Another sign of the future

I don't use camera stores at all these days. All my Leica gear is at least 50 years old from eBay, and film comes from Jersey where it's about 30% of the local shop price. I don't need any more Bronica kit either, as I have all the lenses and backs for anything I'd ever want to photograph. Photo shops in the UK are generally vastly overpriced (Jessops sell virtually everything at the mythical RRP) and it's rare to find an assistant who knows what they're talking about.

My digital images are far safer than my negatives. The next California earthquake (or some other disaster) could easily bury, soak or burn my negatives. My digital files (all scans at this point, but I will drop 35mm for digital later this year) are on a remote server, a removable hard drive, and CDs, all in separate location. The ease of copying digital files makes them far more easy to archivel, unless you can get Corbis to store them for you. It's a bogus argument.

 

File formats aren't going to disappear either, as long as you stick to the standard formats. Databases from the 1950s can still be read, image files will be able to be read for a very long time.

 

I had to buy some film while in New York last week so I went to B&H. There were two people (including me) at the film counter, and a line halfway through the store for the digital counter. It's not too difficult to figure out where things are going.

no questio film is dead. just look around the next time you go to

an event at your child's school, etc. nobody is shooting on film --

not the grandma, not the older sib, not even the inevitable pro

wannabe with the domke shooter bag and five lenses who has

squeezed himself between the front row and the kids.

 

but leica fans should be happy. in the 1930s leica users were a

lunatic fringe who defied the mass taste. the next decade will

just be a homecoming.

 

sallors in a stinkpot world. hey it's luddite heaven.

 

p.s. how long until we get plug-ins that duplicate the grain

structure of popular films??

I think the problem with digital now is that "one" it's not upgradeable; that is in other words you're stuck with one CCD imager or one CMOS imager and you can never change that imager ever really on that camera. I imagine that they're doing this because then when you actually want to change that imager you have no choice but to buy a whole new different camera and they can charge more money for the new one even though you're redundantly buying all of the other stuff that you don't need in order to get a new imager.

 

"Two" the camera companies are not really spending the money to develop smaller interchangeable lenses for the general smaller size of the CCD or CMOS imagers. The digital SLRs that they're putting out use the older lenses that were designed to accommodate the 35mm film sized frame. You either don't get the image that the lenses were originally designed to project the image of with the digital SLRs or you have to spend $8000.00 US for a camera designed to mimic the entire size of the 35mm film size's frame.

 

"Three" the problem with digital is not quality or picture size the main problem with digital is you end up with too much information! There's too much data to take care of and maintain. The question of the survival of CD's is sort of irrelevant because the important thing with digital pictures isn't the medium on which they're stored it's the data making up the pictures themselves. As long as you can protect the data somehow, the pictures can survive one hundred or even a hundred thousand years! The problem with the increasing popularity of digital photography isn't the death knell of film but the incredible deluge of data that's piled up by hundreds of thousands of people taking hundreds of thousands of pictures it's like... counting all of the grains of sand in all of the beaches around the world it's just ridiculous...!

Hi Marc; my point was that some of mine ; a small fraction are now unreadable after 4 to 7 years. You may want to do a spot check on your oldest CD's; to see if any problems are arising as a safety measure. In some of my "troublemaker" few CD's; some parts were recovered by trying several different CD readers. Sometimes they will read in one; and not another; when the reflective substrate is going south.<BR><BR>Harry; Re <i>"Dear silly people, please don't confuse the lifetimes of removable storage media formats and devices, or the failure rate of internal storage devices, with the "lifespan" of digital data"</i><BR><BR>The digital file must be saved my some physical method; to survive. Alot of space probe info from the 1960's is still resaved every 7 years on 1/2 inch mag tape; a very well proven technology. RAID disc arrays use multiple disc drives. The backup method is magnetic recording; optical disc recording; or ancient paper tape or punch cards...........Usually only magnetic or optical is used today. <BR><BR>Most people today in digital photography are burning CD's; and are NOT saving files in a remote salt mine; with a giant RAID disc server. Thus the lifescan of burned CD's is an issue. Scanning just one 4x5 transparency; and saving multiple modified versions usually here fills up one CD. What is the cost of saving 600 megs in the salt mine Raid disc server for 30 years? It is not zero my any means; tape backup with rewritting is used for many financial organizations; with the CD's viewed not as a proven method yet.................In the late 1970's; the optical disc recorder I worked on had a media lifetime of but a few days. The reflectance would drop with time; and the data recovery would require more retries..Later; the data would be unreadable. The laser power to burn the disc would increase with time; as the media was not stable..............We would test samples; and accelerate the aging process; to help improve the media lifetime... I find those who believe that optical media will last forever to be a wee bit optimistic; I spent too many years making media fail.

