More Evidence of the Death of Film Photography

I still have a Nikon SLR for creative photography occassions although I do get shocked at the cost of getting the film processed.

a low end film camera can still beat a low end digital camera hands down in resolution and sharpness.

Here's on that can't be beat with film You actualy have the negative to keep and store in a safe place. Unlike digital where its stored on a card or a PC. PC's have a habit of crashing and losing there data. If its not back up your photo collection is toast.

Color film may die one day, but B&W will live o. (Hopefully)

Film will ALWAYS be available. When TV entered the media world, we said that radio would be deep-sixed. That didn't happen. No, film will always be around in spite of Nikon dunking the film brigade. I still have and use my Nikon F and F3 HP. And I can still drive nails with them. Try that with your plastic-like 21st century digital camears.

Film will ALWAYS be available. When TV entered the media world, we said that radio would be deep-sixed. That didn't happen. No, film will always be around in spite of Nikon dunking the film brigade. I still have and use my Nikon F and F3 HP. And I can still drive nails with them. Try that with your plastic-like 21st century digital camears.

Film quality is superior to digital at this time. There is certainly a place for both depending on use.

There is talk that CDs may not be as permanent as first thought, a German scientist (working for IBM) suggests that CDs will die in 2-5 years.
So in a few years your photographs will be gone, with no negatives to back them up. What of all the effort you put into taking pictures then?

I think that film will slowly phase out. Digital is high quality but now as high quality as film so currently for some things film is still better. However with digital becoming higher and higher quality it will be used for more and more. However film will still stay around for a long time, until people develop a new way of taking pictures that is even higher quality than current digital cameras, film will still stay.

In the Stone Age of digital photography, film cameras ruled the earth with unchallengeable resolution, wider dynamic range, better color and cheap prices. Now they are assaulted by digital cameras on all fronts: A 5-meg camera can bring you a crisp 12 x 18 print, DSLRs have similar dynamic range, all digital cameras $150 or above can beat film in color accuracy (8 vs. 12 in Delta error) and you can click forever without having to worry about buying extra film. The market share for film cameras in the U.S. will shrink until it reaches the level of vinyl records, black-and-white TVs, 47Hz cordless phones, fountain pens or smoothbore muskets.

10 years from now, a docent in a photography museum will say these words to the visiting school children:

Once upon a time, images were recorded on a strip of film with layers of light-sensitive chemicals through a camera lens which looked like the ones we have today. To see the images, you have to take the film to a supermarket and after 3-5 days, you could get your prints back. One roll of film usually contained 24 or 36 exposures and there was no way people could dictate how the color or the resolution should be once you bought the film.

Vinyl is used for many purposes and readily available. The machinery to press vinyl records is robust and will be around for years even if new ones are no longer made. The process is simple and can be done in a small shop by anyone who wishes to.

The chemicals used in film manufacture are highly specialized and require a sophisticated chemical plant to produce. Coating the emulsion on the film is a further complex process requiring highly specialised knowledge. Processing requires additional purpose-made chemicals. When the market for film becomes too small to support the economic manufacture of the chemicals, film will disappear. The know-how, materials and machinery for botique manufacturing like that of vinyl records simply won't be available.

When you read that digital photo disks last maybe at most a year before they deterioriate, and when you consider that film photos can last centuries, I'm sticking with film photography.

The ONLY GOOD thing about film is that, because of the price/inconvenience, people take fewer pictures, and your inbox is not flooded with 20 nearly-identical shots of your old college buddy's new baby!

I'd put a midrange digital camera up against an film-based camera anyday -- unless one has pretensions of grandeur that can only be soothed by pretending to be Ansel Adams.

Face it, there's a dozen reasons nobody uses film anymore -- it's expensive to buy, it's expensive to process, it's expensive to back up, it's finnicky, it's fragile, it's uneditable...

also, lol @ "muskets" :D

There are always folks who are slow to warm to new technology -- they have an investment in equipment, education and experience and are unsure if they'll be able to adapt. The duribility of archived photos is a non-issue and the CDs-only-last-a-year crowd knows it.

The comparision to vinyl records is a good one. A company that tried to market current singer's music on vinyl records would soon go out of business.

Resist if you like, you will only be hurting yourself, because digital is the future.
(I keep my vinyl records in the basement in the same box as the buggy whips)

Ask Ansel Adams, Minor White or Edward Weston if they would prefer the digital medium. Black and white film is here to stay!

Chemical photography will always have one important advantage in a culture where Truth & her offspring Trust have been abducted, tortured & terrorized and are reportedly being held for indefinite interrogation in a CIA black hole under the White House: film imagery is much harder to fake.

