means it's back to the same storage requirements as digital.
Originally posted by drewdlephone The storage requirements are tremendous, and the larger your library gets, your maintenance bill will climb exponentially, and eventually surpass any expenses you would incur working with film.
At 100 euros per terabyte, and decreasing every month, I don't think you can reasonably say that the storage costs are more expensive than film. Let's see, just for fun.
1GB allows me 60 PEF shots from the K20D. If I process one in ten of them I end up with 6 PSD files which fill a further 1GB. Say I need two copies of each (plus a third on DVD, but I'll assume that would be similar to film archiving costs). That means 15 shots use up 1 GB. A 1TB drive allows me to store (conservatively) 15,000 shots. So I get 150 shots per euro.
It costs me 10 euros to develop a 24 exposure roll of 35mm film. That's only for a small print that won't show much detail. Sometimes I'll need larger than 6x4". Scanning is more. B&W is more. The film costs more. So a euro gets me only one or two shots.
Thus the operating costs of digital will run 75 to 150 times cheaper than film.
Originally posted by ChrisPlatt The necessity to buy a new digital camera every two years must also be considered when comparing long-term cost.
There is no necessity to do this, just like there is no necessity to collect film cameras, upgrade to a 645NII, then a Rollei, Mamiya 7-II, Shen-Hao large format...
...but some like to. It's part of the fun.