I don't have a digital camera. Well, I do have one in my mobile but it so useless that I don't feel like calling it camera. But at the moment I have camera with me. I took it from Finland while I was there for a holiday and now it is with me in Zurich.

It is a Minolta 7000i. It is heavy and it is around 15-20 years old. It used to have autofocus but that functionality has been broken many years. Luckily its range finder still works and gives information for manual focusing. I had it with me in Poland and colors of some photos taken in mountains were a little bit strange. Maybe I should have had a filter because it was extremely sunny on that day.

So far I have spent one roll of film here and yesterday I dropped it to be developed. Just for curiosity I wanted also have photos on CD. Perhaps that was the reason why the price of developing and making 24 prints with CD was around 40 CHF - 25 EUR. Huh! With those costs I can easily reason for myself buying a digital camera.

But the issue I haven't yet solved is storing of digital photos. At the moment I have most recent in iPhoto, something on CDs and I think some photos are just gone forever. Only long time solution would be to use some printing service to create paper prints. I don't trust my hard disk or CD-Rs that much as CD-R lasts with some luck 5 years and if stored and handled with care it might do maximum 10 years.

That is just way too short time as photos are supposed to last 100 years. But on the other hand the costs of traditional photographing seem to be high. I was thinking about taking that Minolta to repair shop to be cleaned and I also saw some used AF-lenses for it. Then it would most likely last another 10 years while producing long lasting traditional photos. Hmm, difficult choice.