Imminent demise of Medium Format?

If 35mm film photography is virtually extinct (just try to trade in

your 35mm slr on something)can medium format be far behind? This is

a philosophic question. I recently tried to trade my Leica R4 with 2

lenses in at every major camera store in the city where I live. Not

one would take the stuff. I also have a Hasselblad and a Toyo 4x5. I

love film, but with Nikon saying they are stopping making film

cameras and Ilford seaking bankruptcy protection is not the writing

on the wall?

joseph

Didn't Nikon just introduce the new F6? I'm not up on new stuff, but isn't it a film camera? Ilford is producing film. Lots of companies go through bankruptcy. For answers/discussion see any of a hundred similar thread starters on this site.

Part of this is also the economy -- not a lot of people have a lot of money to drop on top-name equipment right now (hence my bessa-t instead of leica 7)....

go to any cam store these days, theres tons of people in line for digital and only a few for film...its a dying breed....i think they call it business

Maybe fim based medium format will not be here for much longer. Hopefully, by the time it happens, MF digital backs will be available at reasonable prices and I'll just switch one black box for another.

 

Mamiya seems to explore (slowly, though) the territory of reasonable priced digital backs and they may be able to push prices down.

 

On the other hand, the march to the bright digital future (with blown highlights but lots of detail in shadows :-)) provided amateurs with previously unaffordable MF equipment and the demand from amateurs can keep the film production alive for long time (possibly on smaller scale, but still alive). Fuji does not show any signs of leaving the film market, which is encouraging.

 

The prices of film equipment are such that it does not make any sense to sell. On the other hand, it makes sense to buy and have fun while it lasts. Chances are that film will really disappear one day and the digital MF will be out of reach of mortals. If that happens, I certainly do not want to find myself in regret of missing the opportunity to explore the MF.

Yes, Nikon did just introduce the new F-6 and it is quite an update and refinement of

the F-5. I was so impressed I bought TWO of them and I will let you know on whether

or not I have much trouble selling my F-5. New the F-5 body is still going for $1800

at places like B&H while the F-6 is closer to $2300.

 

I have been in this business for 40 years and I still don't see "digital" as being any

different than another form of "film." It's a recording medium, that's all. As for post-

shooting manipulation, anything shot on film can be "edited" digitally as easily as if it

was shot on digital in the first place. And in Medium Format you get better resolution

and color with transparencies than with a 1/2-sized 35mm digital image. Of course

if you want to spend $12,000 for a digital MF back you can. But $12,000 will buy me

a lot of film--at least 28,800 frames.

 

And if you include the cost of processing, perhaps you'll have to be satisfied with only

20,000 transparencies. If you shoot 10 rolls a week, every week, that's roughly 500

rolls a year, or 4 years worth of film to account for the $12,000 back. In four years,

that back will be "obsolete" by at least two generations of new backs and worth zero

whereas you Hasseblad with its fillm back will still be worth about 65% of a "new" one.

 

Frankly, I don't think I shoot more than 100 rolls a year, so unless you are a high-

volume professional shootng weddings all the time--500 rolls a year--its not even

worth doing the math to justify the cost of an MF-back at this stage of the

development of digital. If the Foveon system--or something similar--ever gets the

bugs worked out, all digital imaging as we know it today will be as obsolete as the

flashbulb. It will be a time to start all over again with a 4x resolution capacity, better

color and easier to print imaging process.

 

Digital development isn't "here" in its present state forever; it is still evolving. We're

sorta where Polaroid was in 1955 when everybody was predicting the demise of film

then too!

Yes. It's a sad thing. 6 years ago, back at uni, our lecturers were reassuring us that film photography would still exist and grow in tandem with the digital revolution. Looks like in the name of business, everyone is going digital. I hope Kodak doesn't follow that route. I wonder what ansel adams would say...With photoshop, who cares about the zone system.

The R-series Leicas have been a soft market for several years. But losing major rollfilm camera lines is not promising. Nikon said it was dropping its P&S fixed lens lines, not film cameras. My neighborhood shop says his B&W film business was up in 2004, and improving. Ilford is spinning off some products and continuing production on others. If you love film, buy some and use it.

We are actually seeing a large number of shooters returning to film. Digital is great... fast,

easy and other than for the really high end stuff, relatively cheap. But there's still one thing

that digital can't do... produce LARGE high quality prints that remotely compare to the

quality of those derived from medium or large format film. If your shooting winds up

being used for web display... you don't need very much quality... 3 Mp is more than

adequate. Or prints up to A3... digital is fairly competant at around 5Mp. But if you want

large prints with superior detail and tonality and NO purple fringing on specular

highlights, film is still the way to go. I think everyone has to come to grips with the fact

that nowadays most images are being viewed on monitors... not paper. You simply don't

need much quality to produce a "stunning" image on a monitor. I suspect there is a whole

generation of photographers that may never have actually seen a photographic print...

much less one derived from medium or large format film. I browse the various web

galleries and very often after seeing a really nice photo I find myself thinking... Nice shot,

shame it won't produce a decent 16x20. So will film go away? I don't know for sure... I

hope not. In the end I think this will depend very much on what quality level

"photographers" are willing to accept, and how they will exhibit their work.

