h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3399529.stm

I'm damn annoyed, damn damn damn annoyed! How can they consider getting rid of 35mm cameras. The quality of photo is far better than that of a digital camera, unless you're planning to spend of few hundred quid. Then if you want old fashioned 'photos', you still have to buy special paper to print them on, and that degrades far quicker than proper photographs (so I've heard, willing to be corrected).

Why stop selling 35mm cameras? If you still sell them, people will still buy them, which means they have to buy the film, and get it developed, so Kodak still get more money in the long run

Blasted digital nonsense, viva la choice!

Hmm, lets face it, Kodak have never been one of the worlds best camera manufacturers...

Now, if they were to stop manufacturing 35mm film then I'd believe them that it was a thing of the past... but the fact they've stopped manufacturing the cameras just tells me that their cameras weren't making any money... why? because there are better 35mm cameras on the market!

Quite apart from the fact it's a pain getting decent prints of digital photos the other problem I've run across is the delay between pressing the button and the photo being taken... at least when I use my old Zenith SLR - when I press the button it takes a picture... not like a digital... press the button, wait half a second (just long enough for the animal in a wildlife shot or the action in an action shot to disappear out of the frame) and it eventually decides to take a photo

yeah... i hate that about digital cameras... mine takes long enough to take the photo, that usually it's a bit blurred... i tried changing the shutter speed, but it's still not short enough...

having said that... have you actually read some of the comments at the end of the article linked to in post one?

yes i liked the comments too!

So Kodak reckon 35mm is soon to go the way of 126 and 110 film? Quite possible considering the number of APS film cameras that are on the market, including APS SLRs.

Oh and those comments are puntastic

Shame they're killing APS as well then, really.

"Shame they're killing APS"

Having worked in a processing lab that's a comment I never thought I'd hear.

Until digital cameras can replicate the resolution of film, and computers have the memory to deal with the terapixels (or more), 35mm will stay around.

On current trends, I'd give it about 5 years for the technology to be available, and about 10 years for the majority of the population to be working with it.

I have a (fairly basic) digital camera. I bought it so that I didn't have the expense of paying to get the pictures developed, followed by the realisation that at least half were cr*p. Then there's the storage of the pictures, which increases if you take them out of the 'envelope' and put them into albums. A while ago Richard did a sort through of umpteen years worth of photos. He only kept the ones he *really* liked, and chucked the rest. The ones he chucked filled a couple of large bin bags! My digital photos take up about 4Mbytes of my hard drive, and I have don't plan to print any of them, even though my printer will do 'photo quality' prints. The resolution is good enough on my PC monitor, and that's about all that matters to me.

Obviously you're not worried about resolution (clarity) of the pictures. 4MB will give you exactly two pictures at 7" x 5" at a barely acceptable 250 dpi.

To reproduce a properly exposed 35mm negative at anything close to its grain size would require about eight times this resolution and 64 times the storage space. There's more than 100MB of data in a 35mm negative or transparency.

Digital is wonderful but it hasn't caught up with 'wet film' for quality just yet.

F

If I remember rightly - and somebody feel free to correct me on this - the resolution of standard 35mm film actually works out at somewhere around 3 "megapixels" [what a stoopid piece of deliberate jargon that word is!]. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is now available on highish end digital cameras [I just saw somewhere a mention of *12* megapixels!]. So the main barriers are 1)cost, which will inevitably fall; 2)the inability to print them off as proper photos, which the high street developers are beginning to falsify already; and 3)the different cultural associations they have than traditional cameras.

This is the biggy. The article suggests that "35mm Camera joins a growing list of victims of technology - gramophones, VCRs..." Well, the case of the VCR has yet to be proven, but "gramophones" certainly haven't died out - they've found a different niche, certainly, but they've survived the invention of the audiocassette, the CD, the minidisc, and the MP3... I think digital cameras will appeal to people who want to take lots of quick snaps, and play around with multiple copies of them. "Old-fashioned" 35mm cameras will still be used by those of us who like to stick all our photos in albums, and treat each one as something worth keeping - with a digital camera there's no real concept of a lasting "original", you just have files lying around of various types and in various degrees of manipulation.

And as for APS, I think if anything it's more doomed than 135 - it always struck me as a fundamentally gimicky format. Yes, the way the film loads and unloads is quite useful, but it all but destroys the idea of developing at home; and the "three different picture formats" seem to work by taking a very wide picture, but not necessarily printing the full width - and in return, you have to sacrifice the ability to choose what size your photos are printed at...

My prediction then? Digital cameras will take over the market for point-and-click cameras (which are already ubiquitously electronic anyway, with automatic zooms and so forth); 135 film will still sell in huge quantity to people who want to be really serious about photography as a hobby; and APS will become a forgotten footnote like 110 and 'disc film'...

