Ben Rubinstein
Active member
But you work without backup. Right.My clients always like the fact I exceed their requirements. When you talk about the professional photographic artist, good enough is really not the criteria.
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But you work without backup. Right.My clients always like the fact I exceed their requirements. When you talk about the professional photographic artist, good enough is really not the criteria.
Or do we just have to do nothing but praise MFD here?
Right.But you work without backup. Right.
Actually I think that the fact that I'm not in love with my camera gear, but consider them simply tools. Fine tools. I do not consider my self to be in another league because I own and use MF.
I recommend MF format film and digital left right and center, but I am realistic about what you have to "put up with" for that increased image quality.
But I also think that it is important for a working photographer like me to share a realistic opinion on gear. In a discussion regarding pricing I think that features, performance and reliability are part of the debate.
Or do we just have to do nothing but praise MFD here?
This makes sense, but is this really that different from the way medium format gear was sold during the film era? It seems to me that the delta in price between formats has changed, but the distribution model has not.It's mainly to do with the sales structure.
Consumer DSLR cameras are sold just about everywhere and made in high quantities.
MF are made in smaller quantities and with less competition. Manufactures prefer to go the specialized dealership rout. These dealers obviously want to make good money and are good at doing so.
I'll try to be clearer.Why? Have large format camera prices been dropping? Have car prices been dropping? I really am unsure why you started this thread? What exactly do you want to know?
I'll try to be clearer.
With both film gear prior to digital and digital gear today, there is a difference in price between medium format and 135 format gear. It is my impression that the difference is considerably larger with the digital gear.
My question is what accounts for this increased difference.
(Note that I'm not asking whether the difference is worth it - as with film, I assume there are pros and cons to different formats, and it's a matter of personal preference. Me, I like large negatives when printing, and I like printing large...)
Thanks,
DH
I can definitely see the point of a backup, but just because someone might use a DF as their main camera, do they really need another DF as a backup? Call me crazy but wouldn't an AFD or AFD II get a person through a technical failure in a pinch? I got my AFD with 80mm lens and film back for $750, it works great as my main camera. I don't see why anyone would need the latest and greatest just for a back up.Fred has a point, no pro works without a backup body and you could buy 1.5 D800's for the price of a backup DF and that's before the back.
Interesting. It does sound like prices have moved down significantly from where they were back in 2000 when the Kodak DCS back came out.Well, MFD has been marching forward ... at one time the popular 16 meg square format Kodak DCS Pro Back 645 was $12,000. without a camera or lens. Add those, and the base MFD kit would be about $16,000 back then. And those dollars were worth more compared to now. Slow performance, 1.5X lens crop factor, questionable battery life, even more questionable ISO performance topping out at 400.
Flash forward to today, 40 meg Pentax 645D kit @ $10K, much better ISO performance, 1.3X crop factor, weather sealed, fast etc., Hasselblad H4D/31 kit still for less than that Kodak kit by $2.5K, and the Phase/Leaf equivalents.
Keeping in mind that those are today's dollars, not 10 years ago.
Where it gets really pricey is buying the latest, greatest, biggest, baddest kit on the planet. Top dogs always command the big bucks.
Best to buy a generation or two behind ... after the breath taking initial drop in value as the next best thing takes its place, it gets a lot more affordable.
-Marc
I see. So the sensor really does play a big role. Is it primarily the R&D on the sensor, or the production cost that comes into play?DH -
The primary contributing factors are the development costs of the larger sensors and the smaller market for medium format digital (which is also smaller than the market was at its peak for medium format film).
This makes sense. I don't have the impression that anybody is making huge gobs of money in this business, so it would stand to reason that margins can't be all that large!The specialized or non-commodity dealer channel has a negligible effect on pricing. Let's say, for sake of argument, the margin for medium format products are 10% higher than 35mm. A Phase One P45+/DF Kit is $22,990. Reduce 10% and you are at $20,690. Not much of a difference and negligible effect on unit sales.
I'm not an expert on these things nor a historian, but I have a feeling if I could go back to the time I bought my Nikon Ftn and compared it to the medium format film options of the day (maybe 1970) the multiplier between the two cameras isn't that different than the multiplier between a professional level dslr and a mfd of today.But do you think that the price of entry-level DMF kit is still going down these days, inflation notwithstanding?
Ben, few commercial MFD users have a back-up ... many MFD shooters don't even have a MFD camera ... they rent one, and hire a tech guy to run it. When they rent, there isn't a back-up either, the back-up is at the rental house. It'd be a rare client bean-counter that'd okay a double rental line item anyway.But you work without backup. Right.
I see. So the sensor really does play a big role. Is it primarily the R&D on the sensor, or the production cost that comes into play?
I didn't realize that MF digital is smaller niche than MF film. That's a shame. I guess that begs the question whether the price is higher because the market is smaller, or the market is smaller because the price is higher!
This makes sense. I don't have the impression that anybody is making huge gobs of money in this business, so it would stand to reason that margins can't be all that large!
Thanks for your explanation.
DH