dear sir, I as a professional photographer would like to set up a digital studio and i have an estimate of about $2000. in this amount i would like to buy a digital camera, computer, scanner, and a photo quality printer. kindly suggest which brands and how?

-- Amrit Choudhary (amritchoudhary@rediffmail.com), March 31, 2000

Answers

Amrit:
It would help to know what you plan to professionally photograph with your new digital equipment. I'm afraid, however, $2000 will get you about half of what's on your list - even if you plan to get the cheapest stuff out there. On a professional scale you need to budget nearly 10X the amount you estimate. The computer will set you back about $1400, the software at least another $150. A flatbed scanner is about $300 for a half decent unit... a Slide/Negative scanner will be $500 and up. Your printer will be about 300 to 500 dollars. If you stay at the low end of all these selection you still run out of money before you get to the camera...
And then when you buy a $1000 camera you won't get the quality of 35mm yet.
Sorry for the dour approach, but as an ameteur medium digital is fabulous. On a professional scale it's either hideously expensive, or limited in scope.
It will get much better in time!
Please don't tell us you are planning on doing weddings....

Des

-- Dan Desjardins (dan.desjardins@avstarnews.com), March 31, 2000.

For a complete "professional" set-up you must mean $20,000 on up.

-- Bert C. (bert@longlivethemac.com), March 31, 2000.

I think you could start out with about $3000 but certainly you couldn't sell your work or call it "professional" by todays standards. My advice is to get a G4/400 or a PIII machine, a 17" Trinitron monitor, an Epson 1200U Photo Flatbed Scanner, an Epson 870 Printer and Photoshop. That should get you a system at around $3300. Its not professional by any means but you could do some nice work with it and upgrade the components as you get the chance. The 17" monitor could become your second monitor used for tool palletes and such when you could afford to upgrade to a 21" monitor. Anyway, there is a hell of a lot to learn about getting great printouts so buying all the gear in the world doesn't mean you'll figure out how to make it work right. You can learn almost every technique you'll need to know with a lower end system. Handing me the keys to a Formula 1 car wouldn't make me a champion race car driver, just a truck drivin' Floridian who would probably crash in 2 minutes, so learn the techniques and then worry about dropping the big money on a high end setup. Besides ,once you learn all the nuances of imaging, you'll know exactly what equipment you want and wont ask us. Not that I mind giving my opinion or anything....

-- Cris Daniels (danfla@gte.net), March 31, 2000.

Don't despair. My answer will be longer then the rest and not discouarge you.

If you're asking the question of how to set up a digital darkroom, this forum is probably the inappropriate place to expect that answer. That kind of answer is arrived at by you, no one else. There are many definitions of digital darkrooms, some for 35mm, some for smaller formats, some for medium format and some for larger format.

If you're speaking in US dollars, the amount of $2000 is insufficent to purchase the "studio grade" that "photographers" use in their typical and ordinary "digital darkrooms". But all options are not closed to you. There are many options still available to you. Do you want to sell your work to the public? An important place to start when deciding what digital photography equipment is appropriate to purchase, is to outline EXACTLY what your expectations are of the technology, how far you want to take it, and whether or not you are pushing its limits.

Digital cameras that are used in commercial uses, for commercial work and for studio photography are sold for generally over $15,000. Digital equipment that produces some of the HIGHEST quality available in scanning and printing sells for over $10,000. This is technology thats used for repeated work for clients that expect repeated results and only the best. However the best equipment does not mean less expensive equipment cannot deliver the same results. As an example, and this is only one to show the ambiguity of the technology and how its marketed and explained, if you take a picture on a 35mm camera that you bought for $200 with a lens, lets say it was a minolta, and took that negative to have it scanned on a drum scanner for $20, and then made it into a picture as large as a movie poster for something over $60, the quality would be just as good as the $15,000 equipment I just mentioned. You could take both technologies side by side and not see any discernable differences. As another example, if you took a 35mm negative and had it scanned onto kodak photo cds (call 1-800-GO-KODAK) you could print decidely acceptable pictures as large as 8 x 10 inches. Of course my examples depend on how far the person is looking at it, for how long, etc. . . But I'm sure you get the meaning.

