The End of Film

[analogguy]

I believe that during the last quarter, for the first time in their history, Kodak made more money on the digital side vs. the film side.

 

[idleprocess]

Usually I'm accused of being a sucker for the latest tech, but in the case of photos I'd rather stick with film for my pics of uncle Ed. I have enough gear to go digital, and I even use Apple's Aperture (and love it) for my wife's digital S400 point & shoot stuff.

But I absolutely cannot get used to organizing and storing and updating the darned digital photos. I just completely hate that.

With film I can take the pics, put the 4x5's on the fridge that I like, and toss the rest of pics & negatives into a shoebox to pull out in 20 years or so. I won't need to worry about crashed drives or being sure it's still in a readable format either, or organizing them along the way.

Seems to me that because the value of the family photos increases with age, and the digital medium is much more of a pain to maintain over the years I'd much rather stick with film. This is all totally aside from the issue of comparing resolutions of digital to what I get even with 35mm on my F5, which to me gets another vote in favor of film.

I'm open to having my mind changed, but for now I'm lamenting the news that film is going away for the family pics.

I have the opposite problem - I hate organizing physical things. I lose things paper or related with depressing regularity. Information in a digital format is much easier for me - its physical location is predictable and usually easier to find... for me.

With computers doing all the grunt work information processing and storage in our society, paper has become trivial; it's the convenient, portable, and immediately-obsolete information medium. Why fill out a paper form when it's just going to be entered into a computer at the other end? Why bother physically presenting information that can't be manipulated or acted upon? With some very few exceptions, I see paper as cheap, disposable, and increasingly irrelevant. At some point in time I need to start a physical file, and I'm loath to do so because the few paper things I keep are a handful of high-value items like diplomas or other truly memorable things.

Lost file formats? Computing is out of its infancy now. Data is far more stable. I expect that the common image formats like JPG, TIFF, PNG will be readable decades from now ... much like ASCII files from decades ago are readable by utilities supplied by every OS in existence.

With digital information, you can cheaply make multiple perfect copies and store them under much less forgiving conditions than you would archive analog, physical originals. You exchange the initial expense of ideal storage medium and conditions for more regular maintenance, but that can be automated or done rather quickly.

Yeah, I'm a 20-something, but my family didn't always have a computer and the internet wasn't widely-available for home use until I was nearly through high school. I remember LPs, rotary phones, the novelty of digital watches, and how excited my father was to buy an original walkman. I did benefit from learning all this at a much younger age, so it comes naturally. I'm sure that the telephone was a shock for my great-grandparents' generation, as was the motorcar, radio, and airplanes. Learn and adapt, I suppose...

Most digital cameras on the market definitely have a lack of the fine-tuning you can do on the fly with most decent SLR film cameras. Manual focus and zoom are badly lacking and I've yet to appreciate an electronic viewfinder on a SLR. But things are changing rapidly. I hear there's at least one high-end digital SLR camera out there with controls almost exactly like film SLRs; no menus, just set it up old-school and shoot. I expect that trend to continue for the pro cameras because the pros don't need a toy, they need a tool - and pros know their tools well enough that menus and other cutesy consumer-friendly nicities are aggravating and rob their productivity.

 

[Tooner]

My work (I am an equipment field service tech.) takes me into pro photo studios. I have also done some limited service on the machines at the 1-hour stores.

As was stated earlier, in the 1-hour places like Wally World your film is put into a chemical developer and your negatives are developed. Next your long strip of negatives is fed into a scanner/printer. This machine scans the negative and sends the data to the printer portion. So it is in essence, a digital photo.

Different stores have different policies but usually the lab tech looks at each image on the monitor that is scanned in and will make decisions about which photo's to actually print. (You really don't want to pay for that photo of your feet that you took when you loaded film, do you?) They also may make adjustments on the fly for your poor shooting skills. Contrast, brightness, red eye removal, etc.

When you take in your digital media the data is printed on the same scanner/printer using the same paper and process as the film is. In either case if you order a CD the operator looks at each image and rotates it if necessary so that it appears on your computer correctly.

So they do offer a good value for your money. You get excellent photos on real photo paper cheaper than you can print at home.

In pro studios that I visit most of them have already migrated to digital. Many still have their large format cameras of course, but the bulk of their day to day paying jobs are digital. Almost all the photo's they sell are "Photo-shopped". If they shot 35mm they would have to use an expensive film scanner to scan the negative with in order to photo-shop it.

 

[James S]

The lifetime of digital media is a definite problem, it requires a "living archive" that gets copied to new media every few years. Even a 5 year old CDR has a significant chance of being completely unreadable and an almost 100 percent chance of having a bad spot on it that makes at least a few files unreadable, and worse if it's in the directory structure somewhere.

