I like the results I get from my 33 megapixel Leaf Aptus. Still a good drum scanned 4x5 transparency has a warmth and romance that the Leaf doesn't have. Of course it is a lot harder to get a good 4x5 exposure than with the Leaf.
I like the results I get from my 33 megapixel Leaf Aptus. Still a good drum scanned 4x5 transparency has a warmth and romance that the Leaf doesn't have. Of course it is a lot harder to get a good 4x5 exposure than with the Leaf.
Brian - I just have to walk a block from my office to an upscale mall where probably more money is spent every month on large format photography than any "fine art" printer like me will generate in film or paper purchases in a year. Great big advertising
prints or transparencies, and they get routinely replaced. Probably a fair amount of PS
post-processing, but I seriously wonder how much of this was shot digital in the first
place. Film is still a lot more convenient except for tabletop stills and smaller scales of
reproduction. Yeah, for catalog work, cookbooks, and magazine ads digital is taking over big time, but the extra investment needed for highly detailed large scale work is clear off the charts for a lot of pros. Until some much more affordable system of high detail digital capture comes along, there will be a commercial demand for LF color film. Black and white LF can probably survive just fine with or without the advertising industry.
In my mind, the consumer film photographer is significant to the view camera photographer because all those millions (if not billions) of folks who shot a roll or two of film a year paid for all the R&D and tooling for film technology over the last several decades. Like it or not Large format photography hasn't paid its own way for a long time, not that I'm saying that it's not profitable for Kodak or whoever, rather that LF is not the driver for advances in film technology and isn't the reason a film company would invest in new plant. Large format is dependent on the success of other formats for its survival and if for example, motion picture film goes it will most likely drag colour film LF with it.
Tobias - I suspect that both Kodak and Fuji have absolutely mountains of unused R&D
available, and that it's marketing decisions, enviro rules, and the availability and cost
of materials which are going to factor into future decisions. Virtually all the developments we've seen in the past several decades have merely been refinements on basic film options already extant. I'm no insider, but if film mfgs are like everyone
else, and the engineers want to keep their jobs, they'll always be a number of steps
ahead of the market. As a comparison, in the plastics resin industry, chemists are
constantly inventing new formulas just for the hell of it, experimenting with potential
uses, and then waiting. Maybe only 2% of what they concoct ever finds a practical
market, but the odds increase whenever one has the most new options. And since these guys are probably only 2% of the payroll and are considered valuable, they tend
to keep their jobs even during tough times, at least more than most. But all I'm really
implying is that films and color papers could hypothetically keep improving for several
decades based upon already extant research (practical development is driven by probable markets, which unquestionably have lost ground to various digital options).
We probably got things like T-grain technology from the demand for finer grained
small camera films, so your point certainly has relevance, but it's just one factor
among several.
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