paddler4

Thanks. I should have clarified that I was talking about gear for personal use.

This depends on your policy. I would read your homeowner's policy coverage and then ask your agent for clarification. Some policies either exclude or limit coverage for some classes of goods unless you purchase a rider. This is sometimes done for jewelry, for example. So you need to see whether your gear is covered without a rider, what risks are covered, and what limits there are on coverage. That said, I rely on my homeowner's policy for my photo gear.

Please put this to rest, or take it elsewhere.

I don't know how much of that is true of camera manufacturers--and the answer almost certainly varies from brand to brand--but to some extent, that is true of almost all complex manufacturing now. That's one of the main reasons for the supply chain problems that have affected much of the economy. I don't know about the UK, but in the US, the press has been writing about this for several years. One of the responses is labeled "reshoring" in the US: establishing parts suppliers nearer to final assembly, or even doing it themselves. While it's clear that it is sometimes impossible to get parts for older cameras, the idea that parts are never made for cameras more than 7 years old, regardless of brand or model, is both illogical (why would the same time limit apply to all cameras?) and simply wrong. For example, the Canon 5D Mark IV was introduced almost exactly 7 years ago (went on sale Sept 2016), and Canon is still producing and selling them. It will be years more before support is ended. Some years after a manufacturer stops producing a camera, they'll stop stockpiling parts, but you haven't provided any evidence about how long that period is for various cameras. And this problem is true of other manufactured goods as well. I recently had to junk an old but functioning electric lawnmower because the manufacturer had long since stopped producing and stocking a protective flap that goes on the back of the mower. And collectors of classic cars face the same problem, although I think after a longer time.

We could do without the gratuitous insults. Hjoseph: both Dog and I provided an answer to your problem, which is that you are basically stuck: you bear the costs of upgrading your OS and software or accept the cost of things that won't work with the old OS and software. We gave you specific information about this, e.g., dates when things were replaced. No one can get you out of this dilemma, as far as I know. So pick your poison. That explanation is all the help I know how to give. Please don't blame me or Dog. It's not our doing. Off topic, but re the golden days of mainframes: this is off topic, but as someone who was on the other side of the desk--a user--I have to say that those days were awful by comparison. I can do orders of magnitude more with my tiny, inexpensive laptop than I could do with that enormous, expensive, hard to maintain mainframe, and I have an easy-to use and very powerful OS (two, actually) rather than the limited, obscure, and hard to master JCL. I get results almost instantly rather than overnight and can easily input the output from one software package into another. For example, in minutes, I can do a complex statistical analysis, move the output into other software, and generate sophisticated graphics. I can then drop those graphics into a document and resize in seconds. I can take piles of output files and search them for relevant content, etc., etc.. You may pine for the old days when none of that was possible, but I certainly don't.

I went directly from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I don't recall many compatibility problems. You would have to check each of the software packages and peripherals to know. The only incompatibility I remember--I may be forgetting a few--is that I had to replace my x-Rite calibration tool. I didn't replace any other peripherals, and I don't recall problems with software. What you are experiencing is the mirror image of the same problem, but much more severe: things that won't work because you are using an old operating system. As long as software and hardware keep changing rapidly, I doubt there will be a way to avoid this fully.

I shoot with Canon (currently, an R6 Mark II), but I haven't used either of those bodies. It seems like an odd comparison to me. What do you mean by "image quality"? Dynamic range? Fine detail? The 5DS and 5DS R were introduced more than 8 years ago for people who wanted lots of megapixels. The sensor shows its age; at base ISO, it has two stops less dynamic range than the R8 or R6 Mark II. The two cameras differ in lots of ways, although some of these won't matter to you. So, one question is whether you need all of those megapixels and therefore are willing to pay the price of smaller photosites and an old sensor design, both of which will exact a cost in terms of dynamic range and low-light performance. Most people don't. Unless you crop severely or print VERY large, you won't see any improvement from the additional MPX, and unless you use good lenses, you won't see much, if any. For example, on a Canon professional printer, a 13 x 19 print requires 22.2 MPX. The fact is that most printing software handles moderate up-rezzing well, and you won't see those individual pixels anyway at a reasonable viewing distance. I've exhibited 13 x 19 and 17 x 22 prints from 22 and 30 MPX sensors, and the prints are excellent with those resolutions. On a computer screen, you need even less. I personally do a fair amount of urban night photography, and one question about that is how you do it. I generally do it with a very low ISO and a tripod for long exposures, and for that, even sensors that don't handle low light well by bumping ISO do just fine. If you do it handheld with short shutter speeds and higher ISO, I would choose a camera with larger photosites and a newer sensor that handles higher ISOs well.

