iml said:
It's already dead as a general consumer format, in the industrialised West anyway. It's only a matter of time before Walmart and the like will no longer develop it at all, and it becomes an entirely specialist/enthusiast format.
Ian
Nope. More film was sold in 2005 than in 1992, pre-digital. That's because the world-wide photography market has grown greatly. There are 6 places with C-41 machines in proximity to my house. There's three that I know of a stone's throw from where I work. Those A-Z bins look pretty big in each one. The C41 machines all seem to be humming. Anecdotally, at least in my area, I see more people dropping off film than standing in front of the kiosk. In my immediate family, there are no digital shooters. Dad loves his old Canon. Sis loves her point and shoot. Kodak came out with new super-8 movie film in 2006(!) and new black and white reveral 16mm movie film in 2005. There seems to be more film stock color and black and white than ever. But, yes, there has been some displacement. Disposable film cameras are huge sellers. I will never shoot digital... ever. I shot it, liked it a lot for a while, went back to film never to return to digital.
Digital can be convenient. But it typically requires an investment in computers, software, storage, and a learning curve for all of it. With a film camera - especially a point and shoot, you shoot and drop your film off at a lab and pic it up in an hour. Even kiosks intimidate and annoy some people. Digital too dependent on other stuff and - sorry, to my eye it simply doesn't look as good as film. Some claim digital has the best color. That seems to be the consensus. Eh - I didn't see it. My camera had difficulty with greens and sometimes reds. It clipped highlights, which I HATED. No latitude, dynamic range a joke, noise reduction algorythms "smeard" detail out of images and gave things an unnatural plactic-y look, which I HATED. I got moire patterns and other artifacts. I spent slightly less money for that camera than, literally, 5 decades old cameras (all of which work, and includes CLA costs) and "stuff" I needed to get a print - including ridiculously priced inks, and the digital was obsolete, again literally, a year later.
Again, this is why filmmakers still shot on film, even on TV, despite costs. With film, you chemically freeze a mirror of reality on paper. Digital images are computer-generated, computer "rendered" reproductions of reality. Don't let the fact that both digital and film cameras use a lens (or can use the same lenses, even) fool you. This is very apparent in a word digital images are fakes. They're unevocative, lifeless. Very apparent in moving images, less apparent in stills but the lifeless, personalityless, dullness of digital-rendered reality is still there. Engineers have been trying and trying to make "digital look like film" - p24, adding grain, shooting with telephoto lenses from across the street to emulate "bokeh" but they cant. Digital is a cheap capture medium, and more easily to manipulate but the computer-rendered sysnthesized baylor interpolated "drawing" don't capture reality, they make phony recreations of it using pixels, silicone chips, and 1's and 0's.
Again, when you want to "tell a story", when filmmakers want to evolk emotion, they use film. Nothing else will do. Same applies to still photography.
I'm sure there are millions like me who would give up his photographic hobby before ever considering some crappy overpriced digital camera that produces soulless, lifeless, computer-generated "pictures". When the digital camera market dies because the bulk of the camera market stops buying them after the electronics die in their camera in a few years and simply shoot with their 4 megapixel cell phones, I'll still be shooting film.
Football is the most popular sport. But there's plenty of interest in cycling. Neither will go away.
Film is dead nonsense is silly.