You have many choices. A desktop (pretty large though) "drum scanner" is being sold by Imacon for $9995 US. Currently there are approximately 16 film scanners for 35mm desktops on the market. 3 or 4 of these can scan medium format negatives. Nikon makes 4, Minolta makes 4, Canon makes 1, Polariod makes 2, Microtek makes 2 etc. Nikon use a technology called ICE which removes scratches, surface defects and fingerprints from scans - but it costs you less contrast, less detail and less quality. Some people use flatbed scanners to scan medium format negatives, like the Epson Expression flatbed scanners, but these are priced at over $1000 typically.

But before you take any more steps into digital photography, you have to read about density range/dynamic range/dmax, dmin, gamma correction, ICC profiles, calibrating the monitor with the printer, inkjet inkjsets and the paper used to print, photoshop, etc. . .

Buy photoshop but don't buy it in the stores, only fools do this. Buy it on www.ebay.com for $100 or $50 or maybe $300, you won't be dissapointed. Use the escrow service. A photoshop limited version comes on a cd with some flatbed scanners or film scanners (35mm), sometimes the 4.0 version, the current version is 5.5. The 5.0 is said to be identical to 5.5, the 5.5 only having the web publishing add on program Imageready 2.0.

Currently the digital darkroom idea is just starting to make sense to people. The technology is in its child stages. The economics of it are unreasonable, the quality comparable but still questionable in some of its areas, and the acceptance of it is growing, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. If you feel you need more working understanding of the limitations or the grammer of digital photography work, I recommend you spend a couple days or weeks reading on the internet what people have to say about it, and what people have done to remove the myths and misunderstandings.

I recommend the following sites,

www.digitaldarkroom.com www.wilhelm-research.com www.misssupply.com www.inkjetart.com www.deja.com a newsgroup service, search for talks www.pdn.com photo.askey.net www.scantips.com www.epson.com www.bhphotovideo.com

Digital cameras that are sold today are sold mainly the consumer level. Prints and pictures can be made from these cameras (speaking of the $200 to $1000 cameras) but they are never targeted to the market of photographers and certainly never professional photographers who consider these cameras below them. This does not mean that these devices are incapable of great images. A great image doesn't require technology at all - it requires talent and imagination. These cameras are capable of terrific images if used properly, digitized properly, handled properly and printed properly. But the $15,000 and $25,000 digital camera backs and digital studio equipment cameras have limitations that 35mm cameras never had. As an example, if you wanted to take a picture with a $15,000 digital camera the object thats being photographed would have to remain still. You cannot take pictures of moving objects. The object would have to remain still for over 2 minutes, because the camera needs to SCAN THE IMAGE into its chips and resolve the data. This takes time. You coulden't use a $15,000 digital camera for portraits because nobody can stay still for 2 to 5 minutes. Not even the lighting in the studio stays evenly distributed for 2 to 5 minutes.

No one talks about this. They don't want to.

I know that I might have left your question still unanswered. But this is the fault of the technology.

You have to also keep in mind that whenever someone asks a question about digital photography in this forum, there is never a good answer. This is because the people don't post good answers, and because they don't have anything good to contribute. If people in this forum only have negative things to say, they say it anyways.

So without answering your question, I hope you found this helpful.

-- Jeff Epstein (nospam@noemail.com), April 02, 2000.

Actually I think I give rather positive advice to every user of this forum so I'm assuming you weren't talking about my response. I agree with your opinion except for buying Photoshop on ebay. Very bad idea indeed. Unless you get the actual license agreement and have the other user who you are buying it from call Adobe and transfer the license. Abobe could give a rats ass if you pay $50, $300, or $500 for photoshop as long as your holding the license. I looked at many copies of Photoshop on the net and most are pirated software copied onto higher quality discs and they are labeled with a high quality CD printer. You don't own anything unless you have the CD key thats NOT posted on every user group in the planet. The real upgrade path is from Photosop LE to 5.0 for $299 or so and it available only through Adobe. As far as high end digicams, I was at the Photoshop World 2000 this past weekend and shot the Phase One Mamiya, for $23,500 plus $4000 for the camera plus $3500 for a firewire Mac Powerbook, it was very dissapointing. Any medium format film camera will blow it away and cost a 10th of the price AND you don't need to lug around a laptop with it. The big brother to the $23,500 Light Phase camera goes for $30,000+ and has the 4 minute exposure times, unless your shooting product photography ( and I'm not sure why anyone would need a 145MB file for that application) it's useless. Film will be around a while still.

-- Cris Daniels (danfla@gte.net), April 03, 2000.