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Digital Cameras Force Film Off Dixons' Shelves
ngibbons writes "BBC News story regarding digital camera sales: 'High Street retailer Dixons, which started by selling 35mm cameras, is to stop stocking the items because of the popularity of digital cameras.' Digital cameras will out-sell 35mm cameras in the UK by a ratio of 15:1 this year."
Dixons is seen as a dealer in electronics. If you wanted film technology, you would probably go somewhere else - perhaps where the staff know what "ASA" means?
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When I see people everywhere shooting digital point and shoot cameras I really wonder what they are doing with all the files. Are they burning them to CD? buying hard drives? I know this has been said a million times before, but what will be the equivalent of an old shoebox filled with family snapshots look like 50 years from now? I have a feeling when a lot of people want to take a look back at that trip to disneyland when they were a kid the images will either be gone or stored on a medium which is obsolete. I doubt most people shooting with digital cameras realize how fragile their images are without care over the long term. With today's emulsions you can put your slides in a sleeve, throw them in a dark drawer, and they will still look pretty good in a couple decades. Can you say the same for a memory stick or even a cd? Is their a business opportunity for digital banks which will provide longevity of digital information so people don't need to worry about it?
It's worth bearing in mind that "photographers" are not a homogeneous mass.
For example, someone producing portraits to be blown up to large size on high-quality media might be unhappy with the fact that digital still isn't as good as (e.g.) medium/large format film.
On the other hand, photographers at a football (soccer) match- in the UK at least- have favoured digital (to the best of my knowledge) for quite a few years now; even though until recently, it was far more expensive and lower in quality than the equivalent film cameras. Why?
Simple; newspaper publishers want the paper (containing photos and reports of the match) to be on sale outside the stadia by the time the match is finished and the fans are hitting the streets again. A football match is 90 minutes long with 15 minutes at half time. You can see that this is going to be logistically difficult if you're using film.
In fact, I doubt it's trivial even if you're using digital, but that at least gives you some much-needed flexibility; as much in the transmission of pictures as in their production. I would assume that doing it this way allows pictures to be taken some way into the second half of the match, transmitted, and dropped into the layout digitally, still leaving time for the printing and delivery.
Nowadays, most photographs taken on a professional Digital SLR will look as good as ones taken on a film camera when printed at normal size on low-quality newsprint; so frankly, cost and minor quality issues are far less important than the convenience of digital.
As I said, two quite different photographic styles; or rather, businesses.
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LPs were "killed" by CDs, yet enthusiats and some DJs are still using them for various properties - including superior sound - that the CD don't hold.
Uh, the only people I know that use LPs are the same kinds of folks who buy $70 monster fiber optic cables and $1000 harmonically-aligned speaker stands. For some folks their wallets are just that much bigger than their sales-resistance. And, it always feels nice to be one of only 100 people in the country who knows that all the PhD engineers out there are wrong.
Film will just be the new LP for a while, and pretty soon the big market will be for $1000 archival-quality, radiation-proof, chromatically-aligned, and otherwise buzzward-compliant film-canisters to carry it around in.
Sure, film is cheaper to scale up (but how many people are shooting medium format outside of the professional photo community?). However, my understanding is that even medium-format is starting to get competition from ultra-high-res sensors that are themselves getting much larger.
It is just simple physics. If you capture more dpi in a CCD than you have grain-per-inch on film (or whatever the stat is called), then you can reproduce the image onto any media you want digitally, no matter what the guy wearing crystals and magnets says. In almost every area of science CCDs have replaced film for precisely this reason. It is just recent news that they've gotten cheap enough for consumers to afford. When was the last time somebody used film in a telescope, autoradiograph, or X-Ray crystallography experiment? (Granted, the latter two are tending to use image-plate technology which have many of the benefits of CCDs but are cheaper. They are still digitally scanned.)
Nothing wrong with film, and I'm sure it will always have some uses. However, except for a few niche areas most of those uses will be by the same sort who currently use LPs...
Actually, she was probably doing you a favour. It's probably much easier to return an unopened unwanted item than it is one that a customer claims is not of merchantable quality. For a start, she probably wouldn't have to get authorisation.
When shop staff offer me an easy way to get what I want like that, personally I usually go for it.