950 shots.

3 full charges (two on a Pentax battery, one on a 7dayShop knock-off).

Maybe 5 minutes total of video, lots of messing around in the menus for the first charge, not much at all since then.

Maybe 50 shots with flash.

Anyhow I look at it, it doesn't seem anything like what page 52 in the manual would suggest, by a factor of at least two, possibly even three.

Any ideas?

Photography has always been a mixture of art and craft. As the amount of craft required falls, the best images will be made by the best artists, not the best craftsmen.

Equally, at any given image quality level, more people will be able to make images at that level, since whatever artistic skill an image requires will be less likely to be prevented by insufficient craftsmanship.

If you enjoy the craft as well as the art, as most people that enjoy photography historically do, it's a bit inevitable that as the craft element falls, so will the enjoyment level.

I'm not particularly artistic, and I never had the patience to make my own images in the darkroom.

With digital, the amount of craft required is about right, since I'm very comfortable with the computer.

As the amount of craft required becomes even less, I expect I'll enjoy photography less, since I'll be limited by my art, and there's not much I can do about that.

Ah well, the deal was, the ex-wife got the prints, I kept the negs. All beautifully catalogued, with dates, places... by her!

Damn right, it was about a grand, and because I'd spent so long deciding whether I could afford it or not, it went discontinued in the UK and I had to import if from the USA. I ended up spending a lot more than I would have, if I'd bought it here 6 months earlier. I don't think you can buy them new anywhere anymore.

Thing is, I have 10k negs, and none of the prints (long story). So mostly I don't know what I've got, and it's memories from about 25 years of my life. So it's worth it to me. I've blogged a bit about experiences with the scanner here and here.

You're welcome.

I can't help thinking that in the long run you'd be better off going digital. Being able to see whether what you've taken is bad or good immediately, and re-shooting from a different location or with different settings, is worth a lot in the learning stakes.

You also don't have to remember to write anything down - all the settings are stored with the file. That's worth a lot too.

I'm one of them.
I don't care about losing face. It's not even so much the expense, although obviously that's a big factor.

In my case it would be all the researching, agonising, deciding, all without the background with the brand that makes it all a little easier to separate the wheat from the chaff.

That, and the knowledge that no brand is perfect, and it could easily be a case of out of the frying pan...

Do you remember my friend that is looking to get into digital, the one with a Canon film camera of some description, and two daughters each with a Canon? I was completely wrong about them being 40Ds, in fact they're 1000Ds. Now I know that that is very much an entry level model, but I had a proper play with one of them the other day.

And a nastier looking, more cheapo-feeling piece of tat I don't think I've ever clapped eyes on. It doesn't make me want to move to Canon if that's an example of the build quality - tell me that the better ones are better?

Absolutely no excuse for them to have dust on, then, or be such a pathetic resolution. Find yourself a better lab!

For reference, I have one of these, since I'm sporadically working through the 10,000 or so negs from my film days.

Each frame is a 70MB TIFF, resolution about 5959 x 3946.

Far more than is justified by the quality of the lenses I used in those days, but hopefully it gives you a comparison.

Another thought. If you're going to do a lot of this, use a lab that scans the negs straight to hi-res JPGs at the time of processing, and don't bother about getting prints except of the ones you really like. You get a CD instead of a pack of prints, and you should get much higher resolution than 1908x1272.

This will be a lot cheaper than getting the scan done after the fact, and you won't end up with a lot of rubbish prints.

When my main camera was an ME Super, I used to reckon that if 10% turned out Ok, I was doing well. So that's a lot of duds!

Back on topic though, I'd make one suggestion, as perhaps a first step.

Get rid of clutter. Quite a few of the subjects on that roll (especially the girl) would be perfectly fine as subjects, but there's so much distraction that any impact is lost. Take more time to ensure that you're only including stuff you actually want in the image.

By the way, I didn't take Geo's comment the way you did.

When he said,
... I thought, yes, I agree. But only because it struck me that I take loads of experimental pictures too. A lot of them are no better than the ones you've posted, and I take them for all kinds of reasons. To experiment with exposure, or focal length, to make sure the camera's working, to see if what I see corresponds to what it looks like in the image, to see what the light looks like. Or just as a grab shot, intending to crop later.

It would cost a fortune, doing it with film, without the immediacy of seeing the results straightaway. I'd never go back to film either, since I'd never do the experimenting, and I'd lose a lot of learning that way.

Perhaps he wasn't really being as insulting as you thought.

Wo'evuh

I used to think this was an argument but I'm not so sure any more - assuming the pixel density was the same on the 35mm sensor, all you'd need to do is crop the middle APS-C bit out of the pictures and the result would be the same. Which is all the APS-C sensor does anyway.

But it would mean an enormous investment in new lenses, so that the quality was acceptable out to the edges. They'd rush to produce them, since they'd suddenly be reading all the carping reviews of the new 35mm Pentax that doesn't have a lens range. So the QC would be all over the place, as it seemed to be a few years ago.

Quite. Imagine Pentax AF with the reputation of the best of Canon AF, and some fast lenses at 400-600mm. Pentax would walk all over the opposition.

There's plenty of incremental improvement left in APS-C.

Well yes, that's a perfectly reasonable strategy. Picking up a few cheap K-5 bodies when the time comes would remove any reliability worries, and the lenses would be cheap, and just as good as they are now.

Agreed. It doesn't seem very likely.