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Kodak To Stop Selling Film Cameras In U.S.
MikeDataLink writes "Kodak has announced today that they are no longer going to sell or manufacture film based cameras in the USA or Europe (except for disposables) and instead concentrate on Digital cameras. It looks like consumers have spoken and film is finally going to go the way of the dinosaur."
The announcement also did NOT say Kodak was going to slow down or stop the production of film in any way. I suspect that corner of their business will continue to thrive in the US and Europe for quite some time yet.
You don't really need a crystal ball for that - especially when it happens to be true. Even though prices continue to come down, and memory and resolution continue to increase, I still can't afford to purchase a digital camera which could equal my old Nikon in image quality, color fidelity, and responsiveness.
Nevertheless, for day-to-day photography my wife's Canon digital camera is perfectly adequate, and I imagine many consumers feel the same way.
Kodak has been losing market share to Fuji for quite a while anyway, especially in the professional market. Kodak has been investing a lot of money and research in "Digital Color Science" for well over a decade - they've been preparing to abandon film for a long time.
I don't think this has anything to do with the demise of film. It's about no longer producing products that aren't as profitable as they'd like. If they stopped making 35mm film, then we'd have something notable.
There is something interesting in the press release; Kodak indicates that they will
This looks like an indirect reference to plans for phasing out the production of APS films, which have never caught on to the degree that the industry had hoped.
Get your facts straight. Bill Gates and Corbis are the ones saving the images for historical record - not the ones destroying it.
Mmmm.. Donuts
You are right that it will be a long, long time before real photographers use digital. But I believe that we are only a few years before the bulk of consumer photography is digital.
I am actually a "real" photographer who has embraced digital photography due to its convenience and cost issues. I was raised on standard B&W and color film photography in 35mm and large format photography and have a passion for those formats as well. But digital does have its place in semi-pro and pro shooting. In fact, a recent National Geographic article on flight was shot entirely with digital cameras and Apple Powerbook computers.
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What you may not realize is that Kodak makes a great deal of royalties off of most CCDs manufactured. The have the patents on color filter gels that are placed down with photolithography over the CCDs (and CMOS?) that go into most digital cameras.
I suspect they make tons more on this than any profits from cameras they would make.
Canon, which does no small digital business, continues to introduce new film cameras -- even low-end SLR's, which would seem to be the most vulnerable to competition from digital. They've recently introduced the Rebel K2 and Rebel G II which are both lower-end versions of the Rebel Ti (Canon has used the Rebel name in the US for about 13 years for their entry-level SLR). Evidently the Rebel Ti was getting just a bit too high-end for comfort. These are all film cameras, by the way.
As others have noted, Kodak getting out of film cameras means nothing. APS has been a well-deserved failure, and Kodak really hasn't built any interesting 35 mm cameras lately.
(I just got a Rebel Digital, which is based on the Rebel Ti body. It's a much, much better camera than my first SLR, a Rebel XS. It's more solid, has better controls, a metal lens mount, much shorter shutter lag and faster drive and in some ways a better autofocus system than my EOS 1N, their previous top of the line prior to the 1V. The controls are still deliberately dumbed down so that they don't completely destroy the market for the Elan, but both the film and digital versions of this camera are very innovative indeed.)
Consumers have spoken, and Kodak digital cameras are going the way of the dinosaur. They use proprietary drivers instead of the standard USB Mass Storage protocol most other cameras are using. This means it's extremely difficult to use them under Linux or BSD, even with a current gphoto. And Mac users are too used to *REAL* plug and play to bother with installing drivers, particularly for devices that shouldn't need them.
On the other hand, most UMass based cameras just work. Period. Without installing one damned driver anywhere, I can use it on my FreeBSD machine, my friends PowerBook, and my mom's Wind98SE system.
Having to carry around the Kodak Install CD just so you can grab your photos anywhere other than your own computer, is just silly. It sucks when you're on vacation. It's just another thing you have to remember to pack. "Dear, don't forget the Kodak CD! Remember that Aunt Martha uses a Canon camera instead..."
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I have a 4 mp digital camera and I can get prints out of it that look as good as any film camera.
There are a few keys to making good prints from digital:
Good software. To make a print from digital to printer requires scaling and interpolation of the digital data from the camera's resolution to the printer's native resolution (ie 720 dpi) and the paper dimensions. There are half a dozen interpolation algorithms I can think off the top of my head (ie, bicubic, lanczos etc) and the quality of your print *depends* on these. My personal favorite printing software is QImage which uses Lanczos, and feeds the data to a printer driver in managable chunks rather than a quick dump, among other things. Its way, way better than choosing the simple "print" from photoshop.
You also need a properly calibrated printer and print profiles for the specific paper and ink you're using. Any decent commercial service should have this done already, but sometimes the button-pushers at your one-hour photomat don't really know what they're doing.
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