----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Glass"
Subject: Re: The film is dead
On Dec 13, 2004, at 1:33 PM, Rob Studdert wrote:
I'd suggest that if you don't own a fire proof safe with a hermetic seal whichYeah, but that's a rather extreme circumstance which would destroy both film and digital media. I'm more thinking the daily grind, when, like I did recently, you accidently save an image from Photoshop back onto a card, thus making it impossible to use in the camera, and forcing a reformat. The key difference between a negative and digital is that the destruction with film is generally gradual, or partial, but with digital, it's _complete_. We all have negatives that are in quite bad condition, but seldom is it such that you cannot recover _any_ data from them. In another thread today, I posted a link to some images that I recovered from negatives in rather bad condition.
is housed in a climate controlled environment you really don't care for the
longevity of your film archives? :-)
There are two schools of thought to this.
One school, the one that is professed here quite often, is that you must archive your images somehow for the next thousand years.
The other, and this is the one that will matter, since it is the marketplace view, is that archiving the images doesn't really matter, as long as the customer has a print they can get copies from at some point down the road.
The print has become the archive.
I see this with both digital and film customers. We do a roaring trade in copying prints, and there is no difference in customer attitude between prints from film or prints from digital. They bring in the print and get it copied.
The photo lab industry wants to switch over to digital only, since it is one less machine to keep in control, and scratches and dust aren't an issue with digital (from the lab's perspective anyway).
The camera industry wants to switch to digital, since they can keep selling new cameras by adding a megapixel to last years model and calling it something new, wheras the film camera industry has matured to the point they can't add anything really new and exciting anymore.
The film industry has also adopted digital. Fuji makes loads of digital cameras, Kodak is making good inroads into the digital market, Ilford, even though their film division is dead, is IIRC, now making inkjet paper.
Konica bought Minolta, now they have a digital camera path, and Agfa finally managed to unload their film division.
My own thought (I realize that I may be wrong, I only work in the film processing industry so I doubt if I have a clue about the direction the industry will go, I am only viewing trends) is that the consumer film industry is pretty much dead in the water in a leaky ship with a busted bilge pump.
The ship is going down, and there isn't anything that is going to stop it from happenning.
The pro film sector is a barge tied to the leaky ship, and when the ship sinks, it will take pro film with it, since one is towing the other along.
William Robb
