Slashdot Mirror
35mm - One Step Closer to the End
Anonymous Coward writes "A colleague of mine just pointed out that Nikon UK has posted a press release here indicating that they are all but ending production of their 35mm film cameras, medium- and large-format lenses and enlarging equipment. The F6 35mm SLR will remain in production and be available in Europe and America, and the all-mechanical FM10 will be available outside of Europe. A handful of manual lenses will remain in production as well.
Film in general isn't going away any time soon as digital cameras cannot replace medium and large format cameras, but this is clear evidence that the resolution and popularity of the digital medium have surpassed that of the 35mm format. 35mm took another step into the grave."
So the "Nothing to see, please move along" actually meant something today :P
I hope I can still find film for my cereal box 35mm camera then.
Quite obvious. Digital SLR's are great for everybody. Versus 35mm film SLRs, the digital varients offer comperable performance, quality, backwards compatiblity with VERY EXPENSIVE lenses, and save the purchaser a fortune in film development costs. 35mm isn't dead, it just isn't as profitable as it once was.
Good bye T-Max, just when I finally had the room to set up my own dark-room, you decide to go. Just not fair.
Though it still blows me away. I mean you can get a fantastic 35mm film camera for less than 1/2 that of a digital. I don't know, maybe Nikon has a cheap D30 in the works or something, but barring that, the barrier to entry into the realm of SLR's is about to get a good deal more expensive.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I guess one of these days I will have to go get one of these.
All manual cameras are really wonderful. Once you are out there, hiking a desert or marveling the cold of Antarctica, you ain't gonna be charging your batteries for a digital camera for sure...
If you were really serious about photography, you wouldn't be using 35mm in the first place. It's meant for beginners who don't need serious resolution and fine detail which is only available in larger formats. For those beginners, digital surpasses 35mm in every way (resolution, color rendition (infinitely malleable), convenience, and you can bring hundreds of pictures for printing to the photo stand on a single card).
So are we going to mourn the loss of this dead technology forever? Give me a break.
... I for one welcome our new digital overloards.
1) Film STILL offers better resolution, although this won't last for long. I believe its close to 22 megapixels, although this is not for sure.
2) Some photographers just love the grain of B&W developed on Tri-X or T-Max film, which doesn't use the C-41 process used for Walmart shit.
There are more, but it's been a long day...
Anyway, I've been using my Canon EOS 10s film camera for years and will continue doing so, mainly because it inculcates a whole new ethic -- you can just snap away and hit the delete button when you find something ugly. Film forces you to think in artistic terms BEFORE you click, and there's a definite cost associated with clicking the shutter release. I believe it makes better photographers.
Why do people still use vinyl? Don't kid yourself -- 35mm film is not the floppy disk. It's not going to die anytime soon.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
I can only imagine the howls of outrage. A couple of years ago, Nikon produced a copy of its 1950s era rangefinder S3 and sold the production run of 8000 for something like $5K/ea. I think there are still a lot of people out there who are not ready fully give up on film.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
There are quite a lot of people who learned the stickshift form of photography, on their 35mm SLR. Many professionals still use regular film too, if only for the purist or romantic value. Either way, there'll be a market for cameras and equipment for this crowd and the crowds they teach. This same market created the digital SLR, one selling point of which was letting people use their old lenses and have full control over things like depth of field. Proctor and Gamble sells off brands all the time, they move on, but others pick it up and do well and often better. I see this similarly.
The resolution ... of the digital medium have surpassed that of the 35mm format
This just isn't true. I've switched to digital as well, but the resolution of 35mm film is roughly 24 megapixels. This is still 3x the resolution of the best consumer digicams.
Moreover, Moore's Law does not apply to the sensors used in digital cameras because they are essentially A/D converters. It will be very difficult to increase their resolution much further without introducing unacceptably high levels of noise.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
I finally broke down and bought my wife a digital SLR for Christmas this year. Now that good quality DSLRs have broken the $1000 barrier, it just makes sense. She already had an assortment of lenses and other accessories from her 5 year old 35mm SLR. The new camera has many more features such as auto stabilizer while keeping all of the settings flexibility of her old 35mm.
Honestly, I'm not sure how we got along with it for so long.
The average Joe is looking for convenience. Color gradation and ultra-high quality are not as important as being able to download images to his computer and email em across the country the same day.
The average Joe spends all the dollars, so the average Joe is going to be the one to which companies cater.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
They are ALL\{ending production of their 35mm film}. Since {designing a FTL rocket engine} is in ALL, Nikon UK is designing a FTL rocket engine.
I recently picked up a D50 to replace my previous Nikon SLR (and give all 10 of my junk digital cameras to anyone I know with a kid). I'm blown away -- the quality is THAT good. The camera is just as fast as my film camera, the resolution is spectacular, and I can use all my old lenses and accessories.
Under US$1000 for everything I need, and I never have to worry about the junk I was getting out of previous generations of digital cameras.
I feel bad about film -- I really love the analog world. Yet the more I look at it, the more I see the future is in processing digital pictures real time to look and feel like film (or even have its own quality). The most recent batch of prints I made from the dSLR look so much better than my last batch of regular SLR 35mm prints -- everyone noticed. I even had it in JPG mode instead of RAW!
R.I.P. 35mm, I loved ya even with the "D" grade I got in 7th grade Photography class.
YA RLY
O RLY?
Hi, Mr. O'Reilly!
We lament the loss of the camera that captures our memories to film, for these memories define our past, our sense of self and sense of friends and memories, and of better times. And as such feel like we are losing our past, these emotions captured into simple mylar strips. But surely it's more memories being recorded, distributed, shared with friends and family in remote locale, that should make us not rue the evolution of film to digital, but rather see that it's not the technique in which we store our faces, it's the breadth to which we may share them...
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Apparently I should let my employer (a very well known and published photographer) know that 35mm isn't any good (we have switched to digital but he shot for decades with it) I suppose I should also let a number of my Professors in photo school know that also. I also suppose I should inform press photographers who before digital shot mostly with 35mm equipment. I also suppose I should inform Kodak and Fuji and tell them to stop making their lines of professional 35mm reversal and negative films, which are available in a much wider selection than they have consumer films available. I also suppose I should tell police photographers who've shot with 35mm for decades (and many still do).
Sure, for paid jobs it isn't ideal most of the times, but sometimes, when portability or processing costs must be kept low 35mm is much more attractive than medium or large format. Sure, digital is far better, and 35 is dead now, but in the days of film 35mm was just as professional as anything else if the situation demanded it.
Photos.
I recently sold my (mind buggeringly expensive) Canon 1Ds and went back to all-manual film cameras. Not 35mm, though. In larger formats film still has huge advantages over digital in terms of quality and enlargability. The lack of battery dependence is also incredibly liberating. It is horribly expensive though. With the exception of my Panasonic LX1 digi, I now don't own a camera which isn't completely manual... a Linhof 4x5, a pair of Fuji 6x9 rangefinders, a Rollei SL66, a Noblex 6x12 and a Leica M4-P. The Leica is the only one that doesn't get used on a weekly basis... but the last time we had a huge power outage I was enormously grateful for it.
Pix here, here and here if anyone's interested.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
I like shooting in film, a lot more than using digital cameras. Because _TO ME_, theres a lot more to photography that clicking good pictures. The thrill and the hope that you carry back home, when you click on film simply isn't there with digital.
There are other reasons too:
1. Vibrance and Depth (I have always found good color slides to offer better vibrance/depth)
2. Resolution (Yes, digital is almost there these days at the higher end. But there is a difference.)
n. Romantic!
On the downside for films, the biggest problem is that quality film are very expensive, compared to digital. But, the fact that the Fuji sells a lot of film to high-end professionals is testament that there is something about film.
I hope Canon has no plans to stop film SLRs. I am a exclusive Canon user. But, the scariest thing to come out of this could be that slides and film might get more expensive as demand decreases.
Life is just a conviction.
Yes, 35mm is dying. But no digital camera can outperform my 4x5 large-format camera for the money. I get over 125 megapixels with a 2400dpi scan of a 4x5" peice of film. And this is with a cheap 2400dpi scanner. A 4000dpi drum scan blows everything away.
