first big newb mistake with film :)

[Michael Kubaszak]

I think it's bullshit that that happens. If you pay for 2000' you should get close to it. Not 600' feet, I'd say at max 150' off. You're paying for it. At that point, I'd rather have them charge me a few more cents a foot and get exactly what I pay for.

[K Borowski]

Yeah, unfortunately the only country on Earth, the United States with a true "Freedom to Measure" also has to live with the hassle of having to put up with metric measures.

 

Only two of the fifty states, New York and, I think, Vermont REQUIRE foot-pound U.S. customary measures on all products sold there.

 

We Ohians have to put up with MKS, although we damned-well don't have to like it! ;-)

[Ian Cooper]

Yeah, unfortunately the only country on Earth, the United States with a true "Freedom to Measure" also has to live with the hassle of having to put up with metric measures.... <snip>

 

Well the UK finally "regained" the freedom to continue selling goods in imperial units, so long as metric is displayed alongside. Metric Martyrs.

 

Despite supposedly being 'officially' a metric country, you still order a pint of beer/cider/lager, pints of milk are delivered from the milkman, road signs are displayed in miles, speed limits are in miles per hour, vehicle fuel consumption is usually stated in "miles per gallon", dieters tend to count the calories ...and there are numerous things sold/measured in exceedingly odd metric values that just so happen to convert to a nice round imperial equivalent! ;) . Even otherwise nice round metric figures seem based on previous imperial history: Coal bought loose from the coalman was delivered in hundredweight sacks - now precisely the same size hessian sacks are defined as 50kg - just 2lb (1.6%) difference from the original cwt.

 

The slightly daft situation is that whilst I came through the education system in the 1980's, even the simple existance of imperial was almost totally ignored - we were almost taught the whole of the civilised world immediately adopted metric as some kind of divine gift from God. Yet leave the school gates and even children today enter a world where both systems happily co-exist. Metric might predominate, but Kodak/Fuji sell film as 100/400ft lengths rather than 30/120metres, and the UK labs charge per ft for their services as well!

 

In practice the measurement system doesn't really make much difference so long as the units are also displayed! It can't be denied that the principle of just shifted decimal places is a lot easier to learn, but I do find it slightly ammusing that whilst metric is often promoted as being based on solid scientific principles, rather than around otherwise nominal random numbers, in practice, metric has been redefined a number of times - and the base standard has very little scientific basis! Originally a metre was 1/10,000,000 the distance from the North Pole to the equator following a path passing through Paris. Then it was changed to the length of one particular platinum-iridium 'standard' bar, next choice for it was the wavelength of light emitted by one specific atomic transition. I believe the current basis for it is the distance travelled by light in an absolute vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second.

 

For such a wonderful scientific system, it's 'standard' seems to not only keep changing, but also seems to be based around some pretty nominal targets! There seems no scientific basis for passing the meridian through Paris, just that it was the host country's capital city! I presume the length of the 'standard' bar was set to match the original 'nominal' meridian. The light emitted by the transistion is no doubt unchanging, but I suspect which specific transition was chosen to match the already existing platinum bar, rather than for any other reason. Even now... since when has 1/299,792,458 of a second conformed to the decimalised principles of the Metric system, where everything is based around multiples of 10?!! It seems to me that the number of millionths of a second were chosen to conform to the same figure as everything that preceeded it... all the way back to a 'true' metric sub-division of a pretty nominal distance - which due to continental drift would change, and who knows how accurately it was originally measured in the 18th century anyway! :lol:

 

Does any of that matter?

Nope!

I just remember there are 25.4mm to an inch - couldn't care less what each system is originally based on! ...but it is annoying my K3 only counting up to 30 rather than 100! Even my French Beaulieu R16 manages to display both units on the "footage" counter! :lol: