Little Prince
Well-known
Socke said:
Heh. That's an original 🙂 . You should put it in your signature.
News: Kodak Is Cutting Up to 10,000 More Jobs
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Heh. That's an original 🙂 . You should put it in your signature.
DerekF
Established
Socke said:
Hmmm, I never got the impression from this thread that anybody was making a "film is better than digital" argument. I think most of this discussion has been based on what the future of film (if it has one) will bring. Fun to speculate! 😉 But, sad to think that film for my existing cameras may be scarce (if not impossible to get) in a few years.
S
Socke
Guest
Bertram2 said:
My apartment is in an old house typical for the town where I live.
In the old times wealthy families had the room for the chambermaid in the basement/cellar (souterain), the kitchen and a big living room devided by a sliding door in the 1st floor and living quarters in the 2nd and 3rd floor.
Today those houses are usualy divided in three apartments. In my place there lives a student in the cellar, which is open to a garden in the backyard, a young family in the 2nd and 3rd floor and me in the 1st. My apartment consists of a 10x5 meter room with windows to the front and to the back of the house. I have a small kitchen in the back and to the front I have my bed and a desk with computers, scanners, printers and such things.
So I can do my printing in my bedroom, and from time to time I show my pictures to a girl 🙂
QuillianSW
Sad Sack In Baghdad
Nah, but it is on it's way to becoming very much a niche market...eg, you can still get a "turntable" from Radio Shack (low end) or some European mfgs (very high end) but it's hard to find newly pressed vinyl albums. Us folks are going to be the hangers on that keep some small part of it alive, albiet with no further R&D thrown into emulsions, etc. But just like there's enough art hobby supply companies to supply oil& watercolor folks, someone (but maybe not Lucky Film in PRC) will keep making film. I'm waiting for the mini-labs to start disappearing next. Here in Iraq, you can still get film processed however...
hughjb
Established
Been a while since I posted anything here, but as a guy who makes money with his cameras let me offer you my 0.2 in relation to my business.
Film is not dead and it won’t be for a while yet, but the people that support your film habit might and in my opinion that is one of the real problems, another problem is that the general public is no longer aware of what a real film print looks like, for my business at least that is the big problem, I have a small photo-wedding business.
The last issue has to do with the “democratization” of professional photography.
There is a lot of contraction in the industry right now when it comes to film in general but by the most part you can find a good variety of film available at pro shops, drugstores and Wall Mart are a different story alltogether but then again that is always been the case.
The real problem in my opinion is not on actually finding the film, but finding a good pro lab with experience printers, most of the BW labs in my city (Washington DC) have gone “the way of the Dodo”, because of a lack of business, which has after 20 years sent me into the darkroom to have an alternative in the event that the lab that I’m presently use decide to close their doors.
As of last year many photographer in my area used BW film because you could not get a real good quality BW print from a color print, which is what you got when you try to print from a digital image converted to BW, so many shoot BW but now that is changing with the advent of off-the-shelf inkjects that come with BW cartridges.
In the past that was an option reserve for people with a piezo BW inkjet system or similar setup. Even the lab that I use implemented a piezo option in order to deal with digital BW.
A good printer right now is hard to find, and once they died-off (literally) BW may actually disappear as an art form, unless of course you take it upon yourself to learn the craft.
A client lack of experience with good prints, normally I monitor wedding forums to see what are the new trends and who wants what in terms of photography, my loosely conducted research points to the fact that most potential brides and groom cannot see a difference between digital and film prints, although most point out that the prints that they are normally show are digital.
In my area however people tend to request real BW as oppose to converted BW.
I have a couple of prints side by side on an album from a real BW print on resin coated paper and the same image from a digital conversion, only after they see that they can tell the difference.
Finally photographers, most pro-photographer on my field have converted to digital for financial reasons, brides wants so many images of their weddings that is not feasible to provide the same number on film, and in order to finance their digital purchases photographers tend to unload their film gear on eBay, now you know where all the MF stuff comes from in eBay.
New photographers entering the market are by the most part digital and a great number of them have gotten in because with digital everything seems simple, up until the blow their first job. But until then all they promote is digital.
At the end off the day digital is here to stay, but this so call digi-film war is one that cannot be compared with the Beta-VHS war but instead is more like a Mac-PC war, where the Mac has a 10% share of the market but they are the sole provider of the machines and the other 90% is divided between everybody else.
So there is still plenty of hope for us film users, Mac stock is doing very well BTW, and I’m a PC user
Regards
Hugh
Film is not dead and it won’t be for a while yet, but the people that support your film habit might and in my opinion that is one of the real problems, another problem is that the general public is no longer aware of what a real film print looks like, for my business at least that is the big problem, I have a small photo-wedding business.
The last issue has to do with the “democratization” of professional photography.
There is a lot of contraction in the industry right now when it comes to film in general but by the most part you can find a good variety of film available at pro shops, drugstores and Wall Mart are a different story alltogether but then again that is always been the case.
The real problem in my opinion is not on actually finding the film, but finding a good pro lab with experience printers, most of the BW labs in my city (Washington DC) have gone “the way of the Dodo”, because of a lack of business, which has after 20 years sent me into the darkroom to have an alternative in the event that the lab that I’m presently use decide to close their doors.
As of last year many photographer in my area used BW film because you could not get a real good quality BW print from a color print, which is what you got when you try to print from a digital image converted to BW, so many shoot BW but now that is changing with the advent of off-the-shelf inkjects that come with BW cartridges.
In the past that was an option reserve for people with a piezo BW inkjet system or similar setup. Even the lab that I use implemented a piezo option in order to deal with digital BW.
A good printer right now is hard to find, and once they died-off (literally) BW may actually disappear as an art form, unless of course you take it upon yourself to learn the craft.
A client lack of experience with good prints, normally I monitor wedding forums to see what are the new trends and who wants what in terms of photography, my loosely conducted research points to the fact that most potential brides and groom cannot see a difference between digital and film prints, although most point out that the prints that they are normally show are digital.
In my area however people tend to request real BW as oppose to converted BW.
I have a couple of prints side by side on an album from a real BW print on resin coated paper and the same image from a digital conversion, only after they see that they can tell the difference.
Finally photographers, most pro-photographer on my field have converted to digital for financial reasons, brides wants so many images of their weddings that is not feasible to provide the same number on film, and in order to finance their digital purchases photographers tend to unload their film gear on eBay, now you know where all the MF stuff comes from in eBay.
New photographers entering the market are by the most part digital and a great number of them have gotten in because with digital everything seems simple, up until the blow their first job. But until then all they promote is digital.
At the end off the day digital is here to stay, but this so call digi-film war is one that cannot be compared with the Beta-VHS war but instead is more like a Mac-PC war, where the Mac has a 10% share of the market but they are the sole provider of the machines and the other 90% is divided between everybody else.
So there is still plenty of hope for us film users, Mac stock is doing very well BTW, and I’m a PC user
Regards
Hugh
Canon Junkie
Established
I have about 100 slide and photo print Kodak mailers I have purchased from eBay over the years to keep development costs down. Do you guys think they will be closing the labs? Should I try and unload these mailers before they become worthless?
bmattock
Veteran
Canon Junkie said:
If you're planning on waiting a decade to use them all up, I'd say sell them. If you think you'll be using them in the next couple of years, I'd say you'd probably be fine. But that's just my best guess.
Best Regards,
Bill Mattocks
S
Socke
Guest
Canon Junkie said:
In germany Kodak sold its film processing to an investor who went bust shortly after that. Some people think it was a "clever" move for laying off the workforce who can't demand compensation from a bankrupt investor or Kodak but get it from social security. Sort of socialisation of the cost and privatisation of the earnings.
Anyways, as far as I know film send in mailers to Kodak is either processed at Eurocolor, a Fuji subsidiary using Agfa mashines, or in Switzerland.
If I had mailers, I'd either demand they honor them or give me my money back, plus interest!
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