On the eve of receiving my new D70 Outfit, I thought I’d review the value I’ve extracted from my current digital camera.

Purchasing, developing, and printing film is expensive. If you go cheap and spend $3/24 exposures on film and another $4 on 4x6 prints, you’re spending about $0.29/photo. And most of those aren’t going to be pictures you’ll want to put in the old album anyway.

With digital, every photo is essentially free. There’s still a price to print them of course, but you don’t have to process them to see them. And the cost of printing digital photos is already below $0.20/print.

My 5-megapixel Canon S50, purchased April 2003, cost me almost $400. Pretty expensive for a camera. But since then I’ve taken 5,657 photos. That’s equivalent to 236 rolls of 24-exposure film which would have cost me about $1,600 to buy and process.

In reality, if I had been using a film camera, I wouldn’t have taken as many pictures. But I also wouldn’t have nearly as many wonderful photos of my kids as I do today. The freedom from film processing costs allows you to be much more creative and carefree about photography. And the more you shoot, the more likely you are to capture a moment you will cherish forever. Digital cameras, even the very expensive ones, are really a wonderful bargain.