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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."
I have a luddite friend (1st grade teacher) who boasted she didn't have a CD player, and she didn't have room for a laptop. Rabbit ears were her adjusted, Lou Reed played on a record, and she once took weeks finding just the right cord for her phone.
She'll call your laptop quaint and hi-speed a luxury as she pays Ma Bell line-insurance on behalf of her landlord. Silly VOIP.It's stage right Ma'am, and I find your taste in antiques curious.
I do not see a problem with this. If I want a TV set, I am not going to Walmart, but to a specialized dealer. I won't buy a PC anywhere else than my local PC shop. And I'd had the money (or the combination to the shopkeepers safe) certainly would not buy my ship at "Honest Stans used Ships", but at a dedicated dealer, if not even at the manufacturer himself.
Yes, this often is more expensive than discount or online shopping. However, I like the luxury of a nice chat with the shopkeepers (as long as I do not have the combination to their safe, that is), and the way they tread a returning customer, e.g. replacing that defective AMD chip without quarrels or pointing at the manufacturers warranty. Let behind that a dedicated shop knows what it is speaking of.
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
My wifes digital camera comes with one plug and I have no idea if the adapter does different Voltage/Hz. Probably it does, but it most certainly has to be recharged at least every day.
My analog camera has one battery that lasts for years. Who do you think is better of for the more "exotic trips"?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The Dixons group is truly awful, especially as they essentially own the entire UK high street and out-of-town electronics market. PCWorld, Curry's and Dixons shops are all Dixon's group and are universally overpriced, with a poor selection and the most stupid staff on the planet.
Theres more to the digital boom than this - I bought a Digital Point and Shoot camera in December for my wife prior to the birth of our first child. Since then it's proved itself invaluable - we'd leave film months/years before processing. Now we get results instantly.
You can correct Red-eye (etc) on the computer & post the results back to the memory card to take to the shop for processing.
You can burn the results to CD.
You only process what you know is worth seeing.
When one of us is shopping we can take the camera, photograph various candidate items then return home & decide what's best - then you delete the shots & all it's cost is a bit of electricity and wear & tear.
I love my old SLR & it still has it's uses in low-light (but if I bought myself a digital SLR it would be toast) but the P&S market for film cameras is SO dead it's not funny.
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
Although it seems that Dixon pulling out of the 35 mm market doesn't seem that significant but if other retailers start to follow suit then I can see that 35 mm camera (esp. SLR) will rise in price. Ok Digital prices will drop but for pro photographers and amateurs who still like use 35mm format they will be the losers as they have to pay the extra price. Ok a lot of pro photograpers (magazine and newspapers) use use digital because its easiar and quicker to get into print. However for the more artistically minded 35 mm is better. Have you ever tried to use a wide angle lens on digital the focal length multiplier really screws things up. For example on cannon I think the multiplier is 1.6 great for zoom but tribble for wide angle unless you buy a 10 mm lens!! As a some one that records music its now becoming more expensive to record analogue tracks its really hard to get hold of tapes for my 8track. I know that digital eventually can cope with the requirements but why take samples of the real thing! Have you tried to do distortion in digital its horrible!
Its a British thing. If someone is talking to you we can't walk away. We just smile politely whilst plotting to kill (or hoping a that someone/thing will do it for us) them in our heads. Same with telephone calls. My girlfriend thought I was mad when I just hung up on someone trying to sell me double glazing. Its so bad, that we have radio shows (Radio 1) with bits dedicated to seeing how long people will put up with people talking to them on the phone. Try it! Phone a Brit and, provided you stay polite, see how long they will stay on the phone even if you don't say anything at all.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
[Incidentally, it might not have been Lord Litchfield, he might not have been talking about digital cameras, and I might have misheard pretty much everything he said. The Today programme is the radio show that wakes me up in the morning, and so I'm not exactly firing on all cylinders at that time... I think I got the gist of it, though]
The significance is that in the UK, I would guess that Dixons sell more cameras than almost anyone. Not to enthusiasts, but to Joe Public. Those who don't buy at Dixons probably go to Argos, or if they're really adventurous perhaps Jessops. This means that film cameras are no longer mainstream; this will have a knock on effect on prices and availability in all UK camera shops, as Dixons probably drove the market especially for point and shoot (although Dixons also sold plenty of entry to mid level SLRs).
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
You could probably buy something like an Olympus OM-2 at a used camera store for around $100.
You can aim, focus, shoot and you have great pictures. How much do you have to pay to buy a digital that can do that? I mean, you can buy 100 dollar digitals that take pictures, but they're not exactly nice. You're probably looking at $500 if you bought one used that will get you equal quality(not the same quality, a different quality, still digital in its look and feel, but it'll have its own good quality). Not too mention the Olympus is going to be much more rugged and last you much longer in general. The digitals people buy today for $100 will all not work in 10 years. The Olympus will still be working another 20 years.
