future of 4x5 and 8x10 film

[Andrew O'Neill]

my favorite b&w film is now gone

Drew, just out of curiosity, which film was it?

[Jay W]

I tend to have a different view of cameras....as toys. I don't try to sell my work, which removes any aspect of "work" from my hobby. Very liberating. I think a lot of people here are similar, in that they've owned and used a bunch of different cameras. Each is fun for their own reason.

I enjoy large format because you get to tweak everything before taking the picture. Also, my topics tend to require detail to make them work. The problem is, my legs can't handle hiking with a big pack every day. So when I go on vacation, I bring and use three formats: 35, 120, and 4x5.

Recently, I picked up a digital SLR, hoping to replace the 35 and 120 systems for vacation. We'll see.

Jay

[Drew Wiley]

Andrew - my favorite B&W film was Bergger 200, at least in 8x10. It was a dream to
print from when dev in Pyro. I'm experimenting now with Arista 200, which is distinctly
slower and very susceptible to scratching during dev. And I keep on hand HP5+, FP4+,
100TM, and ACROS in 8x10. The only major film I haven't tried yet is the new TM400.
So lots of good options out there; it's just that Bergger was the cat's meow for me.
In color I miss E100G in Readyload because it was a dimensionally-stable polyester-base film, whereas Fuji at the same contrast level is still on acetate. But since most of
my color photog is also with the 8x10 that's a minor inconvenience. Wish Astia was
easier to get in 8x10. I use it for a dupe film. It actually works much better than the
official duplicating films by either Kodak or Fuji (I generally print Cibachromes from
contrast-corrected contact dupes - the detail and general quality absolutely blows away anything digital).

[The Muid]

Well, unfortunately, film - as we know it - will eventually die. It has a plastic base, and plastic is made from oil. So, eventually oil will run out and when that happens, film - as we know it - will die.

That's not to say that other, similar products won't be made. If there's sufficient demand, they will be. But this is all centuries away probably, lol, more so if we ever move away from fossil-fueled energy.

Best thing to do to keep film around is to increase demand. Convince your friends/family/anyone who'll listen to shoot only on film. No one prints their digital pics anyways.



Diarmuid

[Drew Wiley]

Digital cameras are also largely made from petroleum plastics. Does that mean they
are going extinct unless we find a way to make them from recycled cardboard? Film is
a very, very small amount of the plastics market, which can be derived in many cases
from either petrochemicals or vegetable oils. The average new house is now wrapped
with more plastic than the amount of film you will ever consume in your life. Does that mean we go back to living in caves? I'm getting sick of this BS. Back when most
professionals were shooting sheet film the masses were shooting box Brownie cameras.
Now the masses shoot digital pocket cameras. What's the difference really? We're
talking about two completely different markets.

[emo supremo]

You know, there are a lot of physicians etc that have xray machines that depend on film. How does that affect the 'rumblings' alluded to in the previous post?

[D. Bryant]

You know, there are a lot of physicians etc that have xray machines that depend on film. How does that affect the 'rumblings' alluded to in the previous post?

In the US those numbers are beginning to crumble. Digital imaging for medecine is growing very rapidly though xray film will be around for a while.

Don Bryant

[Drew Wiley]

Don - how many photographers do you know who can afford a piece of gear even
remotely as expensive as a medical imaging device? Probably a single call by a
service technician would flatten the annual budget of most of us. Right now I'm
shopping around for a Zeiss microscope similar to what I had in school. I'd be perfectly happy with something of forty or fifty year old vintage. Look at what a
state-of-art hybrid optical/digital Nikon microscope costs - maybe fifty grand! That's
why they can dump most of their traditional film camera line and just go primarily
digital. If the digital cameras themselves don't go obsolete within a few years, the
software backing them certainly will. Then you have to buy again over and over.
That allows them to concentrate their high-end engineering on medical and industrial
equipment, which seems to be quite profitable. Same goes for Fuji and Kodak. The
technology is stunning, but hardly answers our practical needs. I don't see any
alternative to sheet film anywhere on the horizon.

[Marko]

If the digital cameras themselves don't go obsolete within a few years, the software backing them certainly will. Then you have to buy again over and over.

I don't get it. How exactly does a digital camera go obsolete, short of breaking apart? Wouldn't that (breaking apart) make a film camera equally obsolete?

Do you know of any camera that was backed by a major software such as Photoshop but is not any more? Any examples maybe?

My Canon D30 - the 3.1 MP one of Y2K vintage, not the 30D one - still works fine, producing equally nice images as it did on day one. No mysterious cracks developing, no signs of premature obsolescence and both its RAW files and its JPGs load just fine in my Photoshop CS3. As a reminder, Photoshop upgraded to the version 5.5 the year that camera came out and Camera RAW did not yet exist.

Had I bought a film camera at the same time, I would've paid about $500 for it, I would be using the same lenses and I would have to keep buying film and keep paying for processing it. Figure $10 per roll for slides (sans scanning, which would be extra). Figure 1 roll per week over nine years, it comes down to $4680 plus $500 for the camera = $5180. The D30 cost $3000 new back then and a decent size memory card another couple of hundred, which means I would be in the red by about two grand since then and I would have been shooting less, keeping an eye on the cost.

So even if it goes obsolete now, it's earned its keep. The Rebel XT I got three years ago cost me all of $500 and it already shot the equivalent of about 150 rolls, so it too can break any time it chooses, it's earned its keep several times over. The more I shoot it, the less it costs me per shot, which is exactly the opposite for film.

So, please, it is high time to stop propagating this nonsense about rapid obsolescence.

The technology is stunning, but hardly answers our practical needs. I don't see any alternative to sheet film anywhere on the horizon.

It is perfectly understandable that you don't see the alternative, but that doesn't necessarily mean the alternative does not exist. It only means that it is not the right alternative for you for whatever reason.

[sanking]

Digital cameras go obsolete in the same way that computers go obsolete. The makers are continually adding new features and increasing resolution and pixel count just as computers get more RAM, speed and hard drive space.

Most of us could get by with 10 year old computers but we don't, and my experience is that people think of digital cameras in the same way. The goal in terms of our ideal digital camera is a moving target in that we want more and more image quality for less and less money. And for now we are getting it.


Sandy King

I don't get it. How exactly does a digital camera go obsolete, short of breaking apart? Wouldn't that (breaking apart) make a film camera equally obsolete?