Digital Rot
© 2008 KenRockwell.com. All rights reserved.

The Nikon D1X. The must-have $5,500 camera of 2003, today worth about $75. The 17-35mm f/2.8 AF-S lens? Worth more today than when it was new, and still Nikon's best all-purpose wide zoom.

September 2008    More Nikon Reviews    Canon Reviews

Old film cameras aren't worth much, since few people shoot film.

Old digital cameras are worth even less.

One day it dawned on me, after I heard about more than one friend buying an old Nikon D1 or D1X for $75, that these old digital cameras are worth far less precisely because they are clogged with worthless digital guts, instead of just having a hole for film.

The D1 and D1X was a Nikon F5 with a sensor and some computer junk thrown in, just as the long forgotten Nikon D2Xs is the current F6 with digital guts. People paid Nikon four times as much for the cameras with the digital guts.

My friends paid $5,500 for the D1X new, and I paid $4,500 for my new D1H back in their day, but the D1X is worthless today because it's only got the resolution of a Nikon D50 and runs more slowly than a D90.

While a used D1X today is hardly worth the cost of packing and shipping, a used F5 still sells for hundreds of dollars because it takes film.

An old D2H is only worth about $500 on eBay, while a used F6 still goes for four figures. The F6 is still the world's best 35mm film camera.

Even though the digital cameras cost about four times the price of their film equivalents when new, the digital cameras are worth far less after a couple of years.

Digital Rot means that a camera's digital guts rot-out its value in just a few years because you can't remove the digital guts. Sadly, Digital Rot is a disease shared by all digital cameras.

Buy a film camera and you can shoot it for a lifetime. Buy an expensive digital camera, and you only get a few years out of it before its value rots away.

Don't let me sway you rich guys from buying digital cameras, but understand that the ritual of buying a new digital SLR every other year is not a game for folks who have to worry about money, and you can get digital files from every film camera if you want them.

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