Properly focusing a 6-8MP image manually on a tiny low-res screen takes at least 5-8 seconds and results in inaccurate focusing. For the forseeable future, nothing will beat being able to look through the actual lens with the human eye and checking the focus there.
For portrait photography... i'd actually agree with you, though average joe users are likely to auto focus. Prostudio work can be done on a real monitor. For run of the mill photography... the old rangefinder system was excelent.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
It's going to be everywhere except in your hands. Vinyls aren't dead, at all, skratch artists almost can't do without them, I own Final Skratch from Stanton and despite all the phoney claims it doesn't hold its own against a real vinyl, even if it comes really really close, and until some technology comes along that truly make the vinyl obsolete we'll see tons of them under dj's hands.
;) ) probably until digital has more resolution than 35mm films (around 22megapixels it seems).
35mm pictures will be everywhere, in magazine, large displays and so on but all the while consummers won't be able to procure the films and material to themselves easily.
Lets face it, for consummers digital is way more convenient, not better, convenient. If digital was better marketing wouldn't compare it to analog they would simply show it. Digital technologies have never been strong because they were good, they always caught up because they were convenient but professionnal will drop convenience really fast if it can produce better results. Think high end studio recording, we stuck to analog reels for very long until digital finally became so good that we could embrace its convenience but not at the expense of quality, not even 5 years ago spliccing was still common in studio. Therefore I don't think 35mm is dying, as much as vinyls aren't dead, they're just hidden from "normal people"(
Irregularily (basically whenever I feel like it) I'll order prints of the ones that are worthwhile. For me that's maybe 1/3rd of the pictures.
I don't see how this is very much different from earlier. I don't have the hassle of film and development, and I know I can still order perfect copies from perfect digital file 50 years from now (assuming I'm still alive).
I can also with no effort at all send pictures to grandmothers, uncles, friends or whomever a process that used to take literally weeks or months and cost effort, time and money.
This is the ideal returns strategy for shops like Dixons - take it back 5 minutes before closing on Saturday. It's always been processed quickly with a minimum of questions when I've done that :-)
I once asked a guy in Dixons if any of their VCRs were SVHS. He looked around and said "This one's VHS...and this one. Yes, they're all VHS."
Secondary storage mechanism is a removable 80 gig hard drive. I have over 6 gigs of pictures, so the removable drive is sufficient to backup my home directory plus the picture directory.
Tertiary backup mechanism is CD-R and DVD-R, with multiple copies of the pictures backed up every year.
All I need now is an offsite backup.
I email my photos to my dad who also has a gmail account. He does the same in return. I think he's on about 2% space used at the moment and there's always another 50 invites...
In Google we trust.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
> Sure, there won't be much in the way of compact point-and-shoot within
> a couple of years, but 35mm (especially slide/transparency) and medium
> format will still be with us in 10-20 years' time, just like the vinyl
> record is still the tool of choice for most creative DJs.
Vinyl records have clear advantages for DJs over CDs. Film doesn't really have any advantages at all over digitial. Pretty much everything about digitial photography is better.
> she says that standard digital SLR is still not high resolution enough to
> be blown up to 6ft
Neither is a film camera (not one any photojournalists could afford anyway).
> chromatic aberration or 'edge fringing' which is coloured fringes
> (typically cyan or red) around the border between different coloured
> objects near the edge of the lens. It's caused by an interraction
> between the lens' properties and the CCD, and does not happen with film.
Chromatic aberration is caused by lenses and not the CCD, although the CCD can alter the apparent colour of the abberations. It DOES happen with film cameras. It isn't really noticable on film or digital with decent lenses that a professional photographer would use. Eg Canon L series lenses.
> professional photographers don't want to have to touch these up in Photoshop
> because it's losing detail.
A professional photographer would be unlikely to buy a cheap lens that would have these problems to a noticable degree. Even for average users, these problems are only visible if you zoom right in on the edge of a photo and are almost never visible in prints.
I recently purchased a very nice film SLR for 150 bucks new, because I wanted an SLR but was unwilling to pony up the equivelant of my monthly mortgage for one.
:-)
I own a decent digital, as well, so I have come to know both breeds.
I hate the digital. I hate its crappy, battery-sucking LCD viewfinder that is useless in bright sunlight. I hate its shutter lag that assures I always miss the shot. I hate its habit of saving power by shutting off every two minutes , assuring that I am still rebooting my camera whenever the next photo op occurs. I hate the fact that I need to carry twice my weight in batteries to every major event. I hate burrowing through menus using only two tiny buttons whose functions change at the whim of the camera's software developer in order to change simple camera settings.