The other big issue is that people delete them! Especially reporters and professionals. They used to keep and file all those negatives, but now the pictures they dont want they just delete and they are gone forever. No archiving later, no smithsonian projects to put things back together in 50 years, just gone.

I dont delete anything

But I love my canon digital for shooting picts of the kids and other snapshots. Can't beat a digital for that stuff.

 

[KevinL]

KevinL Most all of the digital cameras I've seen connect to a computer as a USB Mass Storage device. If a computer user can't figure out how to use drag&drop, I think I'd be inclined to think that they return their computer to the store as well (if you work tech support, you've probably heard that joke already. ). And heaven forbid if they ever had to work on a MVS terminal or punch out a deck of Hollerith cards.

Yup, precisely. I regard computer skills as a SURVIVAL skill in today's world, just like the ability to find your way around, buy stuff, count money, cross the road without getting killed (some botch this up from time to time though) and so many other skillsets required by modern civilization. The most famous excuse I hear is "I'm a computer idiot", no, they are just simply, all round, an idiot. There is nothing so forbidding about these things that cannot be learned by mortals, especially when referring to the basics. Computers have become a mass market item, but they have also become easier and simpler to use.

The camera I had to handle mounted as a mass storage target.. nice and convenient. My own Canon DSLRs don't - but that's why I have card readers.

Worked tech support for 2+ years, both as frontline and Level 2 backup to frontliners. Pass the vodka.

 

[chmsam]

One reason I still like film over digital is the cameras. Drop my old Nikon F (made in 1969) and you curse a phrase or two, pick it up, dust it off, and then take more pictures. (It has a dent or two to prove it)

Drop a digital camera and most of the time you curse a phrase or two, pick it up, dust it off, pay about $75 to have it checked out, probably can't get it repaired anyway, and end up buying a new one. (Seen it happen -- twice)

However, it is nice to be able to manipulate the images without having to play around in a darkroom. The trial and error of getting the perfect print with digital wastes a lot less chemicals and paper, too.

 

[KevinL]

One reason I still like film over digital is the cameras. Drop my old Nikon F (made in 1969) and you curse a phrase or two, pick it up, dust it off, and then take more pictures. (It has a dent or two to prove it)

Drop a digital camera and most of the time you curse a phrase or two, pick it up, dust it off, pay about $75 to have it checked out, probably can't get it repaired anyway, and end up buying a new one. (Seen it happen -- twice)

However, it is nice to be able to manipulate the images without having to play around in a darkroom. The trial and error of getting the perfect print with digital wastes a lot less chemicals and paper, too.

Fully agreed.. and the wonderful thing about some of them is that they don't require batteries.

Even as a devoted Canon DSLR owner (20D and 350D, more EF/EF-S than I can carry), I still have a lot of respect for things like the legendary all-mechanical Nikon FM2 and its ability to shoot without ANY battery power. Of course, good luck to you and your sunny f/16 rule (no meter to guide you), but if you have the skill, the camera won't let you down.

Sad to say I have to baby my DSLRs or they'll quickly exact their revenge upon me

 

[dim]

I recently purchased a Gerber Trio Red LED - a nice flashlight with good output. As I thought that it was like having a portable dark-room, I chuckled at the irony.

73
dim

 

[PhotonWrangler]

I just found a boatload of old 120 B&W negatives of family photos from the late 40s and early 50s. I want to print some of them and make them into an album for a gift, but I can't tell who's who from looking at the negatives. So I just carted them off to Walgreens where there's a professional photographer working at the photo desk. He's going to send them off somewhere to get them scanned to CDs and maybe print some contact sheets as well. I thought about buying a scanner myself that can do oddball sizes of negatives, but after looking at the prices for good ones I've decided to have them scasnned by a lab instead.

I feel a little uncomfortable turning over all of those gems to the photo lab, however it seemed that it was this or nothing.

I was quite surprised at how well the negatives have held up though, even after being stored in some non-temp-controlled areas for a year.

 

[DUQ]

I learned to shoot on an SLR and still prefer it today. A couple of weeks ago while on vacation in Mexico; I went on a cave/jungle tour and took my camera. Couple of rolls of 800 and 28-80mm 70-210mm lenses, my wife used out digital. We started with a visit of the local monkeys. I've never seen heads snap back that fast as people heard my shutter click. Just like they've never heard it before. Thats when I realised that standard film shooting is really taking a back seat. I still think that digital point and shoot cameras are just as skilless as the standard ones are.