I shot with a 5D IV for quite a number of years. I loved it. It's definitely a step up from the 6D in several respects. In many ways, I think it's close to an ideal DSLR: superb image quality, superb ergonomics, pretty good dynamic range, etc. The AF system is a lot more sophisticated than that of the 6D, so give yourself time to become acquainted with it. Also, a lot of things are customizable. It took me a few weeks to get it all set up to optimize it for my uses. Re noise reduction and enhance: if you shoot in reasonable light, expose well, and don't crop severely, you won't often need either of these. I find the AI noise reduction in Lightroom quite good, and in some cases, it does better than I can do manually, but I don't often need it. I've exhibited prints up to 17 x 22 taken with that camera, without any enhancement.

nicely done

I'll second what Edwin wrote. If you are using a relatively lightweight tripod and head, having a way to hang a weight can be critically important. On one of my first night photography shoots, a gust of wind blew my camera over onto concrete. I was lucky: the only damage was a shattered lens hood and a bent filter ring. However, it could have been a disaster. And lesser motion will ruin long exposures even when there is no risk. My tripod and head are quite light--an Oben carbon fiber tripod with a Markins head--so this is very important for me. I sometimes simply hang my photo backpack.

Indeed. That's one reason I suggest to people who don't need archival prints that they consider a printer that uses dye inks, particularly the pro-200 or its predecessors. My Prograf 1000 uses a lot of ink for self-cleaning. It can't be moved without draining all of the ink from the lines, which is a large percentage of the total and also requires a bunch of waste tanks. I used the Pro 100 and a 9000 II for years with never a hiccup, and they needed only brief self-cleaning even after months of sitting idle. I changed to the Prograf because I put a small number of prints up for sale, and I wanted those to be archival. I also wanted to be able to print larger than 13 x 19, which is the limit for Canon's dye printers.

Water colors? I did a side-by-side comparison of the same image printed on my Prograf Pro 1000 and my Pro-100, when I still had the 100. The prints were very, very similar. I've exhibited prints done on the Pro 100. The big difference is durability: the dye prints fade far faster. One can indeed replace Canon print heads, but they are pricey. The Prograf Pro 1000 currently sells for $1250. The print head is about $700.

I shouldn't have missed that point. If he finds an old converter that antedates the raw format he wants to convert, it won't solve his problem.

Which just suggests that Adobe has pulled off it's servers the old versions it no longer supports--unless someone kept one and is putting it on their own server. The only solution is to use a newer operating system.

The current DNG converter requires Windows 10 or 11. See https://helpx.adobe.com/in/camera-raw/using/adobe-dng-converter.html This is an example of the point I posted earlier. When you use very old software, you don't just lose access to new features. Some other things just won't work because the developers don't want to spend time making new software compatible with an OS or other software that is out of date and no longer available.

What I meant is that the pair of LR and Photoshop has been the only way to buy current versions of the software for some years. Both CS5 and Lightroom 3 were replaced in 2012. The subscription version of Lightroom was released in 2017. So for anyone wanting current software, the only option for quite some time has been to buy the Creative Cloud photographer's package, which includes both LR Classic and Photoshop. As your later post and Dog's answer show, using old software can sometimes cause problems, in addition to missing newer features.

Anything stable. Beyond that, not much matters, since the equipment will be stationary, so pick according to other features you need.

