Lameography

Photography

Utter rot.

You know a fad has peaked when it’s the sole focus of a retail store in a costly downtown location, San Francisco in this case.


There’s one born every minute. At 309 Sutter Street, San Francisco.

Here, for under $100, you can buy a POS plastic camera which will take simply atrocious snaps regardless of whether you are Steve McCurry of National Geographic Fame, or Joe Blow. Quite why anyone would want to drop an anvil on their foot before even pressing the button continues to defeat me, and it’s a view which has only strengthened since I wrote about the crap Holga some seven years ago.

Simply stated, you can take a perfectly well resolved and exposed image on a digital point-and-shoot costing under $100, or you can take detritus on film with one of these plastic suppositories for the same price plus the cost of processing and digitizing the images. It’s a cost which recurs every time you unload the film. The digital original can be manipulated to your heart’s content. The one from the suppository will continue doing a passable imitation of excrement regardless of what you do. And you will look like a fool using it.

It’s your choice.

But I’ll bet you one thing. The above store will be out of business a year hence and I’ll publish that here to prove it.

Here’s one of the cheapest digital cameras at Amazon today:

$75. Your choice of output – quality or crap.

Nikon’s bizarre pricing

Nikon bodies

How to kick your loyal customers in the unmentionables.

The table below shows the new and current used prices for Nikon’s ‘serious’ bodies. I don’t use the word ‘pro’ as I am clueless what that means. Maybe it means paying full retail for something that is soon worthless?

We all know that depreciation with digital bodies is rapid, but imagine you bought a Nikon D3x in January, 2012 and are now selling it to get the yet higher definition of the D800, after deciding that’s something you cannot live without. Well, your $8,000 ‘investment’ just crashed to $2,800. That’s worse than Apple stock recently.

Maybe Nikon has some deep reason to financially emasculate buyers of its costlier hardware, because they must have known when introducing the D800 that the prices of the D700 and D3/D3x would crash. Quite why they had to price the D800 at a bargain basement $3,000 when at $4,000 they would have sold everyone they can make beats me, but they sure did a number on owners of the earlier bodies. Same for the D600. They could sell that body all day long for $3,000, like the D700 before it, and it would still be cheaper than the competitor from Canon with a like pixel count.

I take a more benign view of the situation as I’m not a ‘pro’, as defined above. As long as Nikon wants to cannibalize its top end offerings and trash resale values, I’m a happy camper. I can pick up a D2x for 14 cents on the dollar with a remaining life of 175,000 clicks. Or a D3x, with a whopping pixel count full frame sensor for 35 cents on the dollar with 275,000 clicks remaining. Works for me. Can I tell the difference from the D800 in an 80″ print? Nope. And I get a nice integrated hand grip free.


Discontinued March, 2012, just 9 months ago and already down to 35 cents on the dollar and falling.

Whether my technique is up to that big sensor, well that’s another question entirely.