Jeff; at a server long ago in Pasadena; the 40 Meg 14" disc pac drives all walked around on the floor; still attached to their power and data cables; during an earthquake. The data was ok; but the floor got scratched like hell! The removable disc pac drives were very robust; the air path was a once thru; the fly (flying) height very high.

With core memory; the core is often recovered from a jet that crashed; and the magnetic state of each core still readable (under most morteum crash analysis)...Core memory was still used 13 years ago..

Actually, now that I've had the time to think about it, on my last statement in section "one" let me amend that to say that right now in the digital photography industry there are no set standards for CCD or CMOS imager size so that's why there are so many different sizes of CCD and CMOS imagers and no real system of CCD or CMOS sized interchangeable lenses.

 

HINT HINT... LEICA? Maybe if you really want to be the leader in the camera industry right now you should arbitrarily pick some size for the standard imager and then build a really good system of interchangeable lenses around it now that the fruits of the standards picking are ripe for the uhh... picking.

 

Obviously you would have to create a way to remove the imager from the camera (or at least have the camera sent to Leica Camera Inc. to be upgraded or repaired) and obviously these shouldn't be toy cameras (you know, they shouldn't be plastic ones with cheap lenses and whiny little autofocuses). It should be a "digital" sized version of the M-system with new smaller lenses to accommodate the arbitrary standard that they choose for the imager size and built into the camera should be the same shutter system as the M system (in that it should be as quiet and as simple as an M camera's shutter and as quick in reacting to the photographer's press of his or her finger onto the shutter button as the M camera); it should have built in metering; it should use a rangefinder to focus; and it should be built to the same standards as the M system including all of the lenses. With this now M digital style camera built to the arbitrary standard that they choose for the imager size since there is no need for the space being taken up currently in the M cameras designed for film's of the places and parts in the M camera that are there to accommodate film and since the imager size would obviously be smaller than a 35mm film size's frame size the camera can be redesigned and made into a much smaller and more modern design.

 

I know... it sounds like a lot of wishful thinking but wasn't Leica the company that set the original standards for the 35mm still camera industry?

 

Also, as a footnote they should keep the mechanical cocking of the shutter and save the electronics and battery for storing and exposure of the images; maybe no LCD except with a plugged attachment so you won't become distracted by removing your focusing eye from the viewfinder and it won't waste the battery's electricity.

Hard-drive storage costs about $1/gig, thus redundant hard-drive storage costs about $2/gig. My current 6MP RAW files are about 8MB, so the cost of storing two copies of each image is about 1.6 cents. Assume that a hard drive needs replacement every 5 years, and that the cost of storage doesn't drop over time (a VERY silly assumption), then redundant storage of an image for 30 years costs about 10 cents. How much does film cost as a "storage medium"?

 

The fact that most people today are saving data to CDs doesn't mean that it's the right approach. Since you asked, my numbers put the cost of saving 600MB for 30 years at $10. There are no giant RAID servers or salt mines involved, just plain, old IDE hard drives hanging off of plain, old PCs, preferably in two different places.

 

While this data is stored, it's integrity is periodically verified, to ensure it continues to be identical to its original (i.e. we compare current file to a saved checksum taken from the original when it was first created). Since the data is online all the time, this is a trivial, automated operation done by very mundane software (again, no salt mines RAID servers). This is the part of the equation that's lacking from the "burn a CD" approach, it's difficult to do regular verification of integrity on removable media, as every little piece of media requires handling by a human.

