bcsmithga's photostream

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Just a beginner amateur photographer trying to learn it all. Started in May 2008 with a Nikon D60.

In early 2009, I decided to try film, which I had not used for anything more than snapshots since I was a kid. The epiphany came to me after Nikon rolled out their newest digital body, the D3x. The body alone retailed for $8000.

Around the same time, I realized that with good, quality professional scanning of negatives, film could give just as good, or even better, digital images than most digital SLRs out there. But "no one" shoots film any more, so there's a ton of used film camera bodies out there for a fraction of their original price. This meant that for less than the price of a new D60 body, which I already had, I could get a used pro or semi-pro film body pretty easily.

The big advantage to going that route was that the pro and semi-pro bodies can utilize a huge number of lenses with far fewer limitations than with my D60. See, the D60, like the D40 and other "consumer" level dSLR cameras, does not have an autofocus motor inside the body. Thus, they can only autofocus with lenses that have a motor built into the lens itself. Nikon started making those kind of lenses in 1998.

Pro and semi-pro bodies, whether film or dSLR, do have motors built into the body, and therefore can use any autofocus lens all the way back to 1986, when Nikon started to make AF lenses. Those lenses are also slightly cheaper, in general, because you don't have to pay for any motor inside them.

Of course, higher-end dSLR bodies do have AF motors in them. But even the cheapest at the time, the Nikon D300, retailed for $1800 new, and used was only a few hundred less.

Instead, I got a used Nikon F100 body for about $175, which looked as good as new visually. Not to be outdone, and to take advantage of some of the features not in the F100, I managed to snag a fairly well-used Nikon F5 for $190 (though they usually tend to go for $300-$350 used).

Thus, instead of spending $1300-$1400 on a used D300, I got a pro and semi-pro film body, with $1000 left to spare. That money, of course, can be used for lenses, which hold their value long after a digital camera body has become obsolete.