With a question like that your going to get lots of people claiming that thier 500c or whatever system they have invested in will still be worth much more than one of todays DIGITAL cameras in 10 years.

 

But in the end the market place is dictated by its users. And the medium format market is dictated by the PROFESIONAL users. With each PROFESIONAL medium format photographer that swithches to digital the film side comes that much closer to extinction. How many hobbyists does it take to shoot the same amount of film as a profesional? If you do some simple math you can see that when enough PROFESIONALS switch over to digital backs or other solutions the film companys are going to reduce then stop the production of thier films.

This won't happen over night but you will see it happening as more and more profesionals switch to medium format digital backs.

 

I think the used medium format market will thrive for quite a while yet. But I don't think there will be many(if any) film based medium format cameras offered new from the factory in 5 years.

 

I wouldn't say the demise is imminent but it is written on the wall.

 

However as a hobbyist I will be quite happy with my used medium format film solution for as long as I can get film.(shopping on ebay as I write this). Of course if 22mp backs came down to the $1000-3000 range i'd switch in a heart beat.

 

Some people may argue that there will always be a place for fully manual film based cameras, and while I agree, I think in 10 years film will be very expencive and hard to find! Once the profesionals leave the market the prices will skyrocket.

 

Well that's my 2bits. Anyone disagree? Go ahead and refute my oppinions, then in 5 years we'll look up these threads and see who was right :)

 

*as a side note I live in a tropical location with very high humidity, I have had and seen many digital cameras die after thier warenty period due to damage from the humidity(hence now my camera is stored in a sealed plastic box with silica gell when not in use.)

 

In my oppiinion digital cameras are throw away tecnology if you go digtital be prepared to spend alot of money on upgrades, repairs, etc. For a hobbyist keeping thier bills I think many will find that today FILM is cheaper over a 5 year span.

 

My responce is a bit long winded but thats what happens when you ask a philosophic question.

 

PS. sorry about the spelling erros(i'm not much of a typist or a proofreader)

To CPeter Jørgensen:

 

From the perspective of a photojournalist, sure, the difference between the 2 medium is negligible. Afterwall, the objective of photojournalism is to record images for the purpose of reporting (I suppose). Shooting on digital allows you to concentrate on the subject and leave the touch ups such as composition, color, etc. to a later time where you can "fix it" in the computer. But the difference between the 2 medium becomes pronounced when we deal with the artistic aspects of it. It becomes an issue when we question if a picture was created based on the photographer's skill in composition, lighting, sense of color, timing, exposure at the point of image exposure. These are the things that cannot be fixed once the film exposed. And it is based on these and many other factors that seperates the amateur from the professional, who have built up their photographic experience from years of photography the manual way. And we have not touched on printing in the darkroom yet. That in itself is another whole new world of skillsets that sets aside from the "click print" operator to the master printer who knows how to milk the silver from the paper. It's a totally different thing between taking pictures and making pictures.

 

-Observer

yaawwwnnnnn....

You had a hard time trading in your R4? Try trading in a Canon D30 in a few years. I bet that your R4 has retained its value better than the D30.

 

"Digital development isn't "here" in its present state forever; it is still evolving. We're sorta where Polaroid was in 1955 when everybody was predicting the demise of film then too!"

 

And in what sort of financial situation did we find Polaroid a few years back? Was that the pinnacle of Polaroid's evolution?

 

Every camera company in the world is going to eventually push its digital products over film based products and try to convince us that we "need" digital cameras. Why? Because they know of the current insatiability for technology and instant gratification that is running rampant in our modern societies. Oh yeah, and they make alot more money doing so.

 

How many people sold Canon 10D cameras to buy a 20D? Don't tell me that Canon doesn't know that people will do this. They are probably sitting on the technology to release a camera far beyond the next three models that they will release. But, why do they wait? Because people will gladly pay for all of the mediocre "improvements" in between. The camera companies will slowly let the advancements hit the market, dragging a trail of digital carnage behind them. Better!! Better!! Better!!

 

New film camera models used to hit the market at a much slower rate than digital cameras (EOS 1 to EOS 1n to EOS 1V or F4 to F5 to F6). How much time has elapsed between the D30, D60, 10D and 20D? or the 1D, 1DS, 1DS mkII?). Yeah, stop selling film cameras, and convince people that they need a better camera every year. That is business at its finest. Argue if you'd like, but you know its happening.

