[MCaver]

Well, it looks like my MindStor digital storage is dying a slow horrible death and I don't trust it any more. I was barely able to get the photos from my Painted Hills trip off of it between the ungodly drive noises and data transfer errors. I think the hard drive has had enough. Of course, the company has gone out of business now. So it looks like I'm in the 1Gb CF market before I expected -- as in, I need one in the next 2 weeks. Any suggested places to get a Lexar 24x 1Gb CF before I start scouring the Internet?

[Dayhike Mike]

I ended up getting a 1gb card from NewEgg. Good, reputable company that I buy a lot of computer components from and they always give great, fast service. Current price for the 30x Transcend 1GB Type-I card is $226 with $6 for two day (often overnight, really) shipping.

[Erik the Nav]

MichealB, where'd you find the S400 for 389? that looks like a great price from here. I'm pretty much decided on the S45, but the S400 is a close runner-up, and at that price, I'd have to consider it... 'preciate any feedback..

[Dayhike Mike]

PassBuy.com...they have it listed for $385 at present. It's one of the (previously mentioned many times) weasely hard-sell firms in the NYC area. Tom had posted a link to a great article elsewhere. They'll call you back after you've placed your order and try to sell you on overpriced, overhyped Warranty coverage ($159.99 for 5 years of Mack coverage -- it's ~$70 at other dealers for the same thing; they claim it covers pritnear everything, but checking www.mackcam.com shows that there are numerous exceptions to coverage; they try to use immediacy to sell the coverage along with the camera, but it can be purchased separately from other vendors as long as it's done within the first 30 days of ownership) and other overpriced low-quality accessories. Be friendly, sound interested, but in the end just refuse everything they try to pawn off on you. They'll eventually leave you alone and place your order. Took a week for the package to arrive. The box I got had been opened, but it had everything in it -- including all of the Canon accessories that are supposed to come with the package and nothing looked as though it had been used previously. I may have had better luck than most, though, as I happened to be on-site in New York at NYPD last week and left a message on my voicemail to that effect. In summary, it may or may not pan out for you, but if you've got more time than money or if you're in not in a big rush to get the new camera, I'd say it's worthwhile to wait a little and give them a try. Michael

[Damsel Adams]

Serious question here for the digital folks: A camera that holds 500 images seems like too much to deal with. Spending 1.2 seconds to view each one takes 10 minutes! I'd hate to sort through 500 slides trying to find the 14 images worth showing anybody. I'm ruthless about tossing the so-so and worse transparencies. How do you deal with such massive amounts of data? Why do you want to have that much overhead? Why not just delete the poor and mediocre images in the field, and only have, say, 50 or 100 image capacity?

[Dayhike Mike]

It's a matter of time and battery life. I'd rather shoot three or four shots of the same scene...a variety of orientations, zooms, may even fiddle with manual settings if the resultant images I'm seeing in the viewfinder are obviously not up to snuff, but it's so much more effort to delete on-site when my daylight and battery life are short, than to simply take multiple images and sort them when I get home. Besides, the viewfinder on the camera doesn't show you the full resolution of the image without zooming in repeatedly -- it's much easier and faster to browse through them at high speed viewing at closer to actual resolution on a 1600x1200 display at home. I can sift through several hundred photos in a very short amount of time, alternating between Page Up/Page Down (to change photos) and the 'X' button (for deletion of unwanted prints). As far as storage...CDs are cheap, HDs are cheap...there's no reason not to keep multiple shots if they each have their good points or emphasize different subject matter.

[Tom]

Hey Michael, that's a really good deal you got there. So they actually sold it for that price without buying the extended warranty or any other "extras", like a $75 battery? Damsel, it's hard to tell if a picture is properly focused / exposed by looking at them in a 1-2 inch LCD, not to mention it eats into battery life. Much better to take 2 or 3 of the same shot and sort it out when you get home. Compact flash memory is cheap. You can get 1/2 a gig for under $100 so it's not adding a significant cost. You right about needing to keep things managable. One of the first things I do when I get home is weed out the non-keepers. I shoot about 250 on a trip and try to weed it down to 40 or less.

[Dayhike Mike]

[MCaver]

My system so far has been to keep every photo I take. I go through them and pull the "keepers" into a different place, then burn all the originals off to CD. Since I started shooting digital 2.5 years ago, that's amounted to ~40 700Mb CDs. One copy of the CD will stay in the house. A backup copy will go offsite as soon as I get off my duff and get a safety deposit box. I have plans for a lot of those "non-keepers" for a future project. They've also been a good learning tool for me, sometimes significantly after the fact. Or I'll notice that the keeper I have has something wrong with it that I didn't notice at first, so I'll dig through my old CDs to see if I have one better from the same batch. Quite often I do. I store my photos in directories by location (i.e. \United States\Washington\Mount Rainier NP\Paradise) so it's easy to find specific photos on a CD. Of course, all the filenames have been changed from P0184362.jpg or whatever to something more useful.

[Dayhike Mike]

[Damsel Adams]

OK, I can see why you'd want to have lotsa memory to save batteries, and because the image viewing is not too good on the camera's screen. So you get home and have 500 images... I still don't see how I'd want 500 of one trip -- even a very long trip. On a week-long trip I only get maybe 30 slides of merit and distinction. Course, I have to go through 5 rolls of 36 exposures to get those 30 good images. Digital folks could go through many hundreds of exposures (they are virtually free!), to the point where you are inundated with data. Yikes! Piles and piles of data! It seems like it takes away from the fun. Maybe I'm stuck in Ansel Adams mode, where you have a stack of 8x10 plates, limited number of image possibilities, and you have to previsualize the print... plan... wait for the right moment... be selective. This is opposed to the random shotgun, hope you get lucky, approach? Am I stuck in an old paradigm?

[MCaver]

[Tom]

Hey Damsel, you related "N. Vera Mint" who occasionally posts here? Just think of all those rolls of film not being developed, all those messy chemicals being avoided. Instant feedback can accelerate the learning process. It won't necessarily make a photograhper out of someone who isn't, but so what if it does?

[Newt]

When I took 3 weeks and drove to Alaska I shot 1800+ digital and over 800+ negatives. Everywhere I went was something different. A different scene, perspective or lighting. Anymore, I take at least 50-150 or so digital on a day trip and maybe 5-10 35's, depending on scenery. I took 102 in the Leavenworth area yesterday alone. The reason? I probably won't be back and if I am, it won't be there or look as good. Actually, how many shots does it take to get that perfect one? If you're doing BW and the zone system, you can get things down pretty pat. Then it becomes more a matter of composition and having the right light. Not all negatives, Digital, BW or Color can be tweaked to perfection. You gonna take just 1 shot of that pretty rainbow? How about a back up just in case? What about when the cloud darkens behind the bow? Yah, take another, it looks like it could be a better picture. My point02 NN

[polarbear-]

Damsel, I hate to see you or any other member of the fairer sex in distress, and I have to admit I sympathize with your viewpoint. I usually take a roll of film (not digital film) on a hike and use it all. But when I look at my slides I realize some of the shots were pretty lame. Part of the reason is you don't know what the best viewpoints are until you get there sometimes, so I have a shot of the peak, then another one 500 yards up the road, er I mean trail, and then you see that utterly fantastic sight that makes all the other photos pale in comparison and make you wish you had more than two pictures left on your roll because you'd used them all up on that little white dot with four legs way way down in the valley . I usually don't bracket any pictures and I still have boxes and boxes of slides. It's amazing how much better you can make a picture if you just put even 20 seconds of thought into composing it. That said, if I get a digital camera I'm sure I'll take bajillions of pictures.