Nothing excites camera buyers more than leaps in resolution. Like it or not,
the eye-catching and revenue generating headlines are about mega-pixels. We
all know that these high-tech new machines come with a big price tag. But
are you prepared for all the other money and time you'll need to spend
managing your larger images?
Flash Cards: To start with you'll need more flash cards and/or a
portable storage unit you can use in the field.
As a rule of thumb you should consider carrying film
cards for at least two days of shooting even if you have a laptop or
portable storage device. This covers you if you have an equipment failure for a day or just
have an extra busy day. And more of course if you don't have a field backup
device or go on long trips. As an example, if you shoot up to 100
4Mega-pixel JPEGs of about 2MB each you'd want to have at least 512MB of
cards, which you can purchase for about $50. But if you suddenly switch to
100 8Mega-pixel Raw images you'll be looking at 2.4Giga-bytes of cards or
nearly $300. At the extreme if you are a high-volume pro you might shoot as
many as 1000 12Mega-Pixel Raw+JPEG images, or nearly 20GB per day! Cards for
2 days (40GB) would cost you $4000, or nearly as much as your camera. At
that point you'll want to consider a truly reliable field storage device to
keep your costs down.
Laptop hard drive (or portable storage device): If you travel with a laptop, you'll
need to make sure it has enough room for your entire trip worth of shots. A
two week trip with 1000 8MP Raw images is 12Giga-bytes of data. The same
trip as an African safari with 5000 images is a whopping
60GB
(2.5 HDD
-- $120)! As a result
you may well need to upgrade your laptop hard drive or carry an external
drive. Alternatively you can use a device like the
Epson P-2000
($490) which stores up to 40GB of images with a large viewing screen,
but costs much more than a plain hard drive. With an inexpensive case you
can also add a small external drive to take with you--I carry two of them,
one is a clone of my system drive and one is a backup of my images.
Laptop memory: Whatever image processing program you use, larger
images mean more memory. So if you want to do any image processing in the
field be prepared to shell out for more memory. My laptop with 768MB was
fine for my D1X and D2H, but Nikon Capture slows to a crawl with my D2X
images to I'm doubling the memory in it--not happily as it is nearly $400
for the upgrade, but it appears to be a necessary evil.
Card Reader: Those cheap PC card adapters are fine for small cards or
low volume shooting, but if you're shooting a lot of high-resolution images
you'll want to invest in a 32-bit adapter like the one from Delkin or a
Firewire or USB2.0 card reader. Look for multi-card readers to be on the
market before the year is out.
Desktop Hard Drive: Of course once you get back all your images need
to be stored on your network. Hundreds of GB will start to disappear as you
dump your cards from trip after trip. Even more if you make a habit of
keeping TIFF versions of your images around or doing a lot of Photoshop work
and keeping large resolution versions for printing. The good news is that
desktop RAID can let you use several inexpensive drives as a single array. I
use 3 200GB IDE drives ($120 each) to create a 400GB + failover "RAID5"
array with a Promise IDE RAID controller. I can still add another drive if
needed, or even increase the size of these over time.
Desktop Clone Drive: Even though my RAID array is fault tolerant, it
could still fail seriously enough to lose images, so I clone the array to a
400GB external drive I built from a
Seagate 400GB Internal Hard Drive ($337) and a high-performance
enclosure ($60).
Desktop Memory: Fortunately desktop memory has gotten fairly
inexpensive, only about $150/GB, because you'll almost certainly want 2GB on
your machine if you do fancy Photoshop or Capture work on your images and
then want to print them out in their full glory.
Desktop Backup: DVDs are starting to look pretty small compared to
the size of D-SLR images. You'll want to invest in at least a dual-layer DVD
drive if you expect to use it for backup, or go whole hog and purchase a
tape backup system. Even on my DDS4 tape drive my backups are now over 20
cartridges!
Network:
Most of us have more than one computer, or at least use our network to
transfer images from our notebook computers. If you're stuck with 10MBits,
you'll absolutely want to upgrade to 100MBit. If you use one machine for
Photoshop and another for image storage consider upgrading to Gigabit
Ethernet. Inexpensive cards and switches are available and often your
exiting Cat 5 Ethernet cables will work just fine.
Possible Desktop / Laptop upgrade: Then there's the big question. Are
your computers fast enough? In my case I seem to wind up feeling compelled
to build myself a new PC around the same time I get a new camera. I'm sure
part of it is impatience waiting for images to process. If your PC isn't at
least a 2GHz P4, or equivalent Mac, you may need to upgrade. Note that P4-M
's are more efficient, so a 1.6GHz P4-M is similar to a 2.4GHz P4.
Your Time: Even if you write a check for everything we've talked
about here you'll still be spending time configuring it, moving your data,
and re-doing your workflow. Make sure you've allowed for that in your plan
to transform your business with your exciting new camera!
The Silver Lining: One piece of good news is that newer D-SLRs have incredible battery life
with reliable Li-Ion batteries. You'll save money --even though each battery
might be more expensive--by needing less batteries and save time by not
having to be recharging them all the time.
Remember, it's really all about the images, so if a camera upgrade will help
you take better images or make more sales, don't let all the other issues
scare you off. But make sure you go into the decision with your eyes open
about the effects it may have on your workflow and your pocketbook.
