I recently ran across a blog post where a photographer was complaining about how much “space” his Nikon D810 files consumed, and how “costly” this space was. Really? I’m not exactly sure what this photographer meant, but let me take a slightly tongue-in-cheek look at “space” and “cost” today, compared to the same in the film days.
I store my digital files on hard drives. I just checked the B&H website and a 4TB Western Digital external AC powered USB3 drive is currently priced at $119. A 4TB drive will hold roughly 90000 D810 RAW files. Assuming that files are processed, I’ll cut that number in half as the drive’s capacity for final images. So, 45000 images fit on a drive that is roughly 6.5 x 5.5 x 2 inches.
Back in the film days my slide storage solution involved standard office four drawer file cabinets. Each drawer could hold about 5000 slides in archival 20-slide pages, groups of 10 pages dropped into a single hanging file folder. So one cabinet = 20000 slides. Let’s cram a few more pages into each drawer, and say that 45000 slides could fit into two file cabinets.
OK, two four drawer file cabinets: $200 (about $100 each back then, quite a bit more today).
100+ hanging file folders per cabinet: $40 or so.
45000 slides held in 20-slide pages means 2250 pages. B&H still sells these, currently $7 for a pack of 25. I’ll knock this down to $5, so $450 for pages.
Add in the cost of film and processing: 45000 slides @ 36 shots per roll = about 1250 rolls of film, and at a ballpark figure of $10 per roll total cost that’s an additional $12500.
Total expense: somewhere around $13300.
Those two file cabinets take up a goodly space: 52 x 30 x 22 inches when placed adjoining.
So…$119 and 71.5 cubic inches versus $13300 and 34320 cubic inches. And I’m not even going to mention the difference in weight between one external hard drive and two fully loaded file cabinets.
2 Comments
Great points. I can not image why anyone would think storage of image files is expensive these days. This goes for the endeavor of photography in general as well. Many things associated with photography can be expensive, but in general the low cost has made everyone a “photographer”. At least in their own minds.
Very good analysis. There is also the issue of security with digital image files. Heaven forbid the location where your hard drives are stored catches fire or is in the path of a flood, or other natural disaster. You could have a backup copy of all your files off-site, or at the very least you might be able to evacuate with your drives in your hand. I wouldn’t want to try to move two full file cabinets out of harms way in this type of situation.