This is getting ridiculous.

The soon-to-be-available Canon 5D/II consumes some 22 megabytes per image. Child’s play. How about 50 mb a pop?

The Hasselblad H3D50 medium format digital camera

So twenty snaps on this baby (made by Fuji, by the way, not by flaxen haired Swedish maidens) dictate one gigabyte of storage. Or, stated differently, your one terabyte hard drive where you store these will hold a mere 20,000 pictures.

And before you stock up on hard drives, what sort of processing power are you going to need to manipulate those huge images? Presumably a top-of-the-line MacPro with multiple CPUs. And, of course, a couple of 30″ Cinema Displays to do justice to the $30k you just blew on the camera. Add another $10k for computer hardware.

My, digital is expensive. Guess I’ll be sticking with the 12 mb images from my 5D/I a while longer. The body and seven lenses ran me under $9k, but really cost nothing in cash outlay as I sold all my Leica and Rollei gear to finance the Canon. Chump change, eh? I suppose I should add another $900 for the MacBook and $300 for more memory and disk storage, but I use that for lots of other things, too. At least my HP DJ90 wide carriage printer should work with the Hassy, no?