Do the math. 6-10 megapixel cameras can't make very large prints at 300dpi output. And some say that 300dpi isn't even good enough.
Moore's law doesn't apply to Bayer CMOS sensors either. And small sensors found in cheap digicams are diffraction-limited. You can't cheaply make a 4x5" sensor!
This leads me to believe that there will not be a decent, low-cost replacement for large format film in a LOONNG time.
This doesn't suprise me, but I really do not agree with choices like this one. Film cameras and full-manual are the only thing some photographers will use, as I know. As the others have posted, some people really like real photography. Sure, digital is convenient, and can be the way of the future, but I do not see that as what Nikon is after. This seems not to be about the future of photography, but just the future of the company. They want to convert every one, so users can purchase more. I've got a Nikon FE from 20 years ago, and it works wonderfully, with film. Your digital Nikon from a few years back probably is not cutting edge. Digital is still growing and evolving. It is not perfected. Like CD-ROM reading speeds, the number of mega pixels will eventually slow. That would be the best time to discontinue film products, because there wouldn't be short times between upgrades.
500 MHz +/- 100 MHz
While digital cameras may (and mostly are) replacing film in the consumer market, they still have a long ways to go before replacing film in all markets. Like it or not, digital still is a ways from matching the resolution of film, and there are still things that only film works well for.
Even beyond the "nostalgia" market, the other side is that film holds up better as a medium than digital. This isn't news. Remember that vinyl records are still around, and in many ways are still preferred as a medium by audiophiles and for long-term storage. I can still play an album from the 1950's, but will a disk with my photos on it still be readable in a decade? As I recall, we just had a nice long post about how long a CD-R or CD-R/W lasts.
Film isn't dead, it'll still have it's place.
Nikon's the company that held onto its lens mount for all these years, and Canon seemed to be the more prominent one in the digital field (or at least more prominently marketing in the northeast US, with all the Digital Rebel commercials, and all the press/sports photogs with a Canon EOS 1D and some kind of big L-Glass lens). I would've expected Canon to throw in the towel on film camera production, but Nikon? The company that was (perhaps up to this point) still manufacturing the FM3A manual camera as new?
Yes, digital is faster, and the wave of the future, etc., etc., but there are some areas where film cameras still have an edge. In particular, range of sensitivity: you can load ISO 50 slide film, or ISO 1600 negative film (but of course it's a bit grainier as you go up in ISO). Battery life is much better, especially if it's a manual-drive camera; IMO there's nothing more annoying than your camera dying after its eighth picture of the day. And each frame uses a brand new area of film, instead of the same CCD sensor over and over again. Once a pixel goes out, it's either time to live with that dead pixel, or an expensive shipment to get it serviced.
This is a bit of a disappointment, since one of the big two players is deciding to bow out. There's still Canon, Pentax, Leica (at their price, you're better off getting a medium format kit), among others. Olympus backed out of film a while ago. There's still plenty of film being manufactured (though there seems to be rumors of Kodak stopping production soon; I use Fuji, so I don't mind that much), and there's still decent 35mm film scanners that cost less than a digital SLR body alone. And of course there's the search for a decent and inexpensive E-6 film lab in the US (E-6 is the slide film process; the drugstores and chain camera stores almost always handle only C-41, which is negative film).
My favorite has to be shooting with Velvia slide film. My friends all say "Slides? Didn't those go out in the 70's?" Then I show them the 4000 dpi scan that I took of the slide, and the 20 x 30 print made from the slide. Yes, digital could do it too, but the body alone would've been above $1300; I'd rather spend that on a lens.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
old cameras are fun, i have a soft spot for the minolta MD mount line especially the XD-11 not to mention all of pentax's quirky products...K1000 forever... and the Leica MP....
Oh god - typical slashdot drama!!
:).
It is a sad thing that Nikon UK has chosen to do what they have decided to do but that doesn't mean Nikon has started that world-wide. If the British need newer lenses, they can buy from the US online sites. Taken another step to the grave my ass: a bad analogy but the FDD isn't totally dead yet and people have been predicting it's death for the last decade. Film photography is an enjoyable experience that requires a decent amount of discipline and knowledge. The photographs from a film shot have much higher resolution than a digicam shot. Sure a digicam is more convenient but photography isn't meant to be a convenience thing at all times. Sure a point and shoot is awesome at your baby's birthday party but not everything is a birthday party. Photography for me is light falling on film
...co-owns http://lossen-fotografie.de/e5/index_ger.html. She is under the impression that the demand for traditional film work is dwindling. Bernie mostly works digitally these days.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I became a better photographer with a DSLR, since I can try out all the manual modes, and other fun stuff that SLRs offer, but without the expense of burning several rolls of film learning exactly what aperture and exposure do!
Don't pick up the pho*(@)$*@&@!@ NO CARRIER
I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords.
I'm happy to leave the archaic medium of film behind me.
Linking to Ken Rockwell to prove a point about photography is like arguing for Intelligent Design. We know you don't have a clue what you're talking about it and bringing in fake "experts" is not helping your case.
Yes, 35mm has less resolution. Period. End of story. To argue otherwise shows not only that you are ignorant of current technologies, but also that you aren't interested in actually comparing apples to apples. As such, it's worthless to debate this with you.
But linking to Ken Rockwell? I laughed out loud when I saw that. YOU should be the one called LameJokeGuy.
the flagship cammy, the F6 will still be made, and the FM10...what's sad really is that they'll stop making primes (bad for flash-less available light/shallow DOF shooting) and the FM3a (the real camera, the FM10 is made of plastic...) not dropping out of the film field entirely as the orig article states. bummed about minolta stopping their film cameras a few years back...their MD mount cameras were awesome
Why is this different on manual SLRs? Is it?
that tmax was (mostly) a 35mm film. and while you may have a 35mm camera now, after a while it will not be cost effective to make/process film except as a specialty item. and that will make it expensive.
e
By your logic, we should consider training wheels for bicycles "dead technology" because only beginners use them.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
nothing there but spammers and teenage idiots, the trolls are even lacking in originality.
I think I'm going to add those homos to my hosts file.
While film isn't dead yet, 35 mm film most certainly is. While nothing can touch the resolution of medium format, or large format, in the 35 mm area, some new cameras really push the edge of 35 mm film resolution.
Specifically I'm talking about the Canon 5D - which I own. It is such a cool camera, and the pictures BLOW my mind. The camera is a full sized sensor - no more lens multiplication factor - and is 12 mega pixels. The native size is 4368x2912. By up-sampling it in the RAW conversion you can extract even more resolution and detail.
The big deal about this camera is that most DSLR cameras have a focal length multiplication factor. This means that beautiful "normal" lens becomes a short portrait lens. Good news if you shoot portraits, but bad news if you do scenes or landscape.
The best thing about the 5D is it has the resolution and sensor size of a Canon 1Ds Mk-II (what a name!), but the camera is much smaller and lighter. The price is also more reasonable for the 5D, while not "cheap", its accessible, and the price will only come down.
that the shutter life on consumer digital cameras is about the same as consumer film cameras.
some numbers: look at 50,000 clicks - that's a touch more than 2000 rolls of 24exp film. if you took one roll of 24exp photos every *week* (52 rolls/year, which i would consider a lot for a non professional), that *40* years to make hit 50k clicks
if you are not paying for film, processing, printing, etc, i can see how you might burn through that many clicks a lot faster.
i have done a fair amount of event photography where my limit was how much film i wanted to carry. i got a 2gb cf card and in a canon digital rebel, that's about 650 photos. about 18 rolls. almost a brick of film.
i suspect that the 'good' ($1500 and over) have more robust shutters.
eric
A top-notch lens and top-notch film can give you 100 line-pairs per millimeter, give or take. This means you can put 2400 evenly-spaced lines, each 1/200th of a millimeter wide, top-to-bottom on a 35mm image and you can see them all.
To do that with digital you need 9600 x 14,400 pixels, or 138 megapixels.
