A couple of questions for thoes who know more than I

I work in a school as some of you know, and they are thinking about restarting the photography courses (A level, AS and BETEC I think) I've been asked about the digital side of things . . .
I did photography back in 1997 I think, back when there was no such thing as a DSLR

As part of the course they need to set up a dark room and such for normal b&w film based work which is not cheap, which in turn means as much budget as can be saved the better.
ie while 2x £600 dslr cameras would be nice, 6x £200 cameras would be better because the number of available units will effect the number of students who can actually do the course.

I've had a look at the cheap dslr thread http://forums.hexus.net/photography-...heap-dslr.html 2nd hand could well be a good option.
Because this is a school, buying from ebay is not an option, I saw Animus's link and SRS looks good and is relatively close.
http://www.srsmicrosystems.co.uk/c/3...R-Cameras.html

So what I need is some suggestions on which ones from there stuff to look at, also any good non-dslr options, the pentax mx1 looks nice but it's £400

Next, editing
They've got some pc's and i3 laptops with photoshop on, however again more would be good and money saved here mean more can go to cameras
Which is why a suggestion of ipad's or galaxy note 10's was put forward.
the idea here is that at £330 the built in 5mp camera will be good enough and they can also be used for editing, so pc+camera in one at lower cost so more money can be put into getting a few better cameras
I think I need to talk to the teacher a bit more to find out what's entailed in the course just need to throw the idea out there to see if it has any merit.

Printing
This is probably going to involve some fairly high volumes so my gut reaction is that an inkjet is out, too expensive and time consuming to run.
My thinking is an colour laser jet, HP CP3525n (if we can still get that model) mainly as it's a printer we already have and use, the quality on them is very good and they are solid work horses.

Well it depends what wants to be tought, the built in camera on a tablet won't let you learn anything really. As few allow for any control over:

Appature
Shutter
Sensativity

These are the three variables which one has to balance to get a correctly exposed (ie not to dark or light) image.

A lot of the packages that is the camera and lens used on a tablet offer no flexability at all. As such I can only suggest its a really bad idea to try and use tablets.

I think the issue here is you need to ideally get similar cameras, so if one breaks because little Timmy threw it, you don't have to worry about left over bits going to waste.

Realistically you want something that can shoot RAW so you can let them play around with developing the images, the existing photoshop licenses will do this nicely. If not you *could* try and go with the open source software..... Maybe.

If you've got an older camera, that takes lower MP images, you don't need as much grunt in computers to process them.

Looking at older models has the benefit of, cheaper, and less demanding on the computers. With regards to printing? Are you sure people still want too? I mean they can just take them on a USB stick to boots and pay 20p. The rise of Instragram and such shows how people really don't care for hardcopies so much any more. I guess I'm saying its an expense that unless they are going to learn about calibration and stuff, might not be needed.

So I would suggest looking at cheap DSLR bodies, old and new, preferably on the same system. Then comes the joys of lenses.... Some kit lenses are cheap, but they don't allow you to play with very wide apature. A couple of second hand primes from the 70s that are full manual on the other hand do. That way once people have learnt the basics on a kit, they can play with a fully manual prime? Just a thought.

Yes I know one of the things the teacher was looking at was getting some bodies that can share the same lenses then get a basic cheap lens for each body and a couple of other more expensive lenses so they could be put on any of the bodies.

Also what about compact systems? the ones where you can change the lenses?

What about editing on a tablet, reding around most people seem to say they are good from browsing through photo's (bigger screen) and minor touching up/cropping for webuploads.

as to "I mean they can just take them on a USB stick to boots and pay 20p" that's an idea, I think hard copies are still required for the course/moderation, same reason they are also using a physical darkroom and film cameras

Thinking of that, they still have some SLR's would the lenses on them be interchangeable with dslr's? (even if they are the same model) I'll need to find out what they have.

tablets are a long way from fully editing high res digital files

for prints, look at online professional services, most if they get the digital image by 2PM will ship it out for next day...

find out what SLR's you already own (chances are they will be compatible with modern DSLRs of the same manufacturer)

when i did photography at college we only had 1 lens to work with a 50 1.8

For printing, short of the cost of commercial printing and the time delay implied as well, perhaps look at second-hand printers, and be very careful about what you buy. The largest cost component is the ink, but you can get "compatible" inks at a fraction of the cost of originals, and some of the compatibles wre pretty good.

If you buy the right machines, you can fit a continuous ink system, with high capacity external ink tanks feeding "cartridges" that are not replaced. That way, the cost of the ink us vastly reduced.

But for my money, good though they are for office work, there isn't a colour laser printer yet made that is a patch on the image quality of a good photo inkjet. For a photo course, I would have thought image quality was pretty key?