Before you all get too upset, all Kodak have done is announce they're not making any more *cameras*. Kodak's core business is film. They only make cameras when they wish to promote a new film, as they did for APS. Now that APS is now an accepted format, they don't need to make them any more. They probably didn't make much (if any) money from them.

I'd take issue with some points here and also in the article. First, although it's true that film has a better theoretical resolution than all but the biggest digital cameras, for the purposes of most people this is irrelevant. Most of the cameras we use have such poor lenses that the resolution of the film isn't the limiting factor. The lenses are far more important. The fact is that, for most of us, and the kinds of pictures most of us take, a 3 megapixel digital camera is just as good as a compact 35mm camera. More expensive, but just as good. So what people are paying for, as with most new-fangled devices, is the added flexibility. The ability to take as many shots as you need without worrying about cost shouldn't be underestimated.

And as for cameras not being able to replicate the resolution of film, well that's happened already. Cameras of 10 megapixels and higher are appearing, offering comparable resolution to that provided by scanning 35mm negatives. But that's not really the point. The kind of quality most of us experience when getting our films processed and printed in the high street is easily achievable with 3 or 4 megapixel cameras and a colour printer (or, if you want prints that will last as well as photgraphic prints, there are plenty of stores and online sites which will give you prints from digital files which (to my poor eyes) are indistinguishable from the prints I'm used to from my SLR).

Where I think digital cameras still have some way to go is in their speed of use. My camera seems to take forever to calculate exposure and focus before it decides to take the shot. When you're trying to take pictures of small children, this can be disastrous. Also, if the autofocus is dodgy, it's impossible to tell on the small LCDs. I might be unlucky with mine, but I get a frightening number of out of focus shots. It's lucky that I can take so many shots on a single memory card to compensate, I suppose.

On the whole, I'll be happy if I never take another shot on film. But I'm not a professional photographer, so I'm not aiming to blow up my efforts to fill a wall, in which case, perhaps, film might still make a better originating medium. But for me, the ease of using a digital camera far outweigh any nominal lack of quality (which I can't personally see in the pictures I take).

to true i ask my self Antiques road show 2120 how many digital cameras will you see there ,put any of to days lenses onto a box brownie no one will know the difference.
Rollaflex cameras almost indestructable for the average person,also skills in devolopeing digi cameras non comparable to "true photography"

That's roughly what I said Jim


Personally, the only things stopping me from changing over to a digital full time are:
1) That ruddy delay (which is getting better - I was playing with a friend's digital compact the other day which seemed virtually instantaneous
and
2) The expense of not only the camera, but having to upgrade to a decent printer - at the moment, if I try and print colour photographs on my clapped out inkjet then all I get is a soggy mass of ink on the page (plus - you should work out just how much it costs in ink )

I find that as many of the decent photos I take (especially of my son) end up getting scanned and sent in e-mails then digital cameras do have a great advantage there (unfortunately for me - the one I've got at the moment is just toooo old, slow and doesn't have enough memory - anyone like to give me a few hundred quid for a new one

These days you don't even need a colour printer - local high-street photolabs can print from memory cards nt genuine photographic paper - or you can do it online. I had some printed out recent, and they were as good as any I'd got from film, with the advantage that I could do simple corrections (like red-eye).

But the delay is infuriating. It's a manifestation of what happens, as Alan Cooper says, when you cross a camera with a computer: You get a computer, with all the usability implications that brings.

In defense of the 35mm... I have tried at times to digitally "improve" or at least work with photos. While the results were not as bad as I expected, I did not get QUITE as much fun out of that as I did out of actually working in the darkroom. To me, it makes a LOT of difference whether I "just" pushed some buttons to achieve a result, or whether I manaully cut out a dodging tool, decided to burn-in the edges of the photo, played with contrast filters, etc. The satisfaction of finally getting a picture I was absolutely happy about was much higher in the "hands on" experience than it was in the PC pool...

Y. - but I know that this is a special case

Zoomer is the man..he collects 35mm cameras. Ask him.

Zoomer's a professional camera man. Works for an Ontario based media broadcaster in the commercial sector. He collects 35mm and is a wiz with IT. He's a member here..decent guy ask him.

Here's what I know about the resolution of 35mm film compared to digital. And I should know since I scan NASA flight film. 35mm film can be scanned at 2048 x 3072 pixels without any significant loss of resolution. At this resolution you can see the grain of the film. Color positive film (E6 films and especially Kodachrome) have a little better resolution but all of the grain can be seen when scanned at 4096 x 6144. This basically means that the current top of the line digital cameras, from Kodak and Canon for instance, have BETTER resolution than 35mm film.

Now does this mean that film is going to go away... I doubt it. Pundits have been predicting the end of film for nearly two decades now. 35mm might go away one day, but I don't think it will be real soon. I do however think that amateurs will probably stop shooting film fairly soon as the price and utility of digital photography is now making it preferable.

That's my


CZ