On top of that there's dynamic range. Most color negative film has about 10-16 stops give or take (a dynamic range of 3.0-4.8). This means 6 bytes per pixel minimum. I don't think MS-Paint is up to the task.
Today's top-line "pro" digital cameras such as Nikon's D200 are in the 10 megapixel range. Assuming this doubles every 18 months, they'll be "better than film resolution" by mid-2011.
As for equaling 6x9cm medium-format, look for late 2013, but perhaps at the same time as 35 if they can get a larger-surface area imaging surface with the same per-square-inch resolution.
Now running a digital camera without electricity, that will be a neat trick indeed.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I was looking for an excuse to buy a 120mm Hasselblad
The most awesome camera ever made.
Ah, everyone has to have a little dream..
I've briefly handled an FM3a, and it's construction quality is simply brilliant. It's also quite beautiful. I wish they'd make a digital version that looked and handled like that.
Here is a story from a large format photographer who used to use Hasselblads - he went digital as well. You would have thought that large format would never go, since it offered the huge negative for great detail and elargements with no grain. Digital seems to be ruling...
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
As a business decision, going digital can't be beat. The cameras cost a bit more, but you cna make that up in processing a few hundred rolls of film. Enlargements up to 8x10 are nearly indistiguishable. To a working pro, it is an easy move, assuming you get naything close to reasonable pixel count.
For a manufacturer, it is mor complicated, but much the same. The basic camera costs the same to make, but film camera sales are dropping. Digital is on the rise. Get out while the getting is good and save yourself running a production line at a loss.
The problem, as any good computer person should know, is Moore's Law as applied to camera sensors. Every 2 years or so they get a lot better. For a pro, it is a business move. Just buy a better camera every 2-3 years. For an amateur, its like buying a Pentium Pro and watching the P4s roll out. Yours works, but you lust after the best. 3MP - 6MP - 12MP+ But upgrading is $1000 ! Not an easy move to make, but doing it will dramatcally effect your picture quality (assuming you care about quality).
In the film camera world, it was easy to bypass most camera improvements. As long as the basic box was light tight, kept the film flat and the lens in focus, you were OK. Upgrades were at the lens or the film. Both of which were modular upgrades. It is common to see photographers with lenses stretching across decades. And of course film is as good as research can make it today. Not so with digital cameras. You are locked into the tech of the day you bought the camera. Some ROMs are upgradeable, but you won't be changing pixel count or fixing sensitivity issues that way. It is like buying a lifetime supply of film when you buy the camera. Cheaper, but you better love it.
Overall, the digital wave is a financial hit on the amateur and prosumer. A better medium exists, but it is economically unfeasable for a market that small. Going digital will lock these folks into something that is *almost* good enough, but will never be quite right. They have to ride the planned obsolescense train until Moor's Law takes them back to where they already are, at real film resolution, color, and contrast.
And This doesn't even address the problems of proprietary formats, memory, processing, etc.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
I was surprised to see a Canon Rebel with lens (non-digital, and I'm not a camera expert) going for about $200 when I was buying a $300 digital compact this past December.
I almost bought it for my son but then figured that it would be a backwards step, technology-wise, for him.
What he is missing is the near-instant shutter response, manual zoom and focus and maybe motor drive. What he gains is movie-taking ability, immediate review of shots taken, compact camera size and ease of image transfer. For me, I miss the shutter response time and manual zoom/focus features that are not available in even $1000 "prosumer" digitals.
It seems to me that the lenses should be portable to DSLRs. Why are they dropping the lenses?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
We shouldn't talk about grave when a new technology is replacing an old one. Why not saying that 35mm is close to end a wonderful service and retire to spend the rest of its life drinking daikiri on Bahamas ?
Pupeno
LIES ! 35 mm has more resolution - RGBG overcounts resolution by a factor of 4
the grid of four CCD receptors use two greens a red and a blue (similar to distribution abnormality in human eye and repeat that 4 pel pattern
a 4 megapixel cemera is 95% of the time actually a 1 megapixel cemeral with about 1000x1000 resolution.
Why? because the manufacturers lie and count the RGBG as four light receptor elements.
That would be like counting individual grains of chemicals in film!
a 35 mm film negative shot in bright light is 8000 pixels of measuarable resolution if photographing thin verticle alternating lines.
no digital camera. not even the 100,000 dollar Thompson Viper digital camera comes close to a 20 dollar 35 mm camera in bright sunlight
but the sad part is that crap like this appears on slashdot spreading more lies.
if you want to claim digital is better you have to cite RESOLUTION test lab meassurements,
35 mm will not be surpased by digital for bright light conditions for probably 5 more years, or longer.
The massive "Depth of Field" of digital cam corders make people resent the ability to put clutterred backgrounds in soft focus... cinematographers loathe the lack of choices in digital realm. Art takes a back seet. now everything ends up looking like a TV sitcom in perfect focus all the time.
Well, something to learn from this is that film never really had a unified feel ever. Film was sort of all over the place, after all the decades its been out, there was no real unified feel. Hopefully the DNG will pick up at a faster speed and at least the digital negative will be completely rock solid and compatible with everything unlike the mesh of raw formats now.
A clearer indication would be from a comparison of the resolution from the best CCD available versus the maximum possible resolution in a film exposure. Either CCD's can pack more unique pixels in a solid angle than film or they can't.
Get yourself a nice 35mm SLR for cheap. All the advantages of film and if you want digital, just have the processing place scan it to disk (some places are better than others). No shooting delays as with digitals, plus you have hard copy and soft copy, the best of both.
I think that digital cameras make better photographers.
Recently, I wanted to try out taking some different shots of a particularly beautiful sky at night. Not being a camera buff, I tried out a few settings on my Kodak DX490 on the spot and got the right results.
Another time I was at a Thai boxing show and I wanted to take some pictures of a friend while he was fighting. Because it was a digital camera, I could adjust the settings until I found something that worked in the situation.
In both situations, with a film camera, I wouldn't have got the desired results because I don't know enough about photography and I would never have been able to have those pictures. Isn't photography about pictures?
How many times have people left their family snaps in the camera, only to never process the film? How many time has someone thought, no I won't waste that frame of film because it costs $0.30 - I'll save it for something special? With digital cameras you can share the photos without losing the original, you can pass copies to your friends and family without incurring personal cost, or losing the negatives. You can photograph and record the mundane, which might turn out to be the most interesting shot to show your grandkids in 50 years time.
Have you noticed how some people throw away photographs anyway? Why print them out first?
35mm film has rediculous resolution, yet for personal use digital cameras are great. There are more creative ways for you to take and develpe pictures with a 35mm SLR, so for professional use a 35mm camera is in no way dead and nor will it be any time soon.
-Fotographik
...now that the D200 is out, and can meter with many of the older manual focus lenses. Nice move, Nikon. :)
Some of us still prefer film. There's something about film's lack of immediacy that's strangely appealing, and the quality of the images that can be produced by inexpensive used photographic gear is just astounding. Digital does have many advantages; however, for hobbyists, film has a price/performance ratio that's hard to beat.
Move 'sig'. For great justice!
Except Moore's law does not apply here in its original form. You still have to maintain pixel surface area to capture light. Barring something revolutionarry, I don't think we'll see much of an improvement over what's currently available on the high end.
Monsieur Cartier-Bresson practically invented modern photojournalism. Read and learn, grasshopper.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
They still have a lot of great bargains on 35mm over at PriceRitePhoto!
The depth of field issue has always been a problem for point-and-shoot cameras, digital and film alike. Cheap fixed-focus cameras use a very narrow aperture to make the depth of field wide enough that focusing is unnecessary. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible to isolate the subject through creative use of focus. It's pretty much impossible to get 'artistic' depth of field effects with any camera that lacks manual aperture controls.
Move 'sig'. For great justice!
I use film, but have to say I'm very impressed with the 8 megapixel dslr cameras.
It also depends on the film speed. 50 iso film is much better than 400 iso. The Digital SLR I find works better with higher film speeds than I could get with film.