Film has a long way to go before its dead, just like vinyl!
For the past 2 years vinyl has outsold the much touted scad format and is the only part of the physical music media whose sales are increasing.
Of course the numbers are nothing like cd sales but an increasing number of artists are releasing new material on good quality vinyl.
But back to film, when someone can show me a digital pic that is as good as a neg from my 1958 $75 TLR (thanks to ebay!) the I might think about moving formats.

Hmpf!
My wedding photos are now stored perfectly on a 6-year-old CD; nothing lossy is happening. But even if that should be a danger (which I doubt) one can always store cherished data on flash media, which is becoming less expensive all the time, not to mention the fact that new storage technology is under constant improvement and development. So while you can keep photo negatives forever, what good is it when no one is selling film anymore, or the price of it becomes prohibitive?
Pretty soon, only higher-end professionals will be into film photography, and useage is highly likely to shrink from there.

I have been watching the VHS tapes being moved out of the rental stores. Now it is a very small portion of tapes stuck out of the main traffic areas. I believe this is the same pathe the film cameras will be taking. A smaller selection will be displayed, then that will be reduced to nothing in a given time. Society is now in an instant mode. People want things
now, not 3-5 days, or even from the 1 hour photo shops.
Instant gratification in now in the mainstream. I don't like it
but it's the new way. Yes, I have 2 Canon camera because I can not afford the developing cost. I fondly remember my old Argus C3 and GE light meter.

The analogy to vinyl records is a poor one because the consumer just has to have a relatively simple turntable to play a record. As was pointed out above, the consumer has to rely on a precision photo lab to develop and print the pictures. With only a small number of professionals and diehard amateurs sticking to film, there will be fewer and fewer labs to do the work. Priced will naturally go up and further reduce the pool of users. I just cannot see film lasting economically.

My Uncle (dedicated photographer winner of a mother jones international award for documentary phtography in 1994 for his book chiapas-the end of silence), who is right now working on digital editing, says digital cameras are still behind if talking about quality and some other aspects i cant remember right now.

I think its kind of fun when you have an slr and take a photo with it and hear the sound it makes, but digital cameras are great because you dont have to spend on film and you can take allot of photos and choose witch one is better and delete the others, not spend to much time or money on haveing to reveal or woorry of running out of shots on a crucial moment. I prefer digital overall, And i think that when most professional photographers do too film will disapear of most of the earth.

Film will never die. Digital has it's place, but it can't replace film. Many pro's use sheet film, the sheets of film can be as large as 8x10" (think of a negative the size of an 8x10 enlargment). Ever see those giant photo ads? That's what takes those pictures. The largest digital sensor is about 2" square, way, WAY, less resolution than an 8x10" sheet of film. And you can select the outcome of your photo by selecting the type of film (or spend an hour on photoshop for EACH photo for the same effect).

Modern film is so good now, a $5 roll of film is sharper than a $5000 digital camera. One company makes a 'survelance' film that is so fine you can take a photo of a building and blow it up until you can recognise a mans face standing on a balcony on the third floor, digital ain't anywhere near that (that is about 100x the resolution of the $5000+ digital cameras). And they have black and white films that have 16 stops of exposure latitiude or more, digital sensors are only 5 or 6 stops. And you cannot take long exposures with digital camera's. Photo's at night in a city or by moon light can be anywhere from 1 to 90 minutes. Digital cameras start producing sensor noise after about 1/10 of a second, and most can't expose longer than 1 second. And there are more advantages to film, but I'll stop here.

For my digital needs a scanner is the way I go. Image quality as good as a $5000 digital camera, the permanence of film, and only $600.

Robert makes some good points about areas where film is superior to digital (so far!).

Unfortunately for those specialist users, the economics of the specialised chemical industry need to make and process film are dependant on the mass market. I would guess at least 90% of film made in the heyday of optical was for simple cameras used by amateurs.

Whilst this market will continue for some time despite plummeting sales of film - there are still a lot of cameras out there, and you can pick them up second-hand for almost nothing - the price of film will gradually rise as demand declines, and this will accelerate; when it costs 5 times as much to buy and develop a rol of film as it does now, the economics of digital will become overwhelming and the process will accelerate until film becomes uneconomic for even the professional.

Film will then die, because it is not possible to make it on a small scale at a price anybody can afford.

A point in favour of digital for the amateur, which has not been mentioned so far, is that when on holiday I can go out for the day, shoot 100 or more pictures, and when I get back to base in the evening I download them to my laptop and discard 80-90% of them that have not come out so good. This is how professionals work, and it is now available to all of us.