 

Man, I love conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, I still believe that the majority of people making the switch in the amateur/hobbyist arena are doing so due to brilliant "pressure laden" advertising and the proliferation of whimsical urban legends, such as "film is dead".

WOW film is dead someone better hurry over to ebay and tell the thousands of people buying a film camera every week. I watch the Canon Fd stuff like a hawk I see everything that isn't snapped up in the first couple of hours and I got to tell you that even the non working junk is selling someone is using those cameras. Unlike digital where you have to buy a new camera to use the medium you can very happily play with your 50 year old Leica Canon or what ever I own two cameras newer then 1988 one a APS ELF Jr that is just a hoot to play with and about the size of a pack of ciggs the other is a Canon G3 digital already now long out of date. BUT I ALSO OWN 40 other cameras That I feed about 200 rolls of film a year into. Now I don't show on any new camera sales report. The ONLY two times my purchase of a camera ever has is in 1976 when I bought my first AE-1 and two years ago when I bought my G3 everything thing else I have has been bought used.

 

Figure that and the zillions of people like me or even with only one camera into your statistics.

 

 

Last time I counted (abou a month ago) there were about 140 different 35mm films still on the market and available from any major online retailer B&H had about 110 just themselves.

Sigh! I guess every week there will be one of these MF/Film is dead posts.

I happen to know several pros who make their living from photography. They all shoot film MF and/or LF. They "went digital" some time ago and decided it didn't compare to film. They simply scan their negs. Funny how as beginners we all loved the darkroom but as we get older and more accomplished, we loath anything to do with the darkroom.

The typical digital buyer is Joe Sixpack who bought into the hype that his 35mm camera was no longer any good. I've read accounts that digital sales are actually falling because Joe Sixpack is getting around to the idea that he doesn't need a new camera every year with more pixels. I laugh when I read reviews for digital cameras and the reviewer writes about how closely the digital prints resemble film. If one wants a print to look like film, well then use film ferchrisakes! Ooops! I forgot, at several bucks a roll, film is simply too expensive and who wants to wait for an hour or more for for the local mini lab to print up a set?

Cheers,

marc

A couple years ago I bought two fuji rangefinder 6x9 cameras on the famous auction

site. Since then Fuji has stopped producing these cameras.

 

The price they are now fetching in auction has....gone up 10-20%!

 

I guess it's not quite dead yet.

The reason you can't get squat for your used camera on trade in is that the retailers can't compete with the almost no overhead dealers online.

 

Take a look at KEH there whole business is built on selling used equipment.

 

OH and did I mention EBAY try competing with that as a brick and morter store. You couldn't give 50% of what you expected to get on anything used so why bother.

 

Of course I know of quite a few Used only camera shops that seam to be doing a bang up business.

 

I think the origional posters world is just a little to small for objective opinions.

MF use isn't dead. This Forum answers "What to buy" questions on a daily basis. It is just

the sale of new MF equipment that is dead. Users buy "as new" stuff at bargain prices and

use it happily ever after. Personally I don't think 'affordable' MF digital backs will ever

around. As the market for new MF cameras is dead already, who is going to invest in the

development of new affordable MF backs? Those who want to stay with MF better focus on

film. Just my opinion, I am not a Guru in any way and I am usually wrong in predicting.

My bet is that all the nay sayers will be dead before the MF, or 35mm, or film. Digital is outselling analog (statistically) only because analog has a greater market penetration that is stable (relatively) and does not need to keep selling. Count the actual number of analog versus digital units operating today and the whole skew of the statistic will look different. The users still need to buy film and they are a market of consequence, so marketers will satisfy them for their dollars. Names of the marketers will probably change, but what the hell. There is/will be more available than I can ever use.

CPeter,<br><br>Something is not obsolete because there is something new around. It doesn't really matter if the technology is still/continually evolving or not (You bought a couple of F6s; evolving technology giving birth to a successor of the F5? Turning F5s into obsolete, unusable things? Good luck selling them! ;-) ).<br>You only have a problem when the results that something produces are no longer usable.<br>And that may well be long after those 4 years. Certainly well after something new and different comes along.<br><br>Same with value of analogue equipment: its' not what someone is willing to pay you for it, it's how much (payed) use you still get out of it.<br>People want to buy things for many reasons, and how much income/profit having one item might generate is just one of them. Yet all of these reasons will put value in the item.