 

The life-span of any single piece of data recording equipment or media is thus irrelevant. If a single byte of data was degraded, it would promptly be detected, and you would revert to the redundant copy. If a hard drive dies, you promptly replace it and re-populate the new one from the redundant copy.

 

And the most important thing: after 30 years your image is exactly the same as it was 30 years ago. No fading, no scratches.

We need to distinguish between wishful thinking and logic. A mishap or sloppiness might kill your digital files, just like a flood can destroy your negatives if they're stored in the basement.<P>

It's probably the move to digital, combined with the efficient market that eBay has created, that allows prices for film (and second-hand digital) camera gear to be under pressure.<P>

Digital is here to stay. It will get better and it won't fail, as some seem to hope. Film will probably be around for quite a while as well, since it has some advantages over digital and since it will take a long time before the whole world goes digital, esp. since digicams are still ridicously expensive for the casual shooter.<P>

Personally, I'm ambivalent. A few weeks ago, I basically got rid of all my serious film gear and only had the Canon 1D and 10D. I found myself taking out my old Yashica-Mat and longing for a Leica M, for the sheer joy of manual gear and chromes on the lightbox. I'm currently debating whether I should sell my 10D and get a M6 or M7 instead.<P>

I'll stick to film. That's why I bought a freezer. It's full of AgfaPan 25, & Verichrome, & HP5. ect. I'm 50, I plan to continuse to photograph until I'm 70, then I will just print until I die. After I'm gone my kids will toss the negatives/slides into the trash and be done with it. They might sell some of the gear but by then no one will want it. All they will want will be the scans that I will make for them. Over the next 2 years I will back up all my negatives to digital media.

 

I do wish Silicon Film would deliver their 10MP product so I could turn one of my SLR's into a digital camera that I can control (http://www.siliconfilm.com/). Have you ever tried to hook up an external flash to a PS digital? Not as easy as it shoud be. I hope they bring out a version that will work in a Leica M.

 

There still is a demand for high quality camera gear but in five years who knows what the market will be? Will a black M3 sell in the thousands or hundreds? I think the market will level out and cameras will still be actively traded. I'm just going to get what I need and sell off the rest so I can invest in a quality film scanner.

The death of vacuum-tube audio amplifiers was predicted back in the '60's, when transistor amps came out. After a few years people realized they didn't sound as good as tubes. Today, new tube amplifiers are still being designed. Old ones command a premium price. The same thing will happen with film. Eventually the digital bandwagon will lose momentum, and digital photography will take its place alongside film as an alternative.

<i>after 30 years your image is exactly the same as it was 30 years ago</i><p>

After 30 or even 130 years, how many of most of the billions of photographs made this year will anyone <b>want</b> to look at? If we're brutally honest with ourselves, it'll probably be a very small percentage.

Jay, I think the time has finally come...

 

I've been amazed at the recent tremendous drop in film-based camera prices -- two months ago, they were half of what they were a year ago, and in the last two weeks they've fallen another 50% from where they were two months ago. When I go to any of my children's functions, I see maybe one film camera -- ususally an old SLR -- and forty digital cameras of mostly the P&S variety. To be sure, the casual user is going (has gone) digital, at least in my tech-savy area.

 

But does this mean film is dead? I don't think so. But nor do I think there will be any great strides in new emulsions either -- there is simply no demand. Look at the yawn of attention surrounding the new Velvia 100 or the new Kodak E100whatever-it-was... If you shoot film, you probably paid attention. If you don't, you didn't (which is why I can't remeber the designation of the new Kodak emulsion). But there clearly is enough interest to keep sacred emulsions alive, though they'll likely be relegated to the niche of "artiste" photographers -- and prices for them will soar in an accordant fashion...

