Film is dead

Good. Now maybe prices on lenses and bodies will go down even more.
 
Film is dead when I can find a 12-25 megapixel camera with known lenses of decent quality, decent apertures, and ISO 3200 or better for $40 on ebay to take into burning buildings. When digital cameras decide to take the picture right now dangit instead of ohhhh within a second or so. When the industry decides that $200 - $400 for systems that take interchangeable lenses is where the mark has been all along for middle of the road amateur camera systems. When they decide to quit pretending an aps sized sensor is a 35mm sensor and build lenses SIZED for it (and no I dont mean Pentax's DC series of Kaf lenses - think a digital Pentax Auto 110) Full sized sensors are a nice idea but I'm not holding my breath, because of the price (cost difference of the sensor and perceived added value)

In short. It's coming. It's near, and I look forward to it, but it aint here yet, and it wont until they've decided they've milked all the cool gadget factor cash out of it and get back to business as usual but with a a new format.
 
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I don't know, I've never been able to find a pulse on film...or digital...or, well, anything else that has never been alive.
 
Film isn't dead - a little moribund, perhaps, but not dead. What IS going to happen to film, though, is that it is going to get expensive. Which is fine. And what my well die a long time before film is the 'point and shoot' film camera and the 'throwaway' film camera - because of the increase in the expense of film. Which is also fine.

I don't know about you, but I don't have the money to invest in high end digital with interchangeable lenses. What I DO have is a small collection of well cared for Exaktas, a couple of Zorki 4's, a FED-2 (coming) and a well rounded Konica T4 kit that will give me results on film that digital STILL can't touch.

What HAS died for me is Lab prints. I can now digitized my negs at 4200 dpi and print on my Epson color system that gives me archival prints in no time flat. My B&W stuff prints out just as fine as my color stuff and nothing fades or picks up moisture. Yes I have to wait for my negs from the 1 hour. But I have come to know what their processing does and I account for that in the way I shoot. Yes I have to wait days for my B&W negs to come back from the lab, but I will soon start processing my own film, which I find to be fun. So film suits me fine, because it works with what I already own. BTW, I do own a digital - a Sony DSC-S70 - that I shoot quite a bit. I don't like it as much as I like my film systems, but it is convenient, from time to time. It's great for taking eBay shots.

Lou
 
Lou, if you scan and print on an inkjet, your pictures won't be anything better than what a modern dSLR delivers today. In my case the old Canon FS2710 scanner is marginaly better than my Canon D60 at printsizes over 8x12.

What I'm missing is a digital rangefinder.

With Contax SLRs and a Contax G2 I bet on the wrong horse, if I had a Leica i'd probably jumped for the Epson R-D1.
 
Yeah, well look at the blogger's gallery. His B&W work ain't so great - no shadow detail and blown highlights. Real B&W film would have produced much better results.

I expect this guy will next write that McDonald's is the gratest restaraunt in the world because they sell so many burgers.

Robert
 
On a related note, has anyone else noticed that we've been conned into paying 2-3 times as much for monitors that have absolutely horrible performance, and much lower resolution, for the sole virtue of how big they are?
 
I bought a 21" radius grayscale moniter for $5 about 8 years ago. It works great for black and white image manipulation. The only problem is that I have to move my mouse great distances to cover the entire desktop. It also works as a light table. I just open an all-white image and use it to backlight film negatives. If commercially available film emulsions are soon to be dead, we can go back to making homebrew alternative emulsions. There is infomation available on this topic. I have been coating glass plates for several years.
 
XAos said:
On a related note, has anyone else noticed that we've been conned into paying 2-3 times as much for monitors that have absolutely horrible performance, and much lower resolution, for the sole virtue of how big they are?
Click to expand...

My first PC Monitor had 14" diameter and 640x400 pixels in 16 colors, the next was 14" diameter again and 1024x768 pixels with 256 greys in headache provocing interlaced mode, used it mostly at 640x480. Then came a 15" 800x600 Eizo with a matching grafics card so it could display 65000 colors with a resonable refresh rate to use it. Even later a 17" Hitachi, a 19" Hitachi and lastly a 17" TFT in 2001.

The TFT cost 1300DM, then around $1000, and now you get a 19" TFT with better colors for 300 Euro, around $360.
 
I enjoyed Thom's essay. How much of it was satire and how much was not? 😉

I like shooting digital for my happy-snaps but my biggest concern is that due to "advances" in storage media I won't be able to access my picture files in 10 years, no matter how carefully I've archived them.

I can still look through my film prints any time I want. 😀
 
Starting at the 19th century our ancestors were improving the quality of photographic pictures, but since 1990 (invention of digital photography) we want to return to 1820.
Is history repeating itself?
Greek culture -> dark ages
 
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