I LIKE my film camera. I like that it only cost me 150 bucks, so if I lose or break it, I won't be suicidal. I like that it has a clearly marked button or dial for everything I want to do, so that I can change settings with ease. I like that I can change film stocks when I want different results. I like that when I depress the shutter, it takes a picture RIGHT NOW, instead of later. I like that I can forget and leave it on, and my battery will still be good for weeks.
I even kind've like waiting for my film to be developed (even if it's as long as a whole hour). Until that moment, EVERY picture I take is a potential pulizter prize winner
To bring them into the digital realm, I just have them dropped on Kodak CD's, which are high-res, cheaper than prints and look much better
than scans of prints. I figure it is a small price to pay for actually getting the shots I want, and it's handy to have the stuff already archived on CD.
Above all, I like being secure in the knowledge that ten years from now, my camera will still be working. I don't feel that secure with my digital, which will probably be a doorstop in a few years.
The only benefits I see to digitals are increased picture capacity, the ability to review your photos on the spot and the means to make your own porn (the internet gets all the credit for the porn explosion in this country, but I think that people forget that a lot of porn sites owe their existence to a bunch of horny people who didn't have to sneak into a photo lab at night to build their websites).
My take, anyway. Your mileage may vary. But I see a lot of money being spent these days on stuff that is more promises of a better world than a truly better one. Ten years ago, a 17 inch CRT monitor cost me 500 bucks. However, thanks to the magic of modern technology, I can now purchase a far less durable 17 inch monitor that can only be viewed from one angle for....drumroll...500 bucks! But, hey, they're lighter, right?
Somewhere along the way, people stopped selling BETTER ideas, and just starting selling NEW ones. There is a difference...
The one that has the less exotic battery.
My digicam will take AA's. That rather beats those odd little "N" batteries (or whatever they're called) that tend to be in analog cameras.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
$300 will get you a camera what will knock the pants off of the $100 analog camera in every respect except for shutter speed.
...as far as what's going to be working 10 years from now it's rather hard to say. It's all being made by the lowest bidder chinese factory anyway.
Having room in the camera for 200 shots will make up for the slow shutter speed. The fact that you can also preview pictures on the TV in your hotel room will also be a nice plus.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Even with shutter lag, even with battery issues, even with the damn thing turning off at just the wrong moment, I switched to digital 5 years ago, and haven't looked back. In a couple of years, I might buy myself a nice digital SLR to resolve some of those problems, but in the mean time, my little Canon will do fine.
Why do I agree with all of your points and disagree with your position? The tipping point is the medium. The cost of good quality film, the cost of developing, the time it takes, and the likelihood that the film is going to sit on a shelf waiting for me to bring it to the developer is just enough for me to have to think about whether or not I really want to take that picture when it comes up.
With digital, I don't even think about it any more. Once you've gotten over the barrier to entry, the marginal cost per picture is essentially zero. I went to Belize with a 1MB card and pretty much filled it up with pretty fish pictures. A lot of them were not so pretty. If I had been using an underwater film camera, I would have had to either be sparing with my pictures or climb onto the boat every few minutes, dry off the camera, open it, change the film, re-oil the seals, close it up, and go back down.
With my digital in its case, I could just keep snapping and snapping. It did not matter that some of the pictures were bad. I could just throw them away.
For me, I guess its that I am sort of a shotgun photographer. I take a lot of pictures and find the good one, rather than waiting for the perfect one and grabbing it right then. It may not be the afficianado's way, but if it takes me 500 shots to get that one picture of a lobster defending its home, or a shark slumbering under a patch of coral, It's worth it to me.
I do miss long hours in the darkroom developing my own b/w pictures, but that, too, was an expensive habit, and while there's no digital replacement for the smell of the fixative, well, I have to admit that the end result I get with photoshop is a lot better than anything I was able to do in the darkroom.
So Ansel Adams I'm not. But us average joes need digital in order to churn out a good number of great pictures.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Oh, film cameras have more advantages than that.
1. Very wide exposure latitude. You can mis-expose a shot and it will almost always be salvageable later. With digital, if the shot is even slightly mis-exposed you lose highlights or shadow detail permanently.
2. Cheap media. If you're going to Tibet for the trip of a lifetime and plan on taking a few hundred shots, it's much cheaper to take 'em on film.
3. Automatic backups. Once you get your prints, you still have the negatives.
4. Cheaper cameras. A 35mm SLR that'll give better quality than any one hour photo lab can make use of, can be had for under $200. For digital, you're looking at $400+ for a comparable quality of image, $800+ if you want an SLR.
That said, I'm almost entirely digital now... Just waiting for an affordable SLR with a full-frame sensor...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak