35mm - One Step Closer to the End 627
Anonymous Coward writes "A colleague of mine just pointed out that Nikon UK has posted a press release here indicating that they are all but ending production of their 35mm film cameras, medium- and large-format lenses and enlarging equipment. The F6 35mm SLR will remain in production and be available in Europe and America, and the all-mechanical FM10 will be available outside of Europe. A handful of manual lenses will remain in production as well.
Film in general isn't going away any time soon as digital cameras cannot replace medium and large format cameras, but this is clear evidence that the resolution and popularity of the digital medium have surpassed that of the 35mm format. 35mm took another step into the grave."
A sign of change (Score:4, Insightful)
So what? (Score:1, Insightful)
So are we going to mourn the loss of this dead technology forever? Give me a break.
Re:A sign of change (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, they are not. Comparable has a different meaning for professional photographer than an average joe. And don't trust zillions of reviews which shoes digital vs film comparison. You can't scan a film based picture with mere $1000 scanner nor can print a high megapixel camera picture on $5000 laser printer. They will never be comparable. And if you are photographer who has gallery exhibitions, forget digitals. You will never be able to blow it up the wall size even with 30 mega pixel.
Re:FM10 eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
SLR will last a generation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A sign of change (Score:2, Insightful)
Not for everybody. Personally, I want to be able to control my depth of field manually, do long exposures for scientific and astronomical work, and swap in long and short lenses. I can do that right now with my $60 film camera. The digital equivalent is still way out of my price range.
But oh so it's tainted with emotion (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahem (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, for paid jobs it isn't ideal most of the times, but sometimes, when portability or processing costs must be kept low 35mm is much more attractive than medium or large format. Sure, digital is far better, and 35 is dead now, but in the days of film 35mm was just as professional as anything else if the situation demanded it.
Re:FM10 eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally I would take spare batteries, a backup storage device and a solar battery charger
I also doubt most people would be in those situations and as such the market for manual cameras will continue to dwindle but not die out. Somewhat similar to outdated transportation, there will always be a place for horses, camels and husky teams. It just won't be for the masses and large companies out to make profit.
Digital can't compare to LF (Score:5, Insightful)
Do the math. 6-10 megapixel cameras can't make very large prints at 300dpi output. And some say that 300dpi isn't even good enough.
Moore's law doesn't apply to Bayer CMOS sensors either. And small sensors found in cheap digicams are diffraction-limited. You can't cheaply make a 4x5" sensor!
This leads me to believe that there will not be a decent, low-cost replacement for large format film in a LOONNG time.
It'll still be around (Score:4, Insightful)
Even beyond the "nostalgia" market, the other side is that film holds up better as a medium than digital. This isn't news. Remember that vinyl records are still around, and in many ways are still preferred as a medium by audiophiles and for long-term storage. I can still play an album from the 1950's, but will a disk with my photos on it still be readable in a decade? As I recall, we just had a nice long post about how long a CD-R or CD-R/W lasts.
Film isn't dead, it'll still have it's place.
sigh - slashdot at its finest (Score:2, Insightful)
It is a sad thing that Nikon UK has chosen to do what they have decided to do but that doesn't mean Nikon has started that world-wide. If the British need newer lenses, they can buy from the US online sites. Taken another step to the grave my ass: a bad analogy but the FDD isn't totally dead yet and people have been predicting it's death for the last decade. Film photography is an enjoyable experience that requires a decent amount of discipline and knowledge. The photographs from a film shot have much higher resolution than a digicam shot. Sure a digicam is more convenient but photography isn't meant to be a convenience thing at all times. Sure a point and shoot is awesome at your baby's birthday party but not everything is a birthday party. Photography for me is light falling on film
Re:A sign of change (Score:2, Insightful)
I use my camera not-for-real-scientific-work, but somehow I managed to scrape together $300 for one that has great macro functions, a hot shoe, manual exposure and focus (if needed), and 8 megapixels.
For some reason, I get the feeling that you are just more comfortable with 35mm than digital and want to somehow justify that...
For me, it was the other way... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A sign of change (Score:5, Insightful)
maybe you should trust the professional photographers who have switched. The ones who no-longer have darkrooms in their studios and always sway their clients towards digital (and thats not because its less work for them, when you shoot digital, YOU do all of the post processing in photoshop rather than the pro lab you send it to).
The 'professionals' that have switched to digital are those that only do shots that don't require extremely high resolutions; i.e. newspapers and other print publications, wedding photographers, etc, and it's mostly because of convenience and immediate results. Professional photographers stick to larger formats like 120mm, or 4x5. No 'professional' really uses 35mm, but enthusiasts do.
The time has come, cameras are outdoing film grain (especially at high speed). You may need a scanner of higher resolution than a camera to get a good scan but that is because the grain does not match up to pixels so you have to go higher resolution.> [
Wrong again. The average 35mm SLR camera with an average roll of film still comes out with a resolution equivalent to a 25 megapixel digital shot, which you can't find anywhere. However, you can't see what the shot looks like immediately after you take it with a film SLR camera, but you can with a digital one. That's what's making people move away from them, not 'the grain being outdone'.
I can guarantee you that if you take a shot with a 8 or 10 megapixel DSLR and I take the same exact shot with my 35mm N90s and scan the film, my shot will be 10x better-looking than yours, without even touching Photoshop.
I can also guarantee you that anyone with a 20 or 30 year old Rolleiflex TLR taking the same shot will make yours look like pure shit, and mine look like crap.
It sounds pretty hard-core for Nikon to drop film this early but it will eventually get to the point where the only people who use 35mm are people who dont need the added features next years body would provide (they can still use new lenses, at least for a while) as they are changing the settings themselves and dont need a computer to do it for them.
No, wrong yet again.
Nikon is dropping film bodies because Joe Shmoe reads the average photo mag and decides that digital is the next best thing since sliced bread (kinda like you), which is an incredibly ignorant thing to think. Since the average joe wants to take pictures and see what they look like now, they go all out for digital cameras, and Nikon is more than happy to accomodate them.
Why do you think they're keeping the F6 in production? Because it's (to put it simply) quite possibly the best SLR camera ever made, loved by pros. You won't buy it because you can't afford it, and very few people will, compared to the general market.
The bottom line is that this was a decision made to increase proffits, not because digital is better than film or any such nonsense.
Film isnt dead, but 35mm Film is dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Specifically I'm talking about the Canon 5D - which I own. It is such a cool camera, and the pictures BLOW my mind. The camera is a full sized sensor - no more lens multiplication factor - and is 12 mega pixels. The native size is 4368x2912. By up-sampling it in the RAW conversion you can extract even more resolution and detail.
The big deal about this camera is that most DSLR cameras have a focal length multiplication factor. This means that beautiful "normal" lens becomes a short portrait lens. Good news if you shoot portraits, but bad news if you do scenes or landscape.
The best thing about the 5D is it has the resolution and sensor size of a Canon 1Ds Mk-II (what a name!), but the camera is much smaller and lighter. The price is also more reasonable for the 5D, while not "cheap", its accessible, and the price will only come down.
Short Sighted (Score:5, Insightful)
For a manufacturer, it is mor complicated, but much the same. The basic camera costs the same to make, but film camera sales are dropping. Digital is on the rise. Get out while the getting is good and save yourself running a production line at a loss.
The problem, as any good computer person should know, is Moore's Law as applied to camera sensors. Every 2 years or so they get a lot better. For a pro, it is a business move. Just buy a better camera every 2-3 years. For an amateur, its like buying a Pentium Pro and watching the P4s roll out. Yours works, but you lust after the best. 3MP - 6MP - 12MP+ But upgrading is $1000 ! Not an easy move to make, but doing it will dramatcally effect your picture quality (assuming you care about quality).
In the film camera world, it was easy to bypass most camera improvements. As long as the basic box was light tight, kept the film flat and the lens in focus, you were OK. Upgrades were at the lens or the film. Both of which were modular upgrades. It is common to see photographers with lenses stretching across decades. And of course film is as good as research can make it today. Not so with digital cameras. You are locked into the tech of the day you bought the camera. Some ROMs are upgradeable, but you won't be changing pixel count or fixing sensitivity issues that way. It is like buying a lifetime supply of film when you buy the camera. Cheaper, but you better love it.
Overall, the digital wave is a financial hit on the amateur and prosumer. A better medium exists, but it is economically unfeasable for a market that small. Going digital will lock these folks into something that is *almost* good enough, but will never be quite right. They have to ride the planned obsolescense train until Moor's Law takes them back to where they already are, at real film resolution, color, and contrast.
And This doesn't even address the problems of proprietary formats, memory, processing, etc.
Why the lenses? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
My mind is reeling at how utterly stupid this comment is. I'm only hoping that it's due to your nickname here and not your actual beliefs.
"Really serious"? You are going to tell me Walter Iooss, Robert Capa, Garry Winograd or Anton Corbijn weren't/aren't "really serious"? Be my guest. And keep wondering why your prints aren't even shown at the county fair. It's the tools, it's the photos. However you get the picture you wanted is the right way, be it Holga, Minolta or Speed-graphic.I shot professionally for 15 years as a commercial shooter, and had some of the biggest names in the Fortune 500 as my clients. You use the right tool for the right job. Sometimes it was my Nikons, sometimes it was the Hassies, sometimes it was the Sinars. Sometimes I lit the hell out of the shot (12,000 w/s going off makes a noise all it's own), sometimes I'd go with natural lite, no fill card, no nothing. I wouldn't shoot PR at an event on a 4x5, I wouldn't do tabletop product on a 35mm.
Digital Cameras Make Better Photographers (Score:4, Insightful)
Recently, I wanted to try out taking some different shots of a particularly beautiful sky at night. Not being a camera buff, I tried out a few settings on my Kodak DX490 on the spot and got the right results.
Another time I was at a Thai boxing show and I wanted to take some pictures of a friend while he was fighting. Because it was a digital camera, I could adjust the settings until I found something that worked in the situation.
In both situations, with a film camera, I wouldn't have got the desired results because I don't know enough about photography and I would never have been able to have those pictures. Isn't photography about pictures?
How many times have people left their family snaps in the camera, only to never process the film? How many time has someone thought, no I won't waste that frame of film because it costs $0.30 - I'll save it for something special? With digital cameras you can share the photos without losing the original, you can pass copies to your friends and family without incurring personal cost, or losing the negatives. You can photograph and record the mundane, which might turn out to be the most interesting shot to show your grandkids in 50 years time.
Have you noticed how some people throw away photographs anyway? Why print them out first?
Re:A sign of change (Score:5, Insightful)
There are, and have been, many professional photographers who use/used 35mm cameras and film. Photojournalists come to mind - in droves. You used to be able to go through Photographer's Market and find gazillions of clients that would accept 35mm film "professionally". Go back an dlook at a few of the "Swimsuit edition" videos and tell me what kind of cameras they are using...
Second, it's 6cm, or 60mm film, not 120mm film (Hasselblads shoot 6x6cm, and lots of the Japanese medium format manufacturers do "645", or 6x4.5cm, which enlarges to 8x10 without cropping. These cameras are popular with portrait photographers and many advertising photographers who work with people.
Large format cameras are the purview of art photographers (who claim and use everything from old throwaway polaroid cameras to 11x14 Linhofs) and commercial photographers. The biggest commercial application of the large formats used to be images that would be re-touched ( a big enough primary image to work with - think playboy centerfolds ) and ads for high-gloss magazines where the tonal range would be at least partially represented. There isn't much work for a commercial photog that requires resolution higher than 6cm film will provide, but there is a little. A 4x5 image will, certainly, make your 35mm look like crap, but mostly because of tonal range, not resolution; if you display them at the same perceptual size, with detail representation below your liminal threshold, the 4x5 image will look subjectively 'better', because it has a longer tonal range and better contrast without washout.
In the end, the camera to use is the one that fits your purposes. An 8 mpixel camera will make a happy 5x7 image - better than most ISO 400 images, probably simliar to ISO100 films, and not quite as nice as, say, an ISO 32 or 25 film. For snapshots, they'll work fine all the way out to 11x14. For display, I would never take a 35mm image higher than 5x7; for snapshots, they'll go to 11x14. I would print 6x6 images at 6"x6" on 8x10 paper for gallery display. After working with a couple of 8 mp cameras, I would say that they will fulfill the purposes of some 90% of 35mm photographers, particularly the ones that offer full manual override. The single place that I've not seen a digital come close to my T90 or F1 canons is in FPS.. I can crank 4.5 frames a second through either of those machines, while an 8MP camera is still downloading third image it recorded.
The end is in sight. I've seen 32mpixel images, and you're wrong; you can blow those things up till hell freezes over.
The Rolleiflex TLRs were beautiful machines, and had wonderful lenses, but in the hands of an incompetent photographer, they would produce shit. By the same token, the Diana was a POS camera, but in the hands of the right artist, would create images that would stop you in your tracks. I suggest that the quality of the photography is in the photographer, not the gear. The gear is enabling, not creative.
Re:A sign of change (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is, digital SLRs *do* offer comparable performance to 35mm film cameras for the majority of users. Not all, but the majority. Camera manufacturers aren't stupid - they're watching how many cameras they sell, and they make decisions based on those volumes...
Re:This doesn't suprise me, but (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ken Rockwell... And I'M the LameJokeGuy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A sign of change (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A sign of change (Score:4, Insightful)
Then, at a pixel size of 10um (which is larger than most consumer digital cameras nowadays), you're talking 500 million pixels, defect free. I think there are automotive manufacturers that would appreciate a failure rate like that
Re:Resolution (Score:3, Insightful)
No it's not, it's actually closer to 16MP (and that's for ISO 50...which limits you pretty much to still subjects), but even assuming your 24MP figure, your argument doesn't hold up. Image quality is not simply a function of resolution...but a combination of resolution and noise.
For film, this "noise" is grain(still a big problem for film...this is largely a result of the quality of film that you use, but it's still high)...for digital the "noise" is called sensor noise(not so much a problem...and it's based on a fixed variable...the sensor). Here [clarkvision.com] is a good comparison of film vs. digital and why digital SLR has surpassed 35mm...
If you want to save yourself the reading, the meat of the story is this...even an 8MP Point & Shoot digital has better image quality than a 35mm camera with ISO 50 Fuji Velvia film....
Re:A sign of change (Score:4, Insightful)
How many rolls of film do you shoot? Assuming you are buying in bulk and doing your own processing, you might be able to pay $10 for a roll of 36 exposures and processing. Expose 80 rolls (2880 frames) and you could have purchased a new Nikon d50.
DoF is no problem with a dSLR, pick a long or fast lens and you can get razor thin focus. Need something wide? Grab the sigma 10-20mm zoom, effectively the same focal length as a 15-30mm zoom on 35. Need something long for your astrophotography? Your 200mm telephoto lens is effectively a 300mm lens when mounted to a 1.5x (Nikon) dSLR.
Canon is better at long exposures than Nikon, but neither will go much beyond 30 seconds. That isn't a problem, though, because digital film is free. You can use your PC to schedule an infinite sequence of 10 second frames, and then stack them in any of a number of astrophotography software packages (several of which are free).
My Lomos and other "cheap" toy film cameras sit on a shelf because they are far more expensive to operate than my d70s.
Film cameras are a luxury product, not an economy product.
Re:Film is dead (Score:2, Insightful)
Or you can take a box of sheet film.
Scanning back:
ISO: 50 (may have changed, it's been a while)
Capture time for 4x5 frame: 30 seconds (again, see ISO)
Portion of those 30 seconds objects in the frame have been blown about by the wind or moved under their own power: 100% (except for people who take macro photos of rocks in the field.)
Film:
ISO: 50 to 1600 (6400 with two stop push)
Capture time for 4x5 frame: 1/1000th on the fast side, infinite on the long/slow side. [faster with a super-expensive shutter, again, we're talking field, not studio use. No, even in the studio, the scanning back has a fixed scanning time, where the effective shutter speed of a film sheet is that of the flash duration of your lighting kit.][Try a 30 minute exposure with your scanning back and see your power supply be drained in short order, if you can even get the thing to slow down the scan rate.]
Time subjects move: 100%, but at 1/1000th of a second they didn't go far so who gives a damn.
So, try to shoot a living breathing subject, or anything outside the studio with a scanning back. You'll be crying out for someone to bring you film!
How many grandchildren will see today's snapshots? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many of the morons currently buying digicams will manage to keep their valuable once-in-a-lifetime snaps intact for more than a couple of years?
[Reformat, reformat...]
35mm film is NOT dying... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sensors can grow as much as you like, BUT... there's still plenty of stuff where film wins over digital, regardless of film area or sensor size:
Film isn't dead. Film isn't going to die. Furthermore, 35mm film isn't dead. 35mm film isn't going to die. It's just lost its dominant position in the mass-market. However, dedicated amateurs still use it.
IMNAAHO.
This is exactly why I own Canon... (Score:1, Insightful)
Nikon has been short-sighted over most of its history. I have both film and digital SLRs from Canon - there are things film does way better (faster cycling, permanent record, lower long term cost). As usual, the technology isn't ready - not the cameras but the printing, the long term storage media, all of that falls short in cost and performance to film. I've heard for ten years (ten years!) that the CD is dead, yet I am still able to buy the music I want on CD. Recently again, the DVD is dead, long live the next cool thing. Slash-dotters are always crowing about how great this next thing is and how it awesomely makes the last thing dead... Bullsh**.
You miss that part of what happens with compact digital cameras is that the quality that has become acceptable is way lower than your basic Instamatic was capable of. M
You've become so enamored with the process, the technology, you completely miss the end result and the fact that the old stuff was BETTER in many many ways than this cool crap. It's like watching a whole generation of ID10ts who can't think in any coherent way but chase through for the next shiny thing (ooooh, it's shiny.........)
Re:How many grandchildren will see today's snapsho (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll take a good pigment-based, inkjet print on archival paper any day. Sure it's a bit more trouble....but then I can do it in the comfort of my own home office, without having to drive to a lab and without any delay. should I so choose.
As for keeping their "valuable once-in-a-lifetime" snaps intact for more than a few years, given the abysmal lack of photographic sensibility that most "morons" (to use our term) have, maybe this is a feature and not a bug?
On the plus side, the digital explosion has prompted the unwashed masses to take many more photos, and in many case, one can hope that more practice will lead to better photos, at least for some.
Re:This is exactly why I own Canon... (Score:2, Insightful)
Online backup services may be the future but my upload bandwidth just isn't there yet.
Where's my holocube?