I thought I’d take a little time to talk about the “hidden” costs of upgrading your camera. I’ve had my Pentax K10d for the last two years or so, and during that time, Pentax has released two succeeding cameras: the K20d and then the K7. The K10d was meeting my needs and is a great camera at base ISO so I wasn’t interested in upgrading. During the last year, however, I’ve began finding myself in situations where the camera was limiting my creativity & vision. I rarely bumped up the ISO beyond 100 or 200 ISO due to the noise that is found in the resulting photos. So, when you’re out photographing flowers in a meadow on a breezy day, this becomes an issue.
I followed the rumors surrounding the next Pentax flagship camera (the K-5), in the months leading up to it’s presumed revealing at Photokina 2010. It was revealed at Photokina and I decided to become an early adopter so I pre-ordered it. It finally began shipping on the 15th of October and so I’ve only had it about a week or so (I plan on doing a writeup in the near future). There are plenty of other websites to get all the nitty gritty details about the camera but the quick specs include a 16mp sensor, ISO 100-12,800 (80-51,200 expanded mode), an improved autofocus system.
I have a modest collection of Pentax lenses but they’ve served me well so that’s why I decided to continue with a Pentax system. The K10d has a 10 megapixel sensor so, although it’s only about a 20% increase in photo resolution, it’s a SIGNIFICANT increase in file size. I shoot using the Adobe DNG RAW file format and the K10d’s RAW files are approximately about 17Mb each; the K5’s RAW files are about 30Mb each. Consider this- on a typical day of shooting, I’ll probably take somewhere around 70 photos. Using the K10d, that amounts to about 900Mb of storage just for the RAW files. For my only outing so far with the K-5, I took 38 photos and that required the same 900Mb of disk space.
Taking this a step further, let’s consider photo processing. I edit my photos using Photoshop CS5 and save my work both as Photoshop files (the PSD files) as well as an output JPEG. With the K10d (10 MP size), the output PSD files were running someplace close to 400Mb in size. The K-5 (16 MP size) output files are now anywhere from 700-900Mb in size. If you’re any sort of regular to my blog, you know I usually post about a dozen photos from each outing. As you can see, the disk space usage QUICKLY adds up!
My older laptop has been processing my K10d’s RAW files fairly well but it’s starting to show its age with the newer K-5 RAW files. The point I want to get across is that you need to look at your whole workflow when you’re considering an upgrade. Using myself as an example, I was just upgrading my camera body but I now have to spend additional money for extra disk storage and most likely a new computer. Things I hadn’t really thought of before my daydreams of a new uber-camera!
Don’t let your zeal for a shiny new piece of equipment distract you from the ability to do your work.