This is a story for another day, but I find Photoshop‘s focus stacking too limited, allowing too little control, and it’s also slow. But the pint I was making is only that the many available plugins increase the value of LR

If I'm not mistaken, that combination has been the only way to buy either LR Classic or Photoshop for a number of years. To say that you need photoshop to do those particular edits isn't correct. You can clone, do content-aware healing, dodge, burn, and make selections in the current version of LR Classic. That's not to say that these tools are as powerful as they are in Photoshop. They aren't. But they are often good enough. And you can do a lot of other editing as well, e.g., reduction of both color and luminance noise, sharpening, selecting color ranges and changing hue or luminance, adding local contrast, etc. It's certainly true that LR Classic is a powerful databased manager, but IMHO, that's not the only reason to use it. It has a superb printing module that is far quicker and easier to use than printing from Photoshop. There is also a wide array of very useful plugins available for LR. For example, I use one that automatically converts a focus stack to 16-bit TIFs and loads it into Zerene for stacking. I use another that creates a JPEG to my specs, uploads it to Smugmug, and deletes it. I use another for exposure fusion.

Re the order of edits in LR: I did a test years ago that showed that for simple global edits, the order in which I did the edits had no impact; Lightroom re-establishes the order it wants after each step. However, this is apparently not the case with some edits, such as spot healing. I have been searching without any luck for the source that explained this. Now that LR classic has powerful selections, I wonder whether there are things other than spot healing and cloning for which order matters and that should be performed early in the sequence. anyone know a good source with details about this?

I rarely disagree with Dog, but to some degree, I do in this case. But first, I don't see this as an either /or. The Adobe photographers' package comes with both, on the assumption that many if not most will use both, for different reasons. If you shoot raw, you have no choice: you have to start with either LR or ACR, which have the same processing engine wrapped in different UIs. It's of course true that the underlying mechanics of LR Classic and Photoshop are entirely different, as Dog says. However, Adobe has been steadily increasing the power of the editing functions in LR classic. One can easily do things in LR now that were impossible only a few years ago. I shoot raw and almost always start in LR rather than ACR because I use many features of LR other than rendering raws and have a number of LR plug-ins that are very important for my workflow. At some point, I generally move the image to Photoshop for more complex editing. Each year, I'm able to do more editing in LR, and I now complete editing in LR on a larger share of my images than I did a few years ago and do more of my editing in LR before moving to Photoshop. To take only one example: I do a lot of candids of kids, and candids of kids often have lousy backgrounds. So, I often want to darken the backgrounds relative to the subject. That is now trivially easy and extremely fast to do in LR; it will quite reliably select the subject, and it lets me invert that mask to select the background. And as Dog says, this has the advantage that it's totally nondestructive.

The pro 200 is dye based, a successor to the Pro 100 that I used for years. If it's better than the 100, it's a great printer. I switched to a pigment-based Prograf 1000 only for two reasons: size, and the fact that I was exhibiting and selling prints and therefore needed archival prints. The prints from the 100 were very, very similar in quality, and I didn't have a single problem with clogging even if I left the printer idle for months. The prograf hasn't had a clog that required my intervention, but when I haven't used it for a while, it sometimes uses a lot of expensive ink running a self-cleaning program. I still think dye is the best solution for a lot of people.

yes, and my aftermarket chargers also

Exactly what I would have posted. And as Dog's post suggests, you can do this very easily in Lightroom or Photoshop. I don't do many conversions, but I do them all in Lightroom. I find the targeted adjustment option a powerful addition to manually adjusting individual colors. Nik hasn't been free for a long time, and the old free version no longer works on my Windows/Adobe setup. What I can't speak to is the raw material, that is, the qualities of the B&W and color negatives. I shot film for decades but stopped entirely once digital became powerful, so I have no knowledge of current films.

I've used Watson batteries for years with several different Canon bodies. I've never had any problems with them. In fact, one of the two I routinely carry with my R6II is a Watson.