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Gold/Mining/Energy : Pacific Rim Mining V.PFG

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To: Richnorth who wrote (13952)	10/21/2000 1:03:44 PM
From: GraceZ	of 14627

I felt exactly as you did a year ago. I thought its still years before the general public accepts digital because of the ease with which they can store and retrieve pictures on conventional print material. I've also taught unsophisticated people to scan and print images and I know how difficult it is for the average person. The factor you forget about and one that I'm intimately involved with, since I've been running a photo lab for 25 years, is that even in large Asian countries the average person doesn't process or print their film, a lab does. I'm about to go up to NYC to check out a trade show for people like me in the photo industry. I can tell you before I even get there that the number of pure photographic processing machines that they will be demonstrating will be minuscule compared to the pure digital solutions. I had to really look for them last year, I think there was only one company showing nothing but photographic out of hundreds of exhibitors. If I was writing a business plan for a lab today there is no way I would set it up as pure photographic. The machines are big, messy, expensive and worst of all require plumbing and waste treatment and they depreciate rapidly. Now if you had your choice as a business owner would you set yourself up with a nice $150k one hour lab machine that takes up 100 square feet or a $20k digital solution that fits on a large desktop? You are still going to be selling prints at the same price point.... In fact you can sell prints from the digital at a slightly higher price point because of the absence of the cost of the film. Of course, I recognize that that in order to have a business based on digital output you have to have more digital cameras out there, but that will happen as the price point of digital becomes more competitive. Recently I had a case of reverse sticker shock. I went to investigate some digital camera options for a client. I hadn't compared prices and options on them for about six months. I sat there with my mouth open at how much the prices have dropped in just that six months I wasn't paying attention. Yesterday I went to Walmart's site. They will process your film and post your pictures on their website for you or grandma or anyone to go look at..... No email or download needed. They do this as an added feature of processing your film. Kodak has set up numerous partnerships with ISPs to allow people to look at, store and order digital prints from both their conventional film and their digital photos. This is the transitional stage that commercial photography entered about five years ago and is about to exit for reasons I sited earlier. The transition to all digital will actually happen faster in less developed countries the same way cell phones were adopted before traditional phones were in these places. Any time you can cut out that much cost in infrastructure and consumables it doesn't make sense to go with the traditional technology. I would say the US might even be last in it's widespread adoption just simply because the interests in keeping silver based are so entrenched. Nothing you see in an offset print hasn't been digitized. I can't tell you how many arguments I got in back when that transition started to happen. People were going on and on about how digital would never match the photographic solutions in place for price or quality. I can show you digital prints that you could not tell were different from photographic without a magnifier. They come from equipment that at one time was very expensive but is now in line with conventional. We are now moving to a point where it will be less expensive and by a large factor.

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