Two givens: digital photography technology is exploding and film photography is generally remaining constant. With this in mind, as long as film technology is not infinite, it will eventually (if not already) be surpassed by digital.

As far as pricing goes, I bought a Canon A95 last year for just under $300 and have taken over 2000 photos so far. Four rolls of ISO400 run about $8 - $10. For 2000 photos, we're talking about over $200 for JUST FILM. Add $3-$4 for developing costs add you've racked up another $250. Add in $75 for a very low end film camera and the total comes to over $500. That comes to $.25 pere pic for film and $.15 per pic for digital. Film is NOT cheaper.

Plus with digital I can store all my photos (over 6000 from the past 3 or so years) conveniantly on a network storage device at the house with a backup copy on CD. No negatives to scratch, easily editable, simple to upload a couple to the local computer store's photo shop and run by in a couple hours for pickup. Film boasts nothing but high resolution, the ever increasing side of digital.

Also note that the vast majority of hard-core film advocates are older folk who grew up with it and are understandably sentamental. Vinyl was once lauded for its superior analog sound, but has now been superceeded by digital CDs with a sound quality far higher than their plastic, yet analog counterparts. The same thing will happen with digital.

In ten years when our kids are buying 150 Meg digital cameras for $500 that sport virtually no sensor noise, what advantage will film still have?

Let see now, you bought that great top of the line digital camera, stored the photos on the best quality CD/DVD money can buy and let?s say the CD/DVD is still good 50 years from now. I still have a 35mm camera I bought in the early 70?s; I also have paper tape used to load Fortran on an early computer. I have a slightly newer model camera from around 1980 and 8 inch floppy disks, I bought a still newer camera about the time 5.25 floppies were popular. The point is that all my old digital media is all but useless just like that CD/DVD will be when your grandchildren try to find a device to load and read today?s digital media. Will film be surpassed in quality, most certainly? Will we be able to use what we stored from that device 50 years from now is the question.

I just went on a vacation. Used a film camera. It was very reliable and there were no battery problems. Okay, I know that some of the photos won't come out and it will be expensive to print, but compared to the guy who could only take 20 pictures because his batteries died and had problems with his memory card, I was quite satisfied with film.

But will film stay? Yes, as a niche/hobby. I think I will eventually switch because the technology is improving so rapidly. And you can always print your shots, if you are worried about archiving.

You raise a valid point; however, let us not forget that you can print out your digital photos at home or at photolabs for more conventional archival. Then you will not need to worry about reading files from a cd/dvd in 50 years time. Also, you could always just copy your discs to new formats as they become available to avoid the pitfalls of phased out technologies - this would be akin to transfering your home movies in vhs format to dvd format.

I believe film will be around quite a bit longer for the hard core photographers and enthusiasts. For the foreseeable future, film photography is better quality than digital at the high end.

The average person that needs to shoot some vacation or family photos will go digital though.
The convenience factor is much better with digital for those that like to send photos to their family/friends by email/IM and those that like to post their photos on the net.

As far as the life span of negatives vs digitally stored; it behooves anyone that cherishes their photos to safely store their film negatives or make back up copies of their digital photos.
Carelessness can result in the loss of either.

There are obvious advantages to digital. But film cameras still rule in one very important area: shutter lag. Maybe if you buy an expensive enough digital camera you can have very little shutter lag. But the shutter on my inexpensive Minolta film camera is a lot faster than most digitals that I can afford. I can't tell you how many good shots I've missed because the shutter was too slow on my Canon digital.

I can speak from a retailers point of view, having until recently (due ti ill health) worked for DSG International [Formerly Dixons in UK].
Due to economies of scale and other commercial considerations,they stopped selling VCRs. For similar reasons they have pulled out of the wet film market. As the computer consumer user base has expanded, so has the market led demand for Home user digicams.
Prices fall by the weekand even a decent dslr can be bought for less than ?700.00.There will for the forseeable future be a market for wet film. I for one use it in my Rollieflex, I also use a number of digicams.For the newsgatherer, equiped with a quality dslr and laptop etc, pictures can be on an editors desk within seconds. conversly, for forensic evidence purposes wet film is harder to tamper with. We can espouse the virtues of both media, but it is the photograph that is the art form, not its "canvas".

