You blink and you miss it.

[andrewducker]

In other news, I seem to have missed the final transition from film to digital cameras.  I assumed that the high end was still split, but it looks like most of the people that sold film cameras have stopped doing so.  Canon still has one for sale, and there are a couple of very high end models.  But film seems to have pretty much vanished entirely.

I can't say that I'm surprised that it's happened - but part of me is surprised that it happened so quickly at the high end.  It was only a couple of years ago that I saw photographers talking about how much better film was for professional photography.  I guess it stopped being so, and everyone converted.

How long until there's no market for camera film or development and another piece of technology vanishes forever?

Comments

[hirez.livejournal.com]

IIRC, chap in charge of Fuji was going to have them keep on making film because he preferred it.

The last time I looked, the alternate Canon firmware was about on a par with what I get out of the XA2 or the LC-A, but a camera sufficiently quick and painless to use was still $howmuch.

Mind you, I have determinedly non-standard requirements.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, http://hawkdog.net/wordpress/archives/2319

[andrewducker]

That's fantastic!

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

Film will live on as a niche/hobbyist thing ... after all, there are probably still people making daguerreotypes today.

*google break*

Why yes, yes there are ...

And there are probably special uses and edge cases where film makes sense, or delivers better results.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I know someone who takes gorgeous photographs using pinhole cameras and the like.

But as I said in an earlier discussion (on today's linkpost) - it's like making Viking longboats, if you want to do that as a hobby, go ahead, I think it's marvellous. But there's not going to be much in the way of societal support/infrastructure for it.

[heyokish.livejournal.com]

dags, yes, and more wet plate collodion photographers (including me) now than since dry plate took over in the 1870s...it's thriving mostly because of the combo of wanting a physical, tangible form of photography and the yay-for-the-internets ability to share information.

[zz]

The photographers at work are using 30-50Mpixel digicams. Along with physical storage of old archive material, we now have a data storage problem, when each photo takes >100MB.

[andrewducker]

Wow. Do they actually need all that detail?

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Isn't almost all of that detail noise in very nearly all of the pictures? I'm thinking seriously high-res motion blur and tiny lens imperfections picked out in amazing detail! Maybe not if they're also using very very bright lights etc etc though?

[andrewducker]

I'm assuming these are the equivalent of 70mm cameras, with much larger sensors than you get in a point/click. Because, yes, otherwise you're mostly capturing noise!

[davesangel.livejournal.com]

A lot of photographers I've worked with favour film to digital cameras, and this seems pretty widespread so I think that some of the major companies should continue to manufacture film cameras to some extent.

[andrewducker]

See, I'd have thought that as well - but they don't seem to be, which I found a bit confusing. Kodak haven't produced a film SLR since 2008, Canon theoretically have one, but I can't find it new, only second hand, Nikon are the same.

[martling.livejournal.com]

Nikon still manufacture the F6 new. Although I see that they finally stopped manufacturing manual focus, fully mechanical film cameras with the FM3a (released 2001, discontinued 2006). They do still manufacture a whole range of manual focus lenses, intended specifically for those, though.

[andrewducker]

Yes, but at £1500 the F6 is out of the amateur SLR market and well into the professional SLR market. Which means that anyone coming new into photography has a film camera to reasonably aspire to.

[martling.livejournal.com]

Well, there's plenty of lesser film cameras to aspire to still, you just won't get them new from the factory any more. But there are so many in circulation already that it really just stopped making sense to add any more.

Anyway, we're only really talking about 35mm here. Hasselblad and others are still making new medium format film cameras - which I think are a much more interesting aspiration than an incremental improvement like the F6 - and last I heard, most serious landscape photography was still being done on large format film.

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

I know Kodak stopped making film, but I thought Agfa and Fuji were still producing the old silver-halide stuff.

I guess when digital cameras reached the 15 megapixel range they became the equivalent of film cameras.

If you're looking for a digital, I recommend the Nikon D90. That's what I shoot with and I'm very happy with it.

[andrewducker]

Oh, you can still get film. Just not any new cameras that use it.

I don't actually want a new camera myself at the moment. I'm going to wait and see what the camera on my new one is like. Maybe after that :->

[heyokish.livejournal.com]

There are, however, several new manufacturers around making large format cameras--almost impossible to beat LF when you are doing architectural work, for starters--and sheet film is selling more now than it has for many years. Fuji has a new medium format camera. As does Bronica.

35mm film cameras, though, yeah. Not so much.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

I was sad beyond measure when Polaroid stopped making the instant film ... I had a Polaroid camera and then they had all those news items saying the exisiting film had gone past its sell-by date. It seemed to me at the time that a Polaroid camera filled a little niche which a digital camera didn't, but I don't know if that's true any more what with cameras and mobile phones getting more clever day by day. :-(

[0olong.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking film and chemical printing will keep being available for a good while yet... part of the reason (35mm) film cameras aren't selling so well is that people already have them - and with so many people doing most or all of their photography on digital cameras these days, there are more people offloading their old cameras too...

That said, film will be more and more of a niche thing. I strongly suspect that in a few more years a majority of people taking their own photos on film will be developing their own, too, as people who aren't so bothered about the process and the physicality of it steadily drift over to digital. As heyokish observes, there actually seems to be more interest in relatively obscure formats and so on...