"jjs" wrote in message
...

I just bought my wife a little toy digital camera. The price was $279
at Best Buy. After getting her the memory and extra battery she needs for
her trip, it was $550. And now I need to get an extra portable
(pocketsized) external drive for home-to-work storage and schleping. That
was another $200. And then another extra drive to back that one (and
more); another $200. Then the printer just wasn't good enough. $300. Extra
ink cartriges: $109 for a set with backup.

Now I find that the home laptop computer has aged beyond usefull life for
digital imaging (the LCD backlight is going fast). That's almost more than
I can friggin stand.

But that's not all! With the digital pictures, one wants to share them and
now we're talking about burning CDROMs and DVDs, and paying an ISP for web
space, and there's never enough web space, so it's $$$ all over again.

Add it all up, again and again. There's NO FRIGGIN END to the cost of
digital!


I can relate to that. I bought a nice little digicam a year and a half ago.
When I realized how much I would have to spend on accessories and
peripherals to make it worthwhile, I decided instead to return the camera
and to stick with film. Those who talk about film and processing costs can
keep talking all they want about it, but there's no way that for the average
amateur, film comes even close to matching the overall costs of digital. And
that's not even including the 3-4 year old computer that mya be perfectly
fine for years to come just for word processing, web surfing and email, but
which becomes woefully inadequate for digital imaging in a
headspinningly-short time. And my experience was just with a digicam that
cost about $700 Canadian. Check the prices out for digital SLRs! Staggering,
especially when you consider that any film SLR every built, now or in the
past, can take the same pictures (and actually infinitely better, when it
comes to balancing between bright highlights and dark shadows). There's no
marrying of computers with photography for me. If the pros are doing that,
they can have it.

Pierre