There is "image data"in the film grain. It gives film a certain look. I scan at 4000 dpi using a minota scanner and then use "grain surgery" to remove grain to get a more smooth image (noise reduction for film basically).
6x4.5 (medium format) is still better that most digital cameras except the very expensive ones.
I noticed that Digg posts stories sooner, but its users aren't nearly as 'mature' as slashdot users.
See, that is bull shite. FYI there are digital camera backs out there for large format cameras that are just as good as large formate film. I'm not talking about any of the dSLR's we are talking about say for example "The Hasselblad H2D Digital Camera uses an advanced 22 Megapixel sensor that is more than twice the size of typical 35mm sensors. It provides higher resolution, less noise, seamless integration, and uses the same high performance HC lenses as the rest of the H System. It's $26,000. Or there is the Better Light Super 8K-HS Digital Scanning Back For 4x5 cameras. It cost $18,000 and creates 550 MB files.
San Francisco Photographers
Even the digital SLR is a transitional technology--as digital sensor technologies are maturing, the SLR form factor (optical through the lens viewfinder) makes less and less sense. In about 5-10 years, cameras with interchangeable lenses and high quality digital viewfinders will replace dSLRs for professional users. And in about 20 years, digital cameras will start to look completely differently from any of the form factors we have today.
I do remember some digital cameras being able to shoot infrared, but my memory tells me that you had to hack them a bit, removing filters, and other such things.
Anyway, I have my 35mm film camera (F100) and they'll probably make my Kodak HIE Infrared film for a little while yet, so I'll shut up now, and continue to drool over the D200 that I'm not going to buy.
That's about right. I estimate it at 15-20. It's nice that the article summary repeated a fact that most people overlook: that digital is a long way from approaching medium- and large-format film. More details here.
you had me at #!
Digital will most likely never be able to achive a truly higher resolution than that of film. In a digital camera, the image is broken down into pixels, whereas in a film camera, the image goes directly to the chemicals on the film. So really, the only way a digital camera could possibly achive a higher resolution than a film camera is if the pixels were smaller than the molecules of the chemicals on the film. I'm not a chemistry major, so I have absolutely no idea what the dimensions of the chemical molecules would be, but I can still more or less guarantee that they're smaller than the pixels in the highest resolution digital cameras.
Of course this doesn't mean much for the point and shoot crowd, but for blowing up an image, the larger the image gets, the more distortion it will have as it gets more pixelated. Obviously, with an extremely high resolution digital camera, blowing up an image to a 4x6" size won't distort the image to the point that the human eye would be able to detect, but blowing it up to the size of a billboard or the size of the exterior of a large building will cause a drop in resolution.
After all, photography is really nothing more than enlarging images, the camera always takes the image at a size much much smaller than the original, and the development, or the printing will make the image many times larger than the original. A picture of a mountain range will still be shrunk down to the size of the film apperature or the ccd chip, and will have to go from there..
Why lie when you can just make up stuff and claim it to be true?
during a vacation to Hawaii I took a little over a thousand photos with my digital. That's about 30 rolls of 36 exposure film. At 10 bucks for film/processing that's 300 bucks. I used to buy my film and have it processed through a pro lab. So if you're costcoing it it might be 2/3's that price. Still if you take lots of photos you can quickly afford a $1000 camera every year or two by switching to digital. And don't even get me started on the costs of maintaining a darkroom...
10 years ago, Kodak published an article abuot film only being 10-15% of what it can be THEN.
Lens resolution peaked in the 1970's. All improvements since then have been in usability. In fact, in consumer cameras, resolution has gone BACKWARDS since the 1970's due to cost considerations, and that the lenses were better than the film at the time.
Oh, and with the scanner I have, I get over 20 MP. And at that the film has more resolution I can't get out of it.
Oh, and for hand held stuff, lighter is WORSE, not better.
35mm dead? Not by a long shot. The difference is that I don't need to buy anything but film anymore. I have my lenses from 24mm thru 2023mm and I have my multiple camera bodies (warrentied for MY LIFETIME). I need a new battery every ten YEARS or so.
For my underwater, besides film, I do need batteries a trifle more often (every year or so) and for the strobe, all of the use regular AAs or that I can get NIMHs for.
Finally, on all but one camera, the batteries control only flash and meter. If the batteries die, I can still shoot outdoors with a trained eye.
There's not really any data in the grain, but I agree that some grain looks better than others artistically. The noise generated by the Nikon D70 is particularly organic looking, IMHO.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Dead? Higher resolution? Only beginners?! I think not!
I work for a wedding photography company, and my boss is completely dedicated to 35mm. That's all she will shoot weddings with. Yeah, she has a nice digital camera, but she only uses it for volunteer jobs, etc.
In brief, she can make prints the size of a conference table with lossless quality from 35mm film. Very few, if any, digital cams today can produce prints like that.
I do B&W only. As soon as digital can come up with something that can come close to an LF b&w back, I'm all about it. And please don't say "reduce to grayscale"... sometimes that filter comes up with the WEIRDEST approximations...
It doesn't seem that tricky to me. If you have a bigger sensor, I'd think you just need to insert one new lens permanently inside the camera, which takes the image at the location of the old chip and refocusses it on the new one. All your old lenses do the job of bringing the image to that point, just as before. It's only that now there's not a device there but one more lens, that relays the image to the new device. Am I missing something?
As a serious photographer, I've completely ditched film for DSLR. The convenience is just incredibly liberating, and the quality is there. People claim that digital hasn't caught up with film yet (they keep jacking the number of megapixels up as the number of available megapixels goes up), but I don't see it. Take a shot from a Canon 20D or a Nikon D200 (so as not to drag the $4000 cameras into it), take a 35mm slide, blow them up to the same size, and your digital shot will look as good or better than the 35mm. The sensors are as smooth as Velvia now (and certainly perform much better at higher ISO than film does) and more sensitive (especially compared to slide film, which is brutally limiting in its exposure range). I can't tell you how many pros I've heard the same from. Digital's won the quality war at 35mm, and always had the convenience advantage. And since Nikon's users are primarily pros and enthusiasts (they're big in low-end digital cameras, but not really film point and shoots), this is where the money is going.
There are a few good reasons you might still be using film for 35mm. First is obviously the huge up-front cost, though digital is cheaper in the long run if you take as many photos as I do. Second is if you know a certain film (Velvia!) better than the back of your own hand and don't want a new learning curve. Third would be if you love the darkroom stuff you can do with black and white. You can do the same in photoshop, but it's not as visceral. E6 color development is just nasty, I can't see anyone being nostalgic for that! Bad reasons would be technophobia and snobbery. Some people are proud of the fact that slide film takes a lot more exposure skill than digital does, so using slide film means you're old-skool hardcore.
So now the battle is fought at medium format, and as long as those Leaf/Hasselblad/Phase One backs cost $35K film will be alive and well. And beyond that of course you've got large format, which would be prohibitively costly digitally for now. And large format people tend to revel in their old equipment, so film will never die there. People still make cyanotypes and daguerreotypes! Though I don't think people do much photography on asphalt any more.
Who needs film? I have in my possession a copy of the British Photographic Society Yearbook and Almanac from 1877. It contains details instructions on how to make dry glass plates. So even when film vanishes from the world, I'll still be making black-and-white images with my home-made, large-format camera.
Damn Nikon. Damn Kodak. Damn them all. They can't stop me having fun.
A large number of non-digital camera still have batteries. Either for winding the film, powering the flash capacitors, or both...
:-)
Whichever you use, bring extra batteries
I wonder how this will affect the values of non-digital cameras. As they become more scarce, won't they increase in value as well (in particular the rarer/higher-end ones)
Much like LPs, I believe in 35m. I grew up on it (yes, there i am aging myself again) Digital wont replace it. Digital may be the in thing but really with professional photography 35m still has a bit of a following. I personally own a Nikon that has had its share of bumps and bruises, not a single peice of plastic on it, that has a nice 50m lens on it. Digital doesn't even come CLOSE to the effects of a good 35m SLR in the hands of a capable photographer for some perposes.