There is still a good reason to use MF. "Both" MFs, film and digital.<br>The problem in the MF market is that MF manufactureres have been too complacent for too long, believing that MF film's quality advantage over digital would be enough for people wanting to continue to pay the premium, both in price and convenience.<br>People don't.<br><br>The thing MF industry must do (and do in a hurry) is provide us with digital products that make full use of the format advantage, and (!!!) are competitively priced.<br>That last bit includes both allowing for a comparable per-pixel-price (many people obviously don't care about pixel quality, only about pixel count) and for the added inconvenience using MF brings (again, many people obviosuly don't care about quality, only about convenience).<br>That means that the price level for MF digital products must be lower than what the added (supposing they have managed to add that) format advantage alone would allow.<br>Now, MF is lacking in both: we do not (!) get the format advantage, and price levels are much too high (higher than they even should be if they did give us the format advantage).<br><br>In short:<br>- Generally film's user base is shrinking rapidly, digital's growing.<br>- MF digital (still) does not give us a reason to want to use MF.<br>- MF digital is too expensive. Even for those willing to consider using MF anyway.

Nikon's announcement referred to point and shoot cameras. because the mass market drives the fortunes of a company like Ilford, the mass market's shift toward the instant gratification of digital has got to cause a signficant restructuring. but for work - those things other than family memories and trips to the beach - film will continue to have a role, just as large format does.

I still see lots of misinformation about high end digital capture rattling around on this forum - usualy along the lines of medium format film outperforms 22mp capture or digital gives you blown out highlights and purple fringing or that backs are expensive ( when they omit the fact that getting the best out of film requires drum scanning which is not cheap) Clearly these posters have never used a 22mp back for a real job.

First thing, try selling the equipment yourself on EBay. A store will give you 60-65% of what they can sell it for. Even if you sell at a 10% discount to the store, which makes up for warranty, return policies, etc., you still come out way ahead.

 

Second, I was at Calumet yesterday and saw the Imacon (now Hasselblad) V96C, a 16MP back for the Hasselblad V series. It is going for $9700 complete. The price curve may go down a little more with 16MP backs going for $7000-8000 over the next couple of years. This already makes sense for me since I spend about $2000/yr for film and processing, not counting extensive scanning time on my Flextight.

 

Third, just to satisfy curiosity, I took my Kodak DCS760, a 6MP 35mm digital SLR with the Nikon 85mm PC Macro lens and shot it head to head with my 553ELX using the Makro Planar 120mm and a 16MP Kodak back (one generation behind the V96C). I set up the distances so that the final images had features with the same size at 100% on the screen to account for the difference between 6MP capture and 16MP capture, as well as focal length differences. It wasn't even a contest: the MF setup just blew away the 35mm. Some of it could be my technique.

 

Using a 16MP back that covers the best center portion of Zeiss glass yields abosolutely spectacular results. If you can swing a MF digital back, MF is about as far from dead as can be. Now that it's less than $10k (even lower for used), putting it not too far from the 1DS MkII, should keep MF shooters in business for quite some time.

 

If you can swing $22k (I can't), the H1D bundle looks very attractive since you get a 22MP back for about $16k. Phase One or Leaf will cost about $25k for a similar back. This may not look workable for an amateur, but a pro making his living from photography should certainly be able to handle $25k amortized over 5 years.

Prices dropping on cameras and clothing when they go out of vogue has always been around. There was a total glut of used screwmount lense in the 1960's. Nikon; Leica; Canon normal lenses were only 9 to 30 bucks; from great NYC dealers; as used items. Folks would trade in their Leica M3 with 50mm Summicron; and add say two hundred bucks; and get a new Nikon F; Minolta; Mamyia; Pentax 35mm slr camera. <BR><BR>MF rollfilm 120/620 gear has always had its ups and downs. Decent 120 folders were once only 5 to 20 bucks used. Stocks do this too :) MF box cameras were given away free to kids in the 1950's.<BR><BR>Usually a pro plans on holding equipment for awhile; and often never plans on selling it ever. Chasing the latest fad; and trying to fetch cash of gear out of vogue will cost you money in the long run. The camera stores "will take your stuff"; IF they can make a profit on later. Since you had no takers; you had your stuff overpriced. They are not fools; they need a profit to may the taxes; overhead; lightbill; advertising; labor; visa fees; etc etc.<BR><BR> A private Ebay sale will fetch your more cash; but you have to present the equipment well. <BR><BR>Most ALL items "consumers" buy always drops in real value after purchase. Because folks dont want to over pay for you gear is no reason to conclude that film is dead.<BR><BR> If you dont get the price for your used refrigerator or car; do you conclude that electricity or gasoline are extinct too?<BR><BR>If the personal computer was suppose to help "make a paperless office"; why do tons of Xerox type paper still get sold; why is HP's entire profit model based on selling freak inkcartridges with high profit margins??