On Dec 13, 2004, at 6:25 AM, David Mann wrote:
My 0.2�. ;-) As a Mac user, who just sold his last film camera to pay for his digital, I personally don't think that film will go away. In fact, when I look at the digital camera market, I see some similarities between it and the PDA market a few years ago. There is a rocketing growth, with new technology coming out on a weekly basis, and people flocking to digital. I personally believe, however, that the touted "convenience" of digital, which has its down side, will eventually play out, and people will find that the "down side" will be more than they were willing to pay for, and after a few years, people will return to film... Not to the same extent it was before, but I believe that people will realize that there _are_ benefits to film that digital can't touch, and will use film for such occasions as important events--snapshot-sort of things. I think pros will give up on film, for the most part, but the casual shooter will probably use more film than he currently is.Bummer. I just ordered a new film scanner to use with my Mac.
The only thing that can stop this, IMO, is for there to become a simple and _reliable_ method of transferring digital photos to some archival medium (and I don't mean prints). I think it would also help if there were a way for people to simply shoot their photos and get prints archival copies like they do now with film. Go to the processor. Give them your card, a couple minutes later, you have your card, and later get a CD or DVD with the "negatives" and the prints. So far, it doesn't seem to be this simple--at least it isn't where I live. :-)
As an example, last November (a year ago) I shot a bunch of rolls at our local cemetery for All Saint's Day, and my friend scanned it for me, and gave me the CDs. I went to load one this weekend, and it will no longer read! If I had burnt a CD from a digital camera, I would be out of luck! Fortunately, however, I have the negatives and slides, so I can always re-scan them. I think that as people lose more photos--and lose them _completely_ and lose them from such events as weddings, vacations overseas, or other _major_ once-in-a-lifetime events, they will rethink their use of digital. Film is a wonderfully durable medium. Digital is very fragile. Yes, you can scratch a negative, or muck it up, but generally, you can always get _something_ out of it. However, with a CD, or a hard drive, one minor failure can make everything on it completely inaccessible, and we've probably all had a memory card go bad on us, at least once! This, I think, is the Achilles heel of digital--that, and the fact that _everything_ must be done by us. Film can be quite convenient. Shoot, toss the shot roll into your bag. Go home. A few weeks later, take it to the processor. Later, again, with little effort, pick up the developed stuff. The prints can be passed around, stored in a box and ignored. With digital, you have to carefully archive, and make duplicates, lest the only copy you have go bad. There is constant care over digital. Now, for the enthusiast, this is no big deal! But for the casual snap-shotter, I suspect that at some point, they will see their hard drive filling with drivel, and see important pics getting lost, and will rethink their investment! At that point, the cheaper point-n-shoot cameras will come back into vogue, and the market for cheaper cameras will diminish, to be replaced with cheap cell phone/camera combos and cheap film cameras. In fact, if I were Kodak, I would be preparing marketing right now to emphasize the benefits of film, and cheap disposable cameras against digital. ;-)
All this is, of course, dependent on the one major weaknesses of digital _not_ being solved.
I've long thought this, but never expressed it. Now I'm curious what others think.
--
-Jon Glass
Krakow, Poland
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
