The cost of digital images versus film

Digital photography has radically changed the photographic process over the last few years. Correcting lighting or other challenges on location that used to take hours with film now take minutes on the computer. Clients benefit since this frees up more time for the photographer to spend on location creating images.

Digital photography systems are considerably more expensive than their film predecessors. A few years go a large format film system could be had for $10,000-$15,000 and could be used, virtually unchanged, for decades. A high-end digital system now costs about $60,000 and comes with a shelf-life of only a few years before technology changes and updates are required. This fact alone accounts for much of the additional expense of digital photography.

Even with all these advances, working with digital photography files is still a time-consuming process. Professional digital cameras record photographs in a “raw” format. This is a proprietary file format, different for each camera manufacturer, and the digital equivelant of a negative. The raw file simply isn’t usable by a client; it would be the digital equivelant of sending the client a roll of unprocessed film after the shoot – hardly a finished product. This raw file must be corrected, optimized, and converted to a more common file format – matching what the photographer visualized - before being sent to the client. As each photograph requires custom adjustment of color, density, tonal range, and sharpening, this can be a time consuming process. To provide the highest quality photographs there is simply no quick, automated way to do the job. The time spent in finalizing the photographs typically mitigates the savings in film and processing. The good news is the photography itself is faster on digital than film so more photographs can be completed in a given period of time. While there may not be a significant savings in the elimination of film and processing, there is a savings in the photography itself as more images can be completed in the same period of time.

For more information on digital photography please see ASMP's articles "Digital photography" and "What Do Digital Processing Charges Buy You?"