Film will always be with us in one form or another. It will just become increasingly hard to get and process. To those who stand on it's complexity and cost to manufacture as the reason it will soon die, I have this to say...Vaccuum tubes. All my guitar gear is tube and I can still buy them NEW. You want to talk about complexity and cost of manufacture, not to mention a niche market. But I can still get them and companies are still making them. Also, show me a Digital camera that can still take a good picture and be in usable condition in 40 years...yea right!

professional photography

Glen says the reason he has a Nikon film camera is because he can bang nails with them and he implies that digital cameras can't. Well I don't know if Glen doesn't have a Home Depot nearby but I can buy a hammer for 16 bucks to hit nails, don't need a $600 camera body to do that. What digital photography has done is open the market to consumers in the same way cheap notebooks have gotten IT professionals out of the creatives noses. Everyone can participate and it doesn't take a year's salary to afford it, and that is a good thing. What is scary, is the world doesn't provide a safe haven for anyone to enjoy a profession wihtout the possiblity that technology will make it possible for someone else to do it themselves or choose from great numbers of those that can. That's capitalism. So for those that demise the loss of products there are still typewriters, fax machines, printing presses, etc. that are for sale for their enjoyement. For the rest of us, we love light, cheap, environmentally friendly cameras. And probably like Glen shop at Home Depot to do it ourselves.

Regardless of how good film is we are talking about businesses here and ecomomics. Companies will not produce a product that does not support the bottom line. Film will die and it will be a business decision. Quality will not enter the picture. I have used film for years and ran my own darkroom and was a teacher of photography -- I love film! But, this is reality people -- if it doesn't make a buck; it won't be produced. Enjoy it while you can. I see its end within the next 10 to 20 years.

Some people here fail to understand that the most important issue is "the image"Learning to produce good images that say something about you and your view of the world is what we all should be about.Digital or film who cares?Film at the moment seems to emphasise craftmanship and thought in image creation.Digital for some people seems to be more about producing vast quantities of shots and hoping that some will have merit.This will change as digital becomes more respectable and more great photographic artists work in the medium.Be sure of one thing though- a simple representative image whether in film or digital is no longer of any value however great the resolution.Imagination is now the key ingredient more than ever.If you dont have it no amount of pixels can save you!

We're all drunk on having the latest and the best, and to hell with the consequences. What about the environmental aspects of all that? e.g. ever increasing energy consumption. Everyone buys new cameras and lenses and all the old stuff, darkroom equipment etc. end up in a hole in the ground! If companies were properly regulated to re-use obsolete equipment maybe we wouldn't be in this mess. Expecting to be flamed by irate photographers who don't think about this... but surely there has to be a discussion?

The world of photography is based on Nikon phobia/mania, sick, film nor digital needs Nikon. or those of you who believe (if its worth taking it must be done with a "Nikon".

I make my living off of digital, but when it comes to personal projects I shoot film. I like and I am comfortable with both mediums, however when it comes time to make enlargements 20-30" for shows, my images from my D2x can't hold a candle to the quality I get from my medium format images. Not to mention my 4x5! In fact a very good (and rich) photog freind of mine had some digital prints made at 30"x 40" from his $25k leaf back and compared them to mine shot with a 120 film camera and made traditionally...he was a little more than suprised and pissed at the results to say the least!!

ive actually got two digital bodies but ive bought a canon eos1n because i want a camera that can handle the rigours of the outdoors ( which my digitals cant ) and high speed photography, lots of bursts of fast shutter speed etc.
There is a place for film and there will be for the forseable future.

Take your modern electronic digital camera out into a 10 degree New England winter day.
Take a mechanical film camera.
The second one will bring back pictures all day long even when the temprature gets colder.
Take both cameras with you on a trip up the Amazon.
Film wins.
Give 1000 of them to people scattered around the world in all economic classes, and all geographic situations for a year.
Digitial might give you pictures for 1 week of that year across the board.
Work without electricity for more than 3 days anywhere in the world and your clever electronic imaging device becomes a curious brick, nothing more.

I use Digital, but reality is that film is still better and in reality - cheaper.

Well said Paul. I completely agree with you. Also I believe Glen was just trying to emphasize the braun of a well built mechanical film camera by saying he could hammer nails with it. I own a Nikon F2 and can say that it doubles as a personal defense weapon if need be. Obviously if you can hammer nails with it, you could drop it down a steep trail or whatever and feel relatively safe that it will keep clicking away, how would you feel if your $600 digi were dropped in the same manner? Still feel confident? Also, I see the film industry becoming more centralized and streamlined. Yes you will see film become more expensive and harder to find, as well as processing, but as long as there are people willing to pay, it will continuted to be manufactured regardless of the image quality/convenience compares between the two mediums. As pro's fade out the film that will be the largest issue in finding cheap film and good processing, but it will still be available in some capacity. It's quite obvious that there are die hard film fans that like the nastalgia factor (me included) that magic electronic digital cameras and media cards can never reproduce. Ever heard of artistic passion?