 

Heck, even I still have a few film bodies and some Tri-X chilling out in the fridge. Maybe someday I'll want to shoot it again... Of course I'll have to mail it to one of you to get it processed :) FWIW, the LAST traditional photo lab in my area folded four months ago. The closest quality lab left is in San Francisco (35 miles away), and they don't do B&W, only C41 and E6.

 

There's a new world order coming as far as imaging is concerned... and I think it's here.

 

Cheers,

First, I enjoy using my thirty yrs old mechanical/chemical gear.

 

Second, I'm a long time EE and I can clearly see the future belongs to digital cameras.

 

In this future:

 

- We will see a plethora of new gear on the market every year as the market evolves very quickly;

 

- Products will be made obsolete much faster than photographers are used to, so don't buy the latest and greatest gear, you will loose money for sure, and in a short period of time (as it happens with PC's);

 

- There are great chances that some of the sacred names in cameras will disapear or become a division of some large electronic outfit (Swatch style);

 

- Silicon law (Moore's) will play so the size of CCD's will not be constant, as we have 35 mm film - there will be, as today, many sizes, depending on final targeted market price.

 

The name of the game is (and has always been) user convenience - and digital wins this one by a large margin.

One of the photo hosting services I use for ebay had their server crash; even with the raid; somehow I lost 8% of my photos..These were reloaded again from my harddrive. Somehow the multiple raid server got phased by the lightning hit; which burped their server...........There are a few degradation mechanisms that can ruin all the drives in a raid system. I got paid to figure our how to quickly destroy data on HDA's; when I worked in that industry......There has to be another disc to rewrite to; not in the local area; if one wants to use some nasty tricks..........The typical professional can backip data to a server; one a that uses industry standard mirroring and backup..............<BR><BR>With the masses of amateurs; many dont even burn CD's as backup; thus a major drive disc crash causes ones snapshots to be lost...........ALOT of people are using CD's today to store digital photos; many are done on "no name" CD's; that come in ammo pacs; without even jewel cases..................<BR><BR>I freak out abit; when we get a customers several CD's to print; all sent loose; without a sleeve or case; in a postal envelope.....all being scratched ; while loose in the envelope............It is amazing that most all still are readable; after the postal services handing...<br><br>

<i> FWIW, the LAST traditional photo lab in my area folded four months ago. The closest quality lab left is in San Francisco (35 miles away), and they don't do B&W, only C41 and E6.

</i><p>

 

I think I know where you live, and if I'm right, this isn't true. The Darkroom in San Carlos does black and white and color (full custom processing), including custom prints, fiber and RC, and color. That doesn't negate your point, but don't go driving to San Francisco for your processing.

Jack, there are a lot of places in San Francisco where you can have your B&W film

developed. I just came back from an afternoon in a rented darkroom (Focus Gallery,

Polk Street @ Union), where the owner, John Perino, will be glad to develop and hand

print

for you at quite reasonable rates.

 

Regarding digital vs. film, I am hedging my bets by shooting both (I have a M6 TTL

and a Canon 10D). I think color film is already obsolete, except for very long

exposures, but B&W will endure because its mostly used by luddites anyway, and

manufacturers like Ilford or Agfa don't need huge volumes to break even.

The general view says digital cameras will lose value faster than film cameras. However, I recently traded in a Leica M6 TTL and a Nikon D1x, over eighteen months they'd both depreciated by about the same amount. On this basis the Leica wasn't a copper bottomed investment, and neither was digital an exercise in instant obsolescence.

 

Maybe that's due to timing, the D1x is still Nikon's premiere digital camera yet the M6TTL has been replaced by newer models.

 

Maybe it's a sign that digital is reaching maturity and the pace of technical innovation is slowing. Incidentally, when I asked London's largest Leica dealer what trade-in item they'd find hardest to sell, the answer wasn't a Leica digital, it was a Leica enlarger.

Use whatever you need and whatever is available at anytime. Technology will change, people will change. You may not even like taking pictures 10 years down the road. If you need to keep up with the times, just keep buying the technology, it never ends.