Just like the clicks and pops that add to the wholeness of listening to a good pressing of an old Billy Holiday album. the 35m format has its uses. I don't think that the current every day user will find them as useful, but there will still be the small sub group of users who will still demand the format, and where there is a demand, there will remain a production.
35m isn't 8track.... not yet.
-Magdalene --"there are 10 types of people in the world, those who read binary, and those who don't"
To whoever modded me flaimbait: you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. There's no reason my list of pro uses for 35mm should be considered such.
Photos.
Using a 6mp Nikon D100, I would put a stitched image of landscape up against a LF print, depending on how many images comprise the stitch. You can get an over 125 MP image by stitching frames 6 wide by 4 high, for instance.
Yes, creating stitched images can be a pain and it requires heavy attention to detail to get it right. The same is true of LF. And it's only really good for static scenes--also true of LF.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
So, apparently you consider the staff of National Geographic, which has used 35mm exclusively for the last 70 years to not be serious about photography. I guess the Leica M and Nikon F series were just beginner's cameras. Silly me.
National Geographic photographers have shot with 35mm film almost exclusively until very recently, and their prints are regularly shown at up to 6 x 4 feet in the Natl. Geo. display galleries on their first floor. Maybe not quite "wall size" but that is pretty good.
Properly exposed, low-speed 35mm slide film holds resolution surprisingly well. The tough part is usually printing it, actually, because pretty much every printing process (analog or digital) enhances grain. But as it's possible to tell from a slide show (which de-emphasizes grain), there is a ton of resolving power in the good films.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
A 4x5 image will, certainly, make your 35mm look like crap, but mostly because of tonal range, not resolution..."
Nope, it's the resolution.
In a way you're both right--it's color resolution. Not only are large format films capable of resolving a a greater number of line pairs per mm than 35mm (assuming the same final print size), they are also capable of resolving a greater number of individual colors per mm. This leads directly to an appearance of clearer, cleaner tones.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
All of that can be simulated in software.
I'm guessing you're an engineer and not a photographer, with a statement like that.
Digital has some great advantages but let's not go overboard on the capabilities of digital capture and software. Individual films have "looks" that software can only approximate. It's like the difference between hearing a violin in person and playing the "violin" sound on a synthesizer. Even on a great synthesizer it's just not all there.
Notice I'm not talking about just "resolution" here, but rather the way film interacts with light, which includes color, grain, and the over and under "shoulders" (how it drops into shadow or fades into highlights). Many photographers still choose film for some or all shots because of the look.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Bruce
Look at these Velvia sky images scanned at 3200 dpi (about 15 Mpixel); if I saw that degree of noise in my digital camera at ISO 50 or 100, I'd send it to the repair shop.
The sky noise in those images is an artifact of the digital scanning process. Velvia viewed through a loupe on a light table does not look like that.
And since we're on the subject, if I got a Velvia slide back with the weak colors you see in most digital pictures, I'd ask for my money back and tell the lab to refresh their chemicals.
And, frankly, a good digital P&S will beat your 35mm film camera in image quality in most cases.
Maybe if you have no idea how to choose a film or use a 35mm camera.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
These are two attributes of any capture medium that will affect the perception of the image at any viewing distance. Greater color resolution leads to cleaner tones and smoother gradations. Greater microcontrast increases the perception of sharpness and resolution.
For these reasons a photographer with a good eye can pick a LF image out of a group of lower res images, even at pretty low res or print size. That's true whether you're talking digital or film. Simply having a larger capture area improves the actual *and perceived* quality of the image, assuming a constant final print size.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
...when they released the F6 - sources like popular photography were reporting that with the release of Nikon's F6 and Canon's T2, both companies were going to watch the market to see wether or not it was worth it to keep putting money into 35mm R&D.
The GP's concerns don't apply to spatial resolution but they do apply to color, which in fact is interpolated from sets of pixels. So while it might affect how many black/white line pairs you can resolve, it will affect the subtle gradations of color in a photograph.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I started with film and abandoned it almost 20 years ago because I never got a good working feel for all of the settings. I "went digital" with the first Quickcam when it came out in what, 1993? After that, I've had at least a dozen digital cameras ending up with my last, a D100, several years ago. I still love it and use it every couple of days. The D100 allowed me to learn photography without going broke on film.
Eventually, I had a bag full of good lenses and got myself a cheap Nikon FE film body that they fit. Now, after having learned on the D100, I waste a lot less film and I'm far happier with my shots. I do mostly B&W now and develop it all myself. After that I scan it and I then have massive digital images to work with.
Nikon can kill off their film camera business and it won't really affect me. I have seven Nikon film bodies and lenses that will last a lifetime, including a couple of Nikon F bodies that I doubt I could ever wear out.
The thing is, once you figure out how light works and learn how to really operate your camera manually, not only will your pictures be better, you'll be far less dependent upon the "features" they add to cameras.
Here's a shameless plug for the "Full Manual" group I created on Flickr. (Applies to both digital and film.)
http://www.flickr.com/groups/manual/
Jim
-- My Weblog.
Why is this post getting modded up?
2 seconds of searching may lead you to http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html. That page, and several pages that link off it, sum up pretty well the quality and resolution of analog vs digital cameras.
It is quite clear that only the most high end digital cameras are in the same league as a good 35mm.
Digital cameras are rapidly improving, but they are not quite there yet.
The reasons for the rise to prominence of digital photography are cost and ease of use, not quality.
You say Look at these Velvia sky images scanned at 3200 dpi (about 15 Mpixel); if I saw that degree of noise in my digital camera at ISO 50 or 100, I'd send it to the repair shop. But gave you read the comment above these pictures ?
A tiny section of sky was scanned at 3200 dpi and then sharpened heavily twice in succession. The resulting images showed Velvia skies scan with more texture than Provia 100F.
The point was not "look how noisy all these films are" but more "once we artificially increase noise, we see that such film picks up more noise than such other film". A fair comparison would be to apply the same "heavy sharpening" filter, twice, to a digital picture... and see how it comes out.
OK, I use digital by the way...
Ceci n'est pas une signature
What do I look for in a digital camera in order to avoid the one and half to two second delay from after I take the picture to it being saved in memory.
In my old SLR it's simple point and click and grab the moment of time that I want to grab. With every digital camera I use, the delay kills that moment of time, my subject is blinking, the puppy has shifter his gaze, the smile has dissipated...
What is the bare minimum it costs to find a camera without this limitation?
Or is this something that we have to suffer through in all digital picture experience?
that "more detail" is from 2001, talks about "current high end 1-3 Megapixel cameras" and how physical limits wont allow the chips to get higher resolutions.
Considering the kindergarden-layout, too, this is nothing but uninformed bullshit.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The was citing the analyses of film and its information content -- properties of which haven't changed lately.
you had me at #!
Super 8.
__________________
http://www.doyoulikemyface.com/
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
Please stop saying this tired, predictable line.
Thank you.
bye-bye.
Small children aren't going to be singing songs about me and laying flowers on my grave a hundred years from now for my sacrifice to the photographic industry, heck I think the people who will be making all the money should be carrying out the noble act of sorting out the problems to give us decent products that last more than half a dozen years. I really hate this idea that everything is disposable these days and can just be chucked away; it all comes round again, give it 50 years and we'll be drowning in our own discarded crap. Why not just make stuff that lasts, or at least has base components that last and minimise the parts that need to be swapped out, and make it easier to swap out a minimum of parts?
Look at the Nikon D50 or the D70, the price point of the D50 is $600 or so (US $). You may also look at similar cameras in Canon. You don't have to spend an arm and a leg. Both Nikon and Canon offer sub second startup to picture time and also 3 to 5 pictures per second.
You do not have to put up with shutter lag. Go to a site like dpreview.com and doa camera search and specify shutter speed, I believe there are several non SLR type cameras that also offer that great response.
I think it is too bad that Nikon will stop producing such gems as the F100, FM3A and the AI-S 105/2.5. There are probably other examples, but these just popped into my mind when I read this.
I love my Nikons -- F100, FE and a bunch of lenses. All film equipment and the simplicity of using a manual-focus FE with a manual-focus AI 50/2 is great. Using the F100 with the AF-S 17-35 is great, too, but in a different way already. This equipment has been paid for and I know how it works, no surprises, just picture taking. That's wonderful.
However, what may well drive me to digital in the near future is the disappearance of real photo shops in my local town. With approximately 40,000 inhabitants, we don't have a single decent shop left. We used to have two and I particularly enjoyed being a customer at one of them. They're gone now. I need to take my rolls of slide film to what I think would be Walmart or Costco or whatever in the USA.
I know, if these shops send it to a decent lab with proper E6 development, my films will be fine. But I want a salesperson whom you can show a picture and receive advice, if need be. That period seems to be over, at least in my part of the world.
I begin to feel I might as well start planning a D200 sometime during this year and find advice, if need be, on the internet.
As for resolution and such... my slides look mighty fine, thankyouverymuch. My film scanner processes them quite nicely. However, that is only a tiny bit of what defines a good photograph. Composition, exposure, timing and whatnot are at least as important and I'm sure there's not much difference between a D200 and an F100 in that respect. I find so much joy in working with a solid camera, good view finder, fast response etc. If I were to buy something new, it would have to match or even exceed my current equipment or else I'd regret spending my money on it.
With respect to cost... I feel that replacing a Nikon F100 (and any accessories that cannot be re-used) with a comparable digital camera, such as perhaps the D200, may cost me something like EUR 4000 (grip, memory, flash, wide-angle lens etc). For EUR 4000 I can shoot a whole lot of film, at EUR 10 - 15 per roll (film, processing, slide sleeves, folders).
Northern lights are at about -3 to -6EV. Let's say we have a good lense F1.4 24mm
Consider that northern lights are mainly at 557.7nm and 690.0nm, so using color film for the picture is maybe not as needed, might as well use filters and reconstruct it later digitally.
To keep a very sharp image of the Nortern lights when they are moving a lot, you have to do it at about 1sec, 1/2s being better, I never needed faster than 1/8s.
For -3EV that's about 3200ASA
For -6EV that's about 12500ASA
For slow moving thing the digital cameras are nowaday good enough and need about 15-30 seconds @ 400ASA.
Too high ASA didgital settings give a lot of thermal noise, already at 400 it is noisy.
I think for 98% of the people who buy a digital camera, 35mm film is actually cheaper.
The first camera that I ever bought is an Olympus C-750UZ. Yes, it's a digital camera and yes after the initial expense, each shot is actually free. But after three years of using the C-750UZ and perhaps 50,000 shots I have started to yearn for more.
What do I miss? How about (a) quick autofocus (b) interchangeable lenses (c) real manual focussing instead of the joke that Olympus has on the C-750 (d) high speed continuous shooting (e) better ISO 400 and above (f) a depth of field preview button?
After some reasearch, it turns out that the digital camera that would satisfy those requirements for me would be a Canon EOS20D. A digital wonder that costs USD1800.00 in our country. And that's only for the body. For the lens I would have to shell out more.
Now I'm going to try film. I just bought a very good second hand Canon T90 that has everything that I want (except autofocus) for only USD30, price including a 70-210mm f/4 zoom lens. I was also able to buy a Canon 50mm f/1.8 FD lens for peanuts. Peanuts because the USD20 price I paid for it included a Canon T50 camera.
Buying a film camera has brought the economics of digital cameras vividly to my attention. Nikon is ceasing production of 35mm cameras because digital cameras are more profitable than film cameras. They are not necessarily cheaper or better than 35mm film SLRs. Let's see why.
Expect Nikon to introduce a line of printers.
Joe Schmo is also not aware that those 80 rolls of film calculation already include the processing fees and 4R sized prints for all 2880 shots. Joe Schmo somehow is also made unaware that he probably shoots only 10-15 rolls of film a year.
With a digital camera Joe Schmoe is convinced to shoot 800 images of his cat rolling on the carpet and 1000 shots of his morning bacon being fried. It makes Joe Schmoe satisfied knowing that he has saved so much money because can you imagine how much those shots would have cost on 35mm film?
In short, Joe Schmo is probably better off buying a cheap 35mm point and shoot and shooting lots of 35mm film than with his new digital wonder.
It's a pity that 35mm will soon be obsolete.
Folks keep telling me how great digital SLRs are, and they show me 8x10 prints from their 8MP cameras and I say "That's very nice, but how much does an 8 mega pixel projector cost?". Then they go a bit quiet and mutter about prints being more convenient. Well, maybe they are, but I shoot Kodachrome 64 on my Contax SLR and project it via a slide projector with a top quality lens in it. I don't get it all set up in the living room very often, but when I do the results are spectacular. Well, I suppose I could replace my screen with a HDTV telly, but I would still only get 2MP and it wouldn't be as big as my projector screen. I see that Apple will sell me a monitor with a resolution of about 4MP (still only half way there) for a mere $2500 (ouch!).
If I sit around and wait for a while, is someone going to offer me a way of seeing at least 8MP images on a big screen at an affordable price or have the manufacturers concluded that people only want prints these days?
How many of the morons currently buying digicams will manage to keep their valuable once-in-a-lifetime snaps intact for more than a couple of years?
[Reformat, reformat...]
No sig today...
Sensors can grow as much as you like, BUT... there's still plenty of stuff where film wins over digital, regardless of film area or sensor size:
Film isn't dead. Film isn't going to die. Furthermore, 35mm film isn't dead. 35mm film isn't going to die. It's just lost its dominant position in the mass-market. However, dedicated amateurs still use it.
IMNAAHO.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
The first 6 of the top 10 photos of last year's (2005) National Geographic Annual Photo Contest were shot in film.
... if I can find a suitable camera that will work flawlessly with Linux or BSD giving me full resolution raw uncompressed (or at least losslessly compressed such as PNG) image files without requiring special software from the camera maker (unless it comes in open source form ready to compile on Linux or BSD). As an added bonus, it would be nice if the camera can also be controlled via the same connection (USB, Firewire, Ethernet) to make it actually shoot pictures when my software decides it's time to shoot (nice for making high definition time lapse movies, for example).
Even though I presently have 2 cameras and several lenses from the Nikon line, I have already decided to abandon Nikon due to their non-open raw image format as reported on 19 April 2005, 23 April 2005, and 25 April 2005.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
An NEF from my D70s is ~6 megabytes while an LZW-compressed TIFF of the same image s ~38, and there's none of the postprocessing options of RAW available nearly as easily; you can do a lot of adjustment in Photoshop but it tends to be a lot more complicated than just playing with the sliders and buttons you get in the Open RAW dialog, or dedicated RAW software. :D).
TIFF is pretty much just a good way to clog up your camera and card...it can be useful if you don't have a RAW option, I've used it on my CoolPix 4300, but if you do have the RAW then go for it (if you want lossless images - most high-end cameras shoot great JPEGs, a lot of pros just do that and use the pics straight...I like to fiddle around with stuff, so I shoot RAW
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I finally got the urge to buy a camera when my first child was born (about three and a half years ago), and I decided to go with a film rather than a digital camera for one reason. On an SLR, there's about a 1/60 second delay between pushing the button and hearing the shutter open. On the digital cameras, except for the obscenely expensive ones, the delay was noticeably longer. I figured that once I had a toddler zooming around the house, I would really need a camera that responded quickly.
Has this aspect of digital photo technology gotten any better?
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
I have a site with a lot of Nikon reviews, it's a whore out, and I have ads on my site, and I really want you to click on them, but it also has a lot of good Nikon lens reviews and reviews of the latest D200 Nikon Digital SLR body. Film is dead, long live film! Nikon Camera Reviews .
You know film is dead when Playboy started shooting all digital except for the cover and centerfold. Those are still shot with an 8x10 large format camera. The rest are shot with a 22mp medium format digital camera. Ah how pr0n has changed.
well you can print your digital photos too, duh. and you actually have to have your films developed and printed before you can show them to anyone. So you need to fire up something beforehand.
And if you are photographer who has gallery exhibitions, forget digitals. You will never be able to blow it up the wall size even with 30 mega pixel.
Anyone making prints that big on a regular basis and worries about maximum resolution is using at least a 4x5 large format camera, and most likely an 8x10.
Man, the only thing that brings out the ultra-geek in a person is a discussion about 35mm vs. digital photography. I can see that everyone on this board must be some kind of professional photographer on assignment with National Geographic
"You can have my trusty Nikon 35mm f2.8 when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands!"
I guess the only thing that would make this discussion even better would be how to make my digital camera run Debian.
Digital will *never* surpass quality of real film. ( or any other analog format )
It may be more popular today, but thats due to marketing ( just wait until DRM kicks in on your own images.. and format changes render your pictres inaccessable ), and peoples stupidity that they cant tell the difference.
"duh.. its close enough"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I agree completely. My remark was directed, not at Tri-X not being top notch (we both know it's the ne plus ultra B&W emulsion), but at the idea that 100lp/mm, which Tri-X can handily beat with a little care, is no big deal for 35mm format photography.
:)
Now, about the "look." Used and abused for what, sixty years?, Tri-X *has* a look. But the appreciation of that look, even the mere ability to notice it, is deadly to mass market consumption ideology. And so it's being bred out of people's conciousness and replaced with a tao of cheapness at any cost. I cherish my battered old Fs, which have never screwed up a shot, no matter how important or mundane, and have been repaid only with abuse; no plush cover, no Halliburton aluminum suitcase. How long will Joe Consumer value that ipod, or tablet PC? Barely longer than that Tommy windbreaker. I intend to teach my son the darkroom and I fully suspect watching that first image come up and the smell of fixer will mark him for life.
Funny, but my confirmation word for this post is "witness".
"I photograph things to see what things look like photographed."
- Garry Winogrand
Nikon has been short-sighted over most of its history. I have both film and digital SLRs from Canon - there are things film does way better (faster cycling, permanent record, lower long term cost). As usual, the technology isn't ready - not the cameras but the printing, the long term storage media, all of that falls short in cost and performance to film. I've heard for ten years (ten years!) that the CD is dead, yet I am still able to buy the music I want on CD. Recently again, the DVD is dead, long live the next cool thing. Slash-dotters are always crowing about how great this next thing is and how it awesomely makes the last thing dead... Bullsh**.
You miss that part of what happens with compact digital cameras is that the quality that has become acceptable is way lower than your basic Instamatic was capable of. M
You've become so enamored with the process, the technology, you completely miss the end result and the fact that the old stuff was BETTER in many many ways than this cool crap. It's like watching a whole generation of ID10ts who can't think in any coherent way but chase through for the next shiny thing (ooooh, it's shiny.........)
I have been an avid supporter of Nikon since I used it professionally as a photog in the USAF. This news absolutely sickens me.
Of course, maybe I can then pickup a F5 or F6 on the cheap.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
A working pro discusses his transition from film to digital.- 7883-7913
- 6463-7191
http://robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7
A fascinating article on how far digital cameras have come in the past 7 or so years:
http://robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7
"I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away"
- "Kodachrome" Paul Simon
I find it amusing, on a high-tech forum like /., how many photographic luddites have surfaced to extol the virtues of film and decry the advancement of digital photography. But that amusement on my part is incidental and solely based on personal beliefs and prejudice, very much like most of the opinions expressed here, which try to masquerade as facts.
The tool is irrelevant. The result is what matters. I judge someone's photography by the appeal of their prints, their artistic sensibilities, their composition skills, the emotional impact the image has on me and the like. Doesn't much matter whether the photographer used a home made pinhole camera, 35mm film, med/lg format, DSLR or high-resolution scanning back.
Once it's printed, most people can't tell what technology was used.
The most critical piece of equipment is the "i" behind the camera. Most people can't take a decent photo (from an artistic perspective, personal snaps excluded) even if given a F5 or 1DS MkII (or better).
That being said, I'll put some of my photography up against anyones. And until recently, I was exclusively DSLR at 6mp. Now I'm up to 10 and even happier.
Bottom line, pixel peeping (or film grain peeping if you must) is boring. Get thee hence and create beautiful images cause everything else is just technological masturbation.
Some of my stuff can be found at: Tarafrost Photography, for those that might be interested.
Chaeron Corporation
Ever seen how fast lab-processed snaps fade and colour shift in albums?
I'll take a good pigment-based, inkjet print on archival paper any day. Sure it's a bit more trouble....but then I can do it in the comfort of my own home office, without having to drive to a lab and without any delay. should I so choose.
As for keeping their "valuable once-in-a-lifetime" snaps intact for more than a few years, given the abysmal lack of photographic sensibility that most "morons" (to use our term) have, maybe this is a feature and not a bug?
On the plus side, the digital explosion has prompted the unwashed masses to take many more photos, and in many case, one can hope that more practice will lead to better photos, at least for some.
Chaeron Corporation
The Nikon D50 and Canon 350D don't have separate shutter and aperture control dials (i.e.: you have to hold down a modifier key to adjust the other parameter). Sure, you can avoid having to do this by staying in S/Tv or A/Av mode (Nikon/Canon), but what about exposure compensation?
What's the big deal about this? I'm more familiar with the 350D, but I cut my teeth on its' 35mm ancestor, the EOS300, and the button layout is similiar. It feels like a pretty natural way to adjust exposure to me. I guess it depends on what one's used to.
No depth-of-focus preview button in the lower-priced digital SLR bodies.
The D50 is the only current DSLR from either Nikon or Canon without a dedicated DOF preview button right next to the lens mount. The 350D has it, in exactly the same location as the EOS30/33 series 35mm bodies. It's hardly an optional feature buried in a strange menu. The 300D had the same dedicated button in the same place. Heck, even my 3-generations-old, entry-level 35mm EOS300 has the same DOF button right next to the lens mount.
(A bonus about Canon's DOF button: one can hold it down, and keep adjusting aperture to one's tastes without having to constantly press and release the DOF preview. Handy feature. The F65's DOF preview drove me nuts, having to press and release constantly when I was trying film bodies to get started a few years ago. I don't know if Nikon's digital bodies are the same.)
As for Konica-Minolta/Pentax/Sigma, I have no idea. Konica-Minolta stopped selling in Canada, so I haven't been able to do hands-on tests at the local camera shop, and they don't make a D50/350D equivalent anyway. Pentax bodies are constantly sold out here (the perils of living in a Pentax town where everyone has a boatload of manual K-mount glass) and no small dealer concerned about their reputation would keep Sigma bodies in stock.
Um, you may have missed this news, but it's now possible to make prints from digital too.
Lot of good stuff here but as a fine art and commercial photographer using both I'll let you know its all about the final product. I shoot all formats up to 4x5 and for me it comes down to what's convenient and what is going to work. The digital lets me work faster in the field and usually lets me get proofs to the client faster; it's also great in the studio to set up a shot I'll want to commit to 4x5. Some work simply lends itself to digital - weddings, sports, product stuff some portrait work. For the majority of the fine art work it's simply a choice - what do I feel like shooting today. I've made fine digital prints of 30 x 40 off a 4 megapixel G2 and a 6 megapixel 10D. I often go to 16x20 with 35mm - yeah it gets grainy but sometimes I like it like that. With digital I've shot a lot less 35mm film - but I also do all my own processing either way - film or digital. I love 4x5 prints - I love the tonal range and resolution. By the same I also have shown plenty of digital shots in galleries and seriously most of my buyers can't tell the difference between most film and digital the way I work it. That's the real point here - just a tool - I would be a far worse digital photographer if I didn't have an extensive background in the darkroom. It's the whole "what camera are you shooting" issue - great tools in the hands of an idiot still produce poor work ...
Prints are not a function of their original capture method. You can get prints of digital images that are at least as archival in quality as an photomat 35mm 4x6 glossy.
As an added bonus, making a print of a digital image does not expose your film media to any danger. Even cartridge formats like 110 and APS carry some risk to the negative in terms of dust, scratching, etc, when making a print. Not to mention that while film has improved markedly over the years, it is still a highly unstable base on which to store an image.
I do not have a signature
A new breakthrough makes all previous incarnations obselete. Now all painters are relegated to minor touch up of a new innovation - "film" - sandwiched light-sensitive material is encased in a light-controlling box with an mechanism for admitting light. Just hold that pose for several minutes (don't breath in the smoke from the flash powder lighting equipment!). This instead of the several sittings and days it took with the old fashioned method. Manufacturers of canvas, already hit by the loss of wind power, are reeling. Pigment and linseed proprieters are claiming they will only carry a small selection of the new tubes of "paint" for nostalgic reasons, but will be pushing gallon jars, glass plates and silver nitrate on the display shortly.
The only thing that really bothers me about digital is the way that it blows out highlights (pixels go to #ffffff abruptly).
I would have thought you can do this just as easily with film, in fact arguably more so (just from the point of view that you don't know for sure until you get it developed.)
If not, please explain, I'm nowhere near a photography expert.
Typical chicken sh..., er, Chicken Little "sky is falling" extremist nut-job posting.
d uct_detail&p=190. Their telephoto lenses for LF are also fairly unique. Schenider, Rodenstock and Fuji will continue to make (and dominate) the fairly small large format lens world. Schneider especially seems strongly committed to LF lenses, as they just introduced two lenses specifically for the 20x24" format (no, that's not a typo, that's a piece of film larger than your largest laptop opened up, that's used in a camera the size of a small dorm-sized refrigerator, see http://www.wisner.com/Page13.html).
Nikon announced that they will stop producing all film based (35mm and APS) P&S cameras, and all but one 35mm SLR (the fairly new F6). Nikon doesn't make the FM10, that's made by Cosina. They'll stop production on some, but not all, of their manual-focus lenses, which, except for Leica and Cosina, not too many people make manual-focus lenses for 35mm any more. Existing stock should last a while on the lenses, not so long of the F5 or F100 as people will snap those up quickly.
Nikon will stop production of their EL-Nikkor enlarger lenses, but that doesn't mean there won't be any in stock for the next decade or so, as there may be plenty on the shelves. Schneider and Rodenstock will still make excellent enlarger lenses, so this isn't much of a loss. Some people like sticking to one brand for all their lenses for color consistency, but few people do chemical color darkrooms any more, digital scan and print is unquestionably better, but many people still do black & white chemical darkrooms (a digital "darkroom" for B&W can be very good, but chemical B&W is still very easy, very cheap and for many people, very "already paid for.") B&W traditional printing doesn't require the same color consistency from lens to lens, so having multiple brands isn't as big of a deal.
Nikon will stop production of Nikkor large format lenses (they haven't made medium format lenses in decades), which is a bigger concern, as their M-Nikkor lenses are particularly favored by people who want high quality light weight lenses. I have the 200f8 M-Nikkor for 4x5 and it's an excellent lens that weight barely more than its shutter assembly. Here's a picture: http://www.badgergraphic.com/store/cart.php?m=pro
Remember, there are millions of 35mm film cameras in the world today, and in most of the world, they're enormously cheaper to use than digital, so there should be film available for decades. Some emulsions are going to go away, and some players (Agfa for one) are already leaving, but there should be plenty of choices for a long time. Kodak may move all their production to China, and Fujifilm may follow. For B&W, Bergger and Ilford are going strong (it hasn't been a huge market for decades anyway).
Photography doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. You can own and use digital and film, and more than one camera of each. I have 6 cameras that I consider "regular use," (digital P&S, 35mm SLR, 35mm Rangefinder, 645 SLR, 645 Rangefinder, 4x5) which may seem like quite a few for this forum, but isn't all that much compared to many serious amateurs or professionals. I also have a "digital darkroom" that's centered on a Nikon scanner and an Epson flatbed, so, in essence, all those cameras are "digital" if I want them to be.
that's a very interesting link - nice that he makes a suggestion of what to do about it.
NO WAI!
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.pl ?ACCT=130907&TICK=NIKON&STORY=/www/story/01-11-200 6/0004247596&EDATE=Jan+11,+2006
Nikon USA press release says the same thing in a watered down and wimpy way. "Digital is where the market is going, so we are following".
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Hard to find a turntable to play old 45, 78, and 33 records. Getting harder to find cassette players. Many new PCs don't come with floppy drives. In 30 years, will you still be able to find a CD-ROM/DVD drive or will there be some other format? Don't throw away your old PC.
Fow any one who was wondering, in the Compact market Film beats digital hands down, that is because the sensor in most digital compacts is 22x smaller than a peice of 35mm film. (Digital sensor 7x5mm, film 36x24, draw 2 rectangles next to each other and you get the idea) That put film a step ahead especially at higher ISO's. I have a digital compact and use it, but I wouln't take ot to a wedding or recomend any to do that. In SLR's there isn't such a big gap, the sensors are only half the size, but I am serprised Nikon are doing this, film will go the way of Vinyl in 20 years and not the way of the VHS tape or 8track ETC.
You were right about lab-processed prints fading and color-shifting, but unless you're spending upwards of 15k to 40k on hardware, your "archival paper" and inkjet printing will be even more short-lived.
I've either been trolled (very poorly) or you really DON'T get it... which is kind of scary.
If you're going to troll, learn how to do it well.
And if you are [sic] photographer who has gallery exhibitions, forget digitals. You will never be able to blow it up the wall size [sic] even with 30 mega pixel.
Speaking as a degreed engineer and an amatuer photographer: This just isn't true. The only thing that stops a person from using an ultra-high resolution digital projector to print digital "negatives" onto photo paper is a series of incremental expansions in the limitations on the technology.
Five years ago, you couldn't get high enough quality pictures to compete with film. But no-one said "Digital will never be able to make pictures of higher quality than 35mm film" because we all knew that digital lenses, CCDs and capture cards would improve to the point where it *was* possible to capture higher quality images with digital. Now, with 5 and 8 megapixel SLRs driving the development of new printers, and digital-to-photo-paper enlargers like Devere Digital Enlarger, the technology is coming to wipe out a need for chemical image capture altogether.
In the fall of 1997 I bet a friend of mine that digital would have replaced chemical as the primary form of photography for most photographers (from shapshooters, to amatuers, to professionals) within a decade. With 20 months left, I'm confident that I will win that bet. One reason is that nothing spoils a wedding like a persistent shutter click and a flash, and digital photography is quickly becoming not only quieter, but less visually invasive than chemical. And since the image printing process will only become cleaner, cheaper, and less time consuming than chemical for the majority of professional applications, professionals will have to adopt. Professional portrait photographers now have to compete with a home market that is being exposed to more and more powerful hardware that they can use to make their own photographs, and will be forced to cut costs just to survive.
Sorry to break it to you, because I like chemical photography (I still do some of it myself, using my father's 1970s era Petri SLR) but the Digital camera will eventually replace the Chemical entirely, and people who use chemical cameras will become a niche antique/collectors market, like the guys that collect, restore and drive old automobiles or the cabbies that offer horse-drawn-carriage rides in Central park.
I'm surprised no-one has linked here yet in this debate: The Gigapxl Project.
Hard to find a turntable to play old 45, 78, and 33 records. Getting harder to find cassette players. Many new PCs don't come with floppy drives. In 30 years, will you still be able to find a CD-ROM/DVD drive or will there be some other format? Don't throw away your old PC.
I'm pretty sure you'll have time to copy the data to some other medium (with a ratio of 100 CDs to one unit of whatever they make in ten years). Unlike copying an LP, you'll be making an exact copy.
I will give up my FE bodies and Nikkor lenses when you imerse my arm in liquid nitrogen and shatter it and then pry the camera from my brittle, chemical stained fingers!
Really! I've got my small format cameras, Nikons all; my mediums including a M-645 with backs for 120 & 220, a Y-124G TLR, and my big boy, Graphlex 4X5.
Ok, so Kodak gave up on film cameras, no big loss. But when they stop making film, I'm jumping off a bridge!
$15k? After $750 for an Epson 2200 or equivalent, you must be budgeting ink and and paper for an awful lot of prints.