The beginning of the end for my film use. My first “proper” digital camera. The quality requirements for stock images at Tony Stone Images were quite high and I knew the affordable 5 and 6 megapixel cameras of the time were insufficient. I was alerted to this camera by the photographer Steve Bloom who sent me a layered Photoshop file containing a 35mm film scan, a 6×7 film scan and a 1Ds digital image of the same scene. When I saw that this camera out resolved the 6×7 image I knew this was the watershed camera that meant the future was digital. The files from it still needed interpolating from 11 megapixels to the required A3 @300dpi requirement (approx 16 megapixels) but with a little sharpening the files looked fine.
By this stage I was having to pay the heating bills on a large Victorian property facing the North Sea in North Norfolk so its price was a little out of my reach, thankfully I manage to sell the source code to a program that injected metadata ingested from a spreadsheet into whole folders of image files. I had always wanted to write a larger scale Windows program and a client offered me the opportunity to do this (and thence to buy the camera!).
My film and processing bills fell sharply shortly after purchase. What I lost is some character of film and grain that is not immediately present in digital images. I have retained all my digital images from my first digital camera (a Kodak DC120 1 megapixel camera I bought in 1998) but it needs active effort to ensure image files are retained on multiple media and hard drives, easier and cheaper to store film in an archive folder and kept warm and dry.
This camera was purchased on 1st November 2003.