 

Last night I was trying to charge my un-used Canon G1 up after 6 months but I couldn't find the charger adapter. At the other corner my Fx3 is all charged up ready to be used anytime..

It's been intimated here that digital cameras are outselling film cameras yet in the latest industry figures as reported in the UK "Amateur Photographer", film cameras are still outselling digital by two to one and that's not taking disposables into account.

 

Digital may displace film eventually but on the figures it's not going to be anytime soon. With a film camera you need the camera, a film and access to processing. With a digital you need the camera and a computer to host the images. For digital to really hit film, the camera prices have to drop by another two thirds and a lot more people need to buy into home PCs (in the US, the latest figures I can find suggest an overal ownership figure of 45% and in the UK nearer 40%)

 

What is clearly happening is that the high end and mid-range buyers are migrating to digital because these are the people who will allready have the computers to make use of them. The rest of the market is staying with film because it's simpler and easier and anyway, they don't have the computer to use with a digital camera.

The worm is in the middle of turning...digital is becoming the

dominate species. People like Jack and I who are "early

adopters" (at a price), know this perhaps more than "resisters".

The competition is fierce in the digital arena, and is fueling an

aggressive development pace. Yet, like computers, you only

need the level of gear that gets the job done efficiently...for me

that was the Canon 1Ds with a full frame sensor.

 

In fact, MF is under pressure from cameras like the Canon 1Ds

because the 1Ds is enough to shoot an entire wedding that was

once the domain of MF gear like the Hasselblad V system.

Response? A digital ready Hassey H1 (not perfect or cheap, but

at least an interim response). And now a 22 meg. full 645

sensor is already here. Just around the corner is a 6X6, 30+

meg MF sensor which will put 6X6 format cameras back on the

map for professionals IMO.

 

The quality issue is a non-issue for most applications. Vertually

all commercial work is now digital in one way or another ( I

haven't shot film for a paying job except weddings in 2 years).

 

As this becomes more of the rule rather than the exception, the

storage problems will be better solved because it is worth a LOT

of money to do so. IMO, it will be solved before the DVDs I have

go bad. In the mean time, my ad agency is in the process of

developing a triple back up system that works at night. Once

they get it all down, I'll apply it here in the studio.

 

IMO, film will not die, but it will become the exception instead of

the rule. There are always exceptions to any rule.

Marc, last night I was at a wedding (the reason I came up to Motown)and the pro was using 2 cameras: a Canon 10D with Sigma 15-30, and a Rollei 2.8F with a prism and a .7x Mutar. He said everybody wants digital, but the reason he still shoots the Rollei is because with the digitals, the only ones without severe shutter lag are the DSLR's and because of the mirror he can't see peoples' eyes at the critical moment.

<i>With a film camera you need the camera, a film and access to processing. With a digital you need the camera and a computer to host the images.</i><p>

 

You don't need a computer for digital camera usage. There are printers that don't need a computer and there are plenty of places in the US to take in your memory card and print.

<p>

<i>in the US, the latest figures I can find suggest an overal ownership figure of 45% </i><p>

 

PC household penetration in the US has been over 60% for several years

Jeff: You are correct, of course... I had forgotten about "The Darkroom" in San Carlos. Still, it's about a half-hour drive for me to get there just to have some B&W processed -- hardly worth the travel time unless I was shooting a lot of it.

 

Fazal: thanks for the tip, but my point was that I don't want to drive to San Francisco (or anywhere more than about 15 minutes away) to get a few rolls of B&W processed! I'd actually buy the chemistry and soup it myself before I did that :)

 

Marc: When we get the 36MP 6x6 back, I'm there! BTW have you seen the new Leaf back? The ability to attach to the 6x7 screen of the PDA is pretty sweet! The rest of it is a bit clugey though. A few more iterations and we'll be there...

 

Jay: I can sometimes see my flash strobe IN THE VIEWFINDER of my 1Ds -- I assume this is the TTL pre-flash, but nonetheless it shows how fast the 1Ds is. However NOTHING can compete with an RF or TLR for seeing what you are capturing at the moment of exposure :)

 

Cheers,