Nikon Is Killing Its Authorized Repair Program (ifixit.com) 109
According to iFixit, Nikon is ending its authorized repair program next year, "likely leaving more than a dozen repair shops without access to official parts and tools, and cutting the number of places you can get your camera fixed with official parts from more than a dozen independent shops to two facilities at the ends of the U.S." From the report: That means that Nikon's roughly 15 remaining Authorized Repair Station members are about to become non-authorized repair shops. Since Nikon decided to stop selling genuine parts to non-authorized shops back in 2012, it's unlikely those stores will continue to have access to the specialty components, tools, software, manuals, and model training Nikon previously provided. But Nikon hasn't clarified this, so repair shops have been left in the dark.
In a letter obtained by iFixit, Nikon USA told its roughly 15 remaining Authorized Repair Station members in early November that it would not renew their agreements after March 31, 2020. The letter notes that "The climate in which we do business has evolved, and Nikon Inc. must do the same." And so, Nikon writes, it must "change the manner in which we make product service available to our end user customers." [...] In a statement, Nikon confirmed the termination of Authorized Repair Stations contracts after March 2020. Authorized service, Nikon stated, will be provided at its Melville, NY and Los Angeles, Calif. facilities. "We remain committed to providing the best product support and repair services to our customers," Nikon stated. Nikon did not answer our questions about the former authorized shops' access to parts or other official services.
In a letter obtained by iFixit, Nikon USA told its roughly 15 remaining Authorized Repair Station members in early November that it would not renew their agreements after March 31, 2020. The letter notes that "The climate in which we do business has evolved, and Nikon Inc. must do the same." And so, Nikon writes, it must "change the manner in which we make product service available to our end user customers." [...] In a statement, Nikon confirmed the termination of Authorized Repair Stations contracts after March 2020. Authorized service, Nikon stated, will be provided at its Melville, NY and Los Angeles, Calif. facilities. "We remain committed to providing the best product support and repair services to our customers," Nikon stated. Nikon did not answer our questions about the former authorized shops' access to parts or other official services.
Not Very Nice of Nikon (Score:1)
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Actually, it was often referred to as "Muttnik" back in the day.
Leicaman! (Score:2)
The most important thing is to tell everyone you have a Leica. We are all super-impressed. And I know all about Leica repair support - because you need it carefully calibrated or CLAed about every 5 years.
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How do you know if someone uses a Mac/uses Arch Linux/is a vegan/owns a Leica?
They'll tell you.
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I'm still really glad I went with Pentax, they're the only major brand that is confident enough in their seals to make "weatherproof" DSLRs and lenses that I can use in the rain without worry.
Nikon installs weather seals on their camera bodies, but they don't make any promises about it at all, you're not supposed to use it in the rain, even a light rain. And that's good, because most of the lenses are not sealed, and so water would enter the camera from the lens. Because of that, it takes long term commitme
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I'm still really glad I went with Pentax, they're the only major brand that is confident enough in their seals to make "weatherproof" DSLRs and lenses that I can use in the rain without worry.
Nikon installs weather seals on their camera bodies, but they don't make any promises about it at all, you're not supposed to use it in the rain, even a light rain. And that's good, because most of the lenses are not sealed, and so water would enter the camera from the lens. Because of that, it takes long term commitment to testing everything and labeling everything, and only Pentax has done that.
Everybody makes a point-and-shoot that is totally waterproof, but only Pentax makes a good DSLR that is rated to survive rain.
may wanna tell that to several Canons I've used and known Nikon users do the same. Not only is the weather sealign present on lot of L glass I use but Canon list the level of sealign on glass and bodies generally. Any issues I've had not or known others to have that wasn't a failure but user circumstance CPS has been amazing. I've used a lot and they've always been stellar in supporting their products and weather sealing is something they stand by too, even send loan gear in some cases while they sort your
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Right, right, that's what I said. Canon and Nikon put in weather seals. But they don't make any promises, not even basic ones.
So the body is fine, but the lenses aren't well sealed, and there is no way to know how much effort went to sealing any particular lens.
Standing by "don't use it in the rain" is different than standing by "weather proof."
If you're only going to use it during the warranty period, OK, they probably repair that. But that isn't the same as "standing by the product." They won't even say y
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Exactly, before I bought anything I spent a month reading reviews and experiences, and lots of people anecdotally had used their cameras in the rain. But these same people either admitted that it created anxiety, or that they didn't normally treat their camera that way.
A lot of my shooting is in a wet forest, and it may or may not be raining, so in the end I decided there is a huge difference between "probably OK but maybe not and the company actually says not to do it," and "no problem it is considered nor
Film or Digital (Score:2)
With the shrink into nothing of Kodak/Eastman is film just about dead?
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Not dead, but in the ICU, on life support, and an ominous prognosis
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Repair used to cost less than replace for most things... now that's not the case.
Re: You have NO RIGHT (Score:2)
You do still have the right to do whatever you want with your purchase. They are just closing some shops, because it costs more to run them than it brings in.
Besides warranty repairs which these days is cheaper to just replace with a factory fresh device, why/how does a solid state camera need to be repaired? It costs them more in engineering time to do a repair than to produce and ship a new one, the name brand premium is only a cost the consumer carries.
Re: You have NO RIGHT (Score:5, Informative)
Besides warranty repairs which these days is cheaper to just replace with a factory fresh device, why/how does a solid state camera need to be repaired? It costs them more in engineering time to do a repair than to produce and ship a new one, the name brand premium is only a cost the consumer carries.
These shops are dealing with pros and their equipment. They're not repairing $200 point-and-shoot cameras, they're repairing $5,000 digital SLR bodies and $10,000 lenses. These are not just throw-away items.
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It costs them more in engineering time to do a repair than to produce and ship a new one
Misread TFA? It is not Nikon doing the repairs that will be affected. This is about independent shops doing repairs, and the possible issue that you bring up is a matter between the independent repair shop and the camera owner.
What this story seems to amount to is that Nikon will cease providing training, manuals and spare parts to those independents. There is no way that the provision of a spare part by Nikon costs more than providing a whole new camera, unless the figures have been massivly falsifie
May as well just make everything blocks of epoxy (Score:2)
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With iPhone/Android repair at every mall now, it seems that the digital camera has replaced the film camera.
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Re:May as well just make everything blocks of epox (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, people still use film. In fact, Kodak has brought back its Ektachrome film line and is expanding the sizes of film available. There are other companies out there producing black and white film in addition to Kodak and Fuji.
Large format cameras still use 4x5 or 8x10 sheets of film even with the availability of digital versions.
Despite digital, film has something which 0s and 1s lack. In fact, there are film packs which can be added to photo software to give pictures a film-like look.
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"Despite digital, film has something which 0s and 1s lack"
Like what?
Re:May as well just make everything blocks of epox (Score:5, Informative)
Specific grain tendencies that fake "film grain" filters simply cannot replicate.
Ultra low ISO settings for creative long exposures without the need, or even that also use, expensive Neutral Density filter setups.
Color profiles on a per film family level that digital can kind of, sort of, come close to replicating.
There were one or two medium format films that had grain so small that the maximum sharpness they could capture couldn't be met due to the physics of glass acting as a lens - even modern sensors can't touch the level of detail it was possible to record on them.
A creative restriction - a good artist will find ways to get the perfect shot, even if it means exploiting the limitations of the medium. No "snap it and fix it in post".
You will note that all of these points are for professional or semi-pro users. The average person just snapping pictures of granny blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, or of little Alice first riding her bike don't need / want film ( at least in the U.S., Asian countries are a bit different ) so digital would suit them just fine. Hell, most of those type of people wouldn't even bother to post process the images and would just use the JPGs the camera spit out.
TL;DR - film is geared more towards the pros these days. Or for nostalgia.
Re:May as well just make everything blocks of epox (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't that digital audio can't accurately reproduce music... the problem is that 16-bit PCM at 44.1KHz isn't quite good enough to do the job flawlessly.
Contrary to popular belief, Nyquist isn't a guarantee... it's a DISCLAIMER and a WARNING. Nyquist didn't say that sampling audio at twice the highest fundamental frequency would sound GOOD, he said that sampling at LESS than twice the highest fundamental frequency was guaranteed to sound BAD.
Every freshman engineering major quickly learns that in the real world, if you're blindly sampling some signal and REALLY need to "get it flawlessly right" on your first and only attempt, you need to sample it at 4-8 times the highest fundamental frequency... or more. The only reason why 44.1KHz digital audio actually sounds GOOD is because human hearing is radically attenuated at frequencies above 11KHz, so the frequencies that represent most of what an average human can hear are REALLY sampled at 4x the frequency... and most of the artifacts end up at frequencies that are beyond the range of human hearing.
16-bit at 44.1KHz is a compromise. A damn good one, but demonstrably non-flawless. At the other extreme, 48-bit at 192KHz is good enough that most computers couldn't tell the difference... and really, 24-bit at 96KHz is way beyond even the theoretical perceptual limits of human hearing to discern. Above that, the extra bits and sampling rate matter mainly for mixing (to avoid bit-slip and quantization errors when combining multiple bitstreams in realtime).
Also, 1980s-vintage digital audio was nowhere near as "pure" as we all thought it was. I remember scratching my head back in high school wondering how the fuck digital audio could have anything LESS than infinite stereo separation, let alone the very finite amounts listed in the specs for CD players. It turns out, it came down to manufacturing cost. DACs were expensive back then, so CD players actually shared a single DAC among a pair of sample & hold circuits. The circuitry that did the switching wasn't perfect, hence the less-than-infinite channel separation.
Put another way, people who thought 1980s digital audio sounded "harsh" weren't completely blowing smoke out of their asses, even if they didn't quite understand WHY they thought it sounded "harsh". The problem wasn't that digital audio fundamentally sounds "harsh", the problem was that value-engineering compromises made to digital audio playback devices (like CD players) MADE it sound that way.
Of course, now we've jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Back in the 1980s, clipping was dead, buried, and gone... then, just like the villain from a cheesy 1980s horror movie, it came right back as the next generation of recording engineers slowly and relentlessly pushed baseline volume levels higher and higher, and used companding to make audio sound "louder". And now, everything isn't just compressed... we compress it to a degree that compromises its audio quality in ways that would have been patently UNACCEPTABLE 20 years ago, then insist on trying to play it back using flat speakers hanging from a wall(*) that can barely reproduce 200hz without artifacts.
(*) There's nothing wrong with flat speakers per se... except when they're forced to hang from a wall. Electrostatic ribbon speakers need to sit several FEET away from the nearest wall (and in fact, at a fairly precise distance) in order to properly develop their soundfield. Hang them on the wall, and they're just oversized piezo tweeters.
Re: May as well just make everything blocks of epo (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s why I always preferred those in-wall speakers for that task. At least for the rooms where I donâ(TM)t have floor speakers.
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Contrary to popular belief, Nyquist isn't a guarantee... it's a DISCLAIMER and a WARNING.
False. Nyquist IS a guarantee.
Every freshman engineering major quickly learns that in the real world, if you're blindly sampling some signal and REALLY need to "get it flawlessly right" on your first and only attempt, you need to sample it at 4-8 times the highest fundamental frequency... or more.
Nope. Only freshmans figure that out. In second year you learn why and how to get it right the first time at the frequency.
Now let me pre-empt the next question: Why do we then record higher? Well the answer to that is simple: We don't record sound for reproduction. We record sound for alteration, adjustment, mixing, we add effects, and then we reproduce. All these processes are slightly lossy and therefore benefit from the extra data which is otherwise completely irrelevant to
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Nyquist is a guarantee, but the problem is for the guarantee to be good you have to have perfect hardware and it doesn't exist.
For example, you need to filter everything about the Nyquist frequency to prevent aliasing. Obviously it has to be done in analogue since you haven't digitised it yet. All analogue filters are imperfect, they are not "brick walls" that cut 100% of frequencies above their specified limit. Even if they were some noise would creep in after them anyway.
So in the real world you set your
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So, unlike you, I looked it up and you're full of shit.
The Nyquist rate has 2 parts; a lower bound for alias-free signal, and an upper bound for the maximum rate that you can unambiguously code symbols in a bandwidth-limited signaling regime.
The first part is about the minimum frequency that might, but will not always, produce an alias-free signal, and the second is a limit on how many bits of data you can transmit and still have it be unambiguously round-tripped back from the analog output to produce the s
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The marvelous sigma-delta A/D converters that have been used for the last 3 decades actually sample at 64 or 128 times the data rate of their digital output. The brick-wall filters needed for anti-aliasing are implemented digitally in these converters. Not perfect, but very, very good. Read about them until you understand; if you're in the digital audio design field it's important.
Back when CDs were new, the sigma-delta converters weren't practical yet, and converters were sample-and-hold successive-approxi
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Think carefully about the word "reproduce".
For live acoustic music, the performance is the way it sounds, and if it's well performed that's the way its supposed to sound. If it's recorded and played back, any deviation of the playback from the original performance is a deviation from how it's supposed to sound. In this context there is no such thing as too much accuracy.
Re: May as well just make everything blocks of epo (Score:1)
Wrong, 16 bit PCM at 44.1 kHz is absolutely sufficient for proper reproduction of all audio for human consumption. In other words, for playback it's fine.
It is likely lacking as a recording format, due to the difficulty to get everything up to 20kHz (without nonlinear phase effects in the audible range) and nothing above 22.05kHz because it w
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The 20 Hz - 20 kHz range often cited for human hearing is good for most practical purposes, but there are some people who can hear at frequencies of almost 30 kHz.
The 98 dB dynamic range of 16 bit audio is not adequate to cover the greater than 120 dB dynamic range of human hearing.
Sigma-delta converters with properly designed FIR filters do not have nonlinear phase response to any audible degree.
16 bit/channel sampling at 44.1 kHz is great for straightforward audio. But capable of recording everything a hu
Re: May as well just make everything blocks of ep (Score:1)
Even if 120dB is the human hearing range, you typically have a >20dBA noise floor. Plus, you don't want to damage your hearing just listening to music. In other words, 98dB does fine for listening. Recording, agreed, there it's beneficial to have way more headroom. Al
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Here's one other advantage of photographic film that most people wouldn't think of: permanence, or at least to a degree. A film negative can be damaged and still be usable, much like a printed book. Damage the media a digital file resides on? Probably gone for good. Accidentally erase it? Buh-bye.
Re: May as well just make everything blocks of epo (Score:2)
You can replicate digital a lot faster and more accurate than film. No excuse losing your digital media today.
The difference between film and digital is like the difference between monster analog cables and a cheap toslink cable. People will always claim the one they have is better.
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Re:May as well just make everything blocks of epox (Score:5, Informative)
There are two kinds of permanence you're alluding to... permanence in the sense of "robust ability to persist after partial destruction", and "ability to be perceived without special hardware".
The former can be achieved with magneto-optical phase-change media, a shit-ton of forward error correction, and an encoding scheme that scatters sequential bits across the entire disk... or spreads them across SEVERAL discs that are then stored in geographically-diverse locations with redundant copies.
The latter can be achieved by shooting in digital, then rendering your final print to 3 strips of fine-grain black & white film a-la-Technicolor. Long after Technicolor ceased to be viable for SHOOTING movies, it stuck around as a tool for PRESERVING them. In the 1980s, directors would shoot a movie with regular color film, then have Technicolor preserve their final print frame by frame. George Lucas went a step further, and had every scrap of film he shot preserved in Technicolor. When VHS arrived in the 1980s, the first tapes were usually mastered from undistributed theater prints that were pulled from storage, which is why most 1960s and 1970s films released in the 1980s on videotape had messed-up color. Studios didn't pull their technicolor prints out of the vault until DVDs arrived (or occasionally, for their LaserDisc release).
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George Lucas went a step further, and had every scrap of film he shot preserved in Technicolor.
Obviously Technicolor isn't very good as a backup medium then. George has stated that the reason he couldn't re-release the original theatrical cut of Star Was on DVD/Blu-Ray was due to the fact that negatives of this version are in too bad of a state (and would be too expensive to restore them).
Re: May as well just make everything blocks of epo (Score:2)
George was lying. He just doesn't *want* the original theatrical release to be available, warts and all, because in his mind, it was just a first beta release that had all kinds of nasty bugs, and the GOOD version is his latest refinement that's up to the standards of a movie he'd make *today*. As far as he's concerned, "Star Wars" is an ongoing process of continual refinement & improvement, not a snapshot of what existed 40 years ago. Plenty of people disagree with him, but he's rich & powerful eno
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That may have been a cop-out. I've seen some parts of the original upscaled to higher def, and they look really bad. It was great for the time, but boost up the resolution a few notches and every special effects cut and paste is glaringly noticeable. Really distracting.
I'm sure George didn't want to say he wouldn't re-release it because it would look like crap.
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How high the definition? Because I saw it blown up to 70mm on a pretty large screen the summer it came out and it looked great, not noticeably different from the smaller screen, 35mm print viewings before and after that. Some research I just did indicates 35mm negatives
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Not really sure what resolution - not 4k, just normal HD. It was over cable too, so it may have been color compression effects more than resolution itself. I remember noticing it most with the Tie fighter scenes - anything with space as a background.
I've seen it in 70mm too - looks great. But, you have film, movie frame rate vs. TV frame rates, digital compression artifacts, etc. It just might not look good after all the conversions to that upscaled format.
Dunno what to tell you - I just know what I saw
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You forgot to mention the artifacts and noise CCD-sensor introduces plus that a pixel in the resulting picture has a lower color-resolution due to the use of Bayer-masks.
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Ever wonder why color negative film is orange? It's because the color sensitivity of 2 of the three photosensitive layers is so imperfect that it has to be compensated for in the layers that make the orange tint. Don't fall to the belief that the color response of film is perfect.
I'm no fan of Bayer filtering; I wish someone would make an image-splitting 3 sensor camera that's affordable. The Foveon sensor is a nice trick, but it doesn't work well enough.
Film is noisy, too.
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Specific grain tendencies that fake "film grain" filters simply cannot replicate.
Film grain is a bad thing that we want to eliminate. The only time I could think of anyone wanting to replicate it digitally is for very specific contexts, such as they want a video to look old and poor quality...like it was shot on film. That's not something you would apply to most videos.
Ultra low ISO settings for creative long exposures without the need, or even that also use, expensive Neutral Density filter setups.
ND filters are dirt fucking cheap, usually only a few bucks. So are filter step up/down adapters. You can also shell out a little more, maybe $20-$50, and get a variable filter.
Color profiles on a per film family level that digital can kind of, sort of, come close to replicating.
Whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. I
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Film doesn't liberate artistry, it limits it. With a digital I can compose shots in multiple ways and angles and not have to worry about running out of film. I don't have to put a cap on creativity like I would with film.
You do have to worry about running out of storage space though (but yes it would be very hard to run out of film with digital). To be fair though, storage space is infinitely cheaper to come by than film and film processing.
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Film grain is a bad thing that we want to eliminate.
WRONG. Now, YOU may want to eliminate it, but surprise surprise- you're not the only person in the world.
The only time I could think of ...
Perhaps you should think harder.
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WRONG. Now, YOU may want to eliminate it, but surprise surprise- you're not the only person in the world.
The only reason to apply film grain is to make a video look old and low quality, full stop. Take off the rose-tinted glasses.
Perhaps you should think harder.
If you could have provided a valid reason other than to evoke nostalgia, you would have. I'll accept that as a tacit admission that you are full of shit.
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The only reason to apply film grain is to make a video look old and low quality, full stop.
It must be an awesome delusion to think that you speak for everyone else in the world.
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You still haven't offered another valid reason to want film grain.
I don't need to; all I need to do is explain to you that other people may have different reasons.
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There were one or two medium format films that had grain so small that the maximum sharpness they could capture couldn't be met due to the physics of glass acting as a lens - even modern sensors can't touch the level of detail it was possible to record on them.
That isn't even remotely true. Digital sensors have surpassed both film and the glass in front of them in resolution long ago, to the point where much of the added resolution is now used for non-resolution purposes (e.g. distributed points for noise reduction, data points for sharpening algorithms to get past diffraction related issues, improved colour response by debeyering using a different process, or improved dynamic range by alternating sensitivity of adjacent pixels).
Even the pros and semi-pros don't
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"Despite digital, film has something which 0s and 1s lack"
Like what?
Nostalgia.
Re:May as well just make everything blocks of epox (Score:5, Informative)
(I am a serious amateur photographer, having used film since the 1960's, and now, of course, digital, mainly Nikon.)
Everything that "chmod a+x mojo" said.
And:
1 - Image quality. Digital creates better quality in some ways, film in others. Film is "tuned" to deliver a good image out of the camera. It taxes the photographer to set up the camera and the exposure properly, and there is a limited amount of post-processing that you can do in the darkroom, but when the image is done right, it is superlative in film. With digital, there is hardly any such thing as a production or display worthy image right from the camera. They all need post-processing. That is why fiddling with a raw image (histograms, tone curves, brightness & contrast, etc.) is often referred to as "developing the picture", same as wet chemistry for film. The dynamic range and saturation of a lot of film chemistry is simply better than digital, Digital allows for much cheaper easier post-processing, but film obviates all of that when done correctly. And remember, all of the great digital photography that today comes from pricey smartphones depends on a lot of in-camera or in-phone post-processing that occurs before the raw image is delivered to the file format you can view, because the raw image by itself is usually nothing impressive.
2 - Image resolution. Film images are non-pixelated, and that means that on big blowups, quality is better. Modern high-res detectors in the 100 megapixel range (eg about 12,000 x 8,000 pixels) are great, but not perfect. If a display is done at a relatively low res of 200 dpi, that gives you an image of 60x40 inches. If you have ever looked at a 5-foot digital blowup versus a 10-foot film blowup, you appreciate the difference, and it is dramatic. The biggest digital blowup you will see is modern cinema, but you are there to enjoy the movie and the story, not critique the photography which on close scrutiny kind of sucks. The comparison is the same as analog NTSC or PAL broadcast TV versus 4K or 8K HD.
3 - Fine resolution and image "texture and timbre". Film is an analog technology, and if the grain is fine enough, the gradations in color and tone are continuous, with no banding or posterization. Also, the film quality or character creates textures, kind of like audio timbres, that fulfill an esthetic that can be hard to match even with digital post-processing filters.
4 - Context. Digital and film each have their place. Digital is cheap, easily processed, stored, transmitted, shared. It is ideal for technical and non-artistic work. It is great for snapshots. Film offers greater options for art. Consider the other arts. If you like painting, to do or to view, you know that you or the artist can choose tempera, oil, watercolor, acrylic, etc. We do not live in an all poster paint world. Like graphics? You can have lithography, engraving, silk screen, etc. Fancy sculpture? Would that be stone, plaster, cast metal, wood? Do you like music? You are not limited to listening to chopsticks on a toy piano. Great music is made on thousands of different types of instruments in many compositional formats. Like good food? You do not need to eat just watery Gulag gruel. You can choose from thousands of ingredients to make an artistic and wholesome experience for you tongue. Same for art and photography.
5 - After the rave, sensibility sets in. Remember vinyl? It's back. CD's hit the market circa 1980, so it took 40 years to appreciate that vinyl brings a valuable quality that you cannot capture in a raw wav format. It is no accident that there is a huge interest now in revitalizing Polaroid style photography. Lomography, using crappy Russian Lomo film cameras has become all the craze. So, film will come back.
6 - An interesting and possibly vital technology. Film is a non-obvious non-trivial technology. It developed in the early 1800's, so it predates digital by 150-200 years. That is because back then we were in the midst of discovering and en
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Re:May as well just make everything blocks of epox (Score:5, Informative)
One point that gets very overlooked -- today's records are very, very different from the ones sold at K-mart in the 1970s.
Back when LPs were mass-market items, they were made to be as thin and cheap as possible. Because every (mass-market) alternative at the time sounded even worse than records, studio engineers mixed music to the limits of what those cost-reduced LPs were capable of handling.
For a good analogy, consider a metal cassette tape recorded with Dolby-C or DBX from a DDD compact disc... compared to ANY prerecorded cassette purchased from a retail store, ever. Long before we had CD-R and digital audio extraction, we learned that cassette tapes were capable of sounding almost as good as CDs... IF the source material itself was a CD, and you used metal tape and best-of-breed noise reduction. Cheap chromium oxide tape duplicated at high speed from masters mixed with the infamous "RIAA curve" (that attenuated bass), in contrast, sounded like ass.
Anyway, TODAY'S records generally don't try to fit as many minutes of music per side as 1970s LPs did, they're much thicker, and they're often 45RPM instead of 33-1/3RPM. As a result, they can reproduce bass, with greater dynamic range and SNR than ANY mass-produced 1970s LP EVER could. And they're pressed from masters mixed for the limitations of CDs, not 1970s LPs.
Put another way, modern records are almost a completely different beast from the mass-market LPs of the 1970s. They're inferior to the best CDs, but many of them have better audio fidelity than some first-generation non-DDD CDs did. It's not because digital audio is "inferior", it's because 1970s LPs utterly and completely SUCKED, and sucked so badly they continued to drag everything ELSE down for years after we'd already started moving on to digital audio.
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and they're often 45RPM instead of 33-1/3RPM.
Not sure where you're getting that from, but I haven't seen a 45RPM record on sale since about the 70s. The rest is spot on though. They are quality thick vinyl and generally well produced.
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Not all records made to be played at 45rpm are 7" singles. Pretty much every (new) record I've seen for the past 25+ years has actually been a 12" 45RPM single made for DJs.
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I find it hilarious that anyone thinks any modern analog content hasn't been digitized at least once in the production chain. I'm willing to bet quite a lot of money that the master for pressing vinyls was made on a digital CNC machine. Even if you send in master tapes rather than master files to preserve the illusion they'll just stick them in a player and generate digital instructions, losing any "inifinity-bits" magic. At that point it's just about how you get there, bits are bits.
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Nobody tries to make analog instrument tracks anymore, there are not any analog recordings at all anywhere in the process. The analog signal only travels as far as the XLR input on the mixing board.
The first analog recording made is the tape master that gets made after the digital master is finished and is only used to feed the (usually very old) "disk computer" that generates the optimized output for cutting the wax with variable groove widths.
CNC is no good here. Even people with a totally modern digital
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That's a load of crap.
1. Film is handing someone else control of your process. That's what you just said by "tuned" to look good out of the camera right? I like you finished with vinyl because all the same applies. It's measurably perfect in every way and you only enjoy it for its defects which you yourself aren't capable of replicating (but are possible to replicate).
2. If you appropriately blow up the digital image you will appreciate the difference. It's just as good quality as the analogue. You just see
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2. If you appropriately blow up the digital image you will appreciate the difference. It's just as good quality as the analogue. You just seem to enjoy the added noise (grain if you want to fancy it up), an actual image defect that makes you think it looks better. Kind of how 6bit TN film displays employ dithering to make you think they can display more colours than they are capable of. Film is not sharper, and you only think it looks better because you're comparing apples to a perfectly manufactured silicon sphere and declare the apple has more texture.
There is a difference between grain and pixelisation though when you blow up images. Grain isn't a uniform structure. When you blow up film images some grains will be more noticeable than others. When you blow up a digital picture the pixels are all of the same uniform shape so may be more noticeable versus film grain. Comparing noise and grain gets even trickier. Grain in film is dependent on the speed of the film and whether you "push"/"pull" the iso settings. Noise in digital photography depends on the i
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Noise in digital also tends to be rather uniform unlike the variability of grain size.
That is not my experience at all, managing the noisiest areas is equally bad in low light in either. And in both cases the noise is both low and fairly uniform under ideal shooting conditions.
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It's just as good quality as the analogue. You just seem to enjoy the added noise (grain if you want to fancy it up), an actual image defect that makes you think it looks better.
You can say that stuff until the cows come home, but artistic photography is still all about the bokeh. "Everybody" thinks a high quality image requires carefully selected defects.
This sort of base-level oversight really hurts your argument, perhaps you should have made a narrower set of points that stay within whatever your area of expertise is?
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...digital camera has replaced the film camera.
Nikon make and sell some very nice digital cameras. The article is not about film cameras.
Re:May as well just make everything blocks of epox (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Nikon is in trouble. Between smartphones, the death of print media and greater gear longevity the traditional big system cameras are all [dpreview.com] in trouble. There's some places where physics rules like sports, nature and landscape photography but your average Instagram star doesn't need it. For that matter I'm not sure every film team needs it, it's just a marginal cost to the cost of a film crew.
Check out iPhone 11's Snowbrawl [youtube.com] ad and the making of [youtube.com], sure they got a cage and gimbal, professional lighting and audio and a whole crew to instruct and direct but it's just the plain phone making the shot. And the Huawei P30 Pro is probably better. Then you got Qualcomm 865 [dpreview.com] coming with 8K video, 4K HDR, depth mapping for post-processing, unlimited 960 FPS capture and more.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like the market is going to die, but it's a fraction of what the market was 10 years ago. True that was much more point and shoot cameras but the idea that you need a separate, dedicated camera is becoming more and more rare. Don't get me wrong they're technical wonders when you can shoot a 50+ MP image that's so tack sharp you can zoom in on a tiny little detail and still fill a 4K screen. It's just not the kind of wonder most people need.
Is this unusual? (Score:2)
e.g. does Canon have such a program?
Re:Is this unusual? (Score:4, Informative)
Thom Hogan is a well-known Nikon blogger, and in the article he wrote about this particular move - he implies that Canon is the *only* major camera company that hasn't yet given third party repairers the shaft:
http://dslrbodies.com/newsview... [dslrbodies.com]
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Yet another reason to stick with Canon. Also, I think Panasonic also lets third-party repair shops repair their camera bodies (not lenses), but I could be out of date in that regard. I'm not sure whether anyone considers them major outside of the video production space, though.
Sony, of course, always charged extortionate prices for repair parts even back when you could get them, i.e. they tried pretty hard to prevent you from repairing their gear. That sort of behavior is why they've been on my manufact
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Sony, of course, always charged extortionate prices for repair parts .... That sort of behavior is why they've been on my manufacturer blacklist
Me too, but because of the Sony root kit episode. I didn't know about high Sony repair prices, but I was never tempted by a camera aimed at the pro market with the brand name of a consumer electronics company.
When cameras went digital, the then pro camera makers partnered with electronic companies : Pentax with Samsung, Nikon with Kodak (who had pioneered digital cameras), Leica with Panasonic, Minolta with Sony. I think Canon were big enough to do their own electronics. In most cases, the camera brand
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They are all getting squeezed by phone cameras getting good. In fact some phones actually out-perform DSLRs in certain situations: https://youtu.be/bHkaZ8OjeIg [youtu.be]
So now people don't bother taking their DSLR/mirrorless with them any more, the market is shrinking and there is pressure from new entrants like Yi. The Yi M1 is actually a very decent camera and incredibly cheap: https://www.shutterbug.com/con... [shutterbug.com]
They are being attacked on two fronts, and expect their market to keep shrinking so are looking for other
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he implies that Canon is the *only* major camera company that hasn't yet given third party repairers the shaft
Pentax (ricoh) sells parts to any authorized dealer or repair shop that wants them. They only stopped selling parts directly to the public themselves.
Fortunately, I just sold all my Nikon gear (Score:1)
Which camera vendors have authorized repair shops? (Score:2)
Is there such a thing as an unauthorized repair shop?
Which vendors are known for their ease of repair, and support for their customers? I sometimes see deals for cameras on ebay, so called "imported models" but don't know what the manufacturer's stance is on these in terms of long term repair. It seems there are a lot of complications to owning high end camera gear, and these things are expensive an easy to break.
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Sure, of course there is! Just like their are tons of "unauthorized" Apple repair shops out there as well., many of which do much better repair work than the bozos at the "Genius Bar" can do.
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It depends on the needed tooling, parts, costs... over decades...and what could be imported, used, approved to "buy".
Then make a profit on every repair per hour of work..
Re "expensive an easy to break"
Look for the better brands that list/show their weather-sealing design skills and that list their cold/hot temperature support.
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Pentax (Ricoh) gives out a pdf list of authorized dealers that also includes a page full of known unauthorized dealers. But they tell you, don't buy from those unauthorized guys, who knows where that lens has been.
Signs of general trouble? (Score:3)
Re: Signs of general trouble? (Score:1)
Huh, that's too bad. I've always liked Nikon scopes just fine. The market space is super crowded though.
Right to repair bill? (Score:2)
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If Apple could be forced to make parts available, why would cameras (or watches!) be legally different?
Simple: Money.
Nikon is slowly going broke; so there is no incentive for class-action law firms to sue them.
Apple, OTOH...
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Nikon is slowly going broke; so there is no incentive for class-action law firms to sue them.
I don't want money from them. I want the availability of spare parts.
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Terimnation (Score:1)
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Ditched them long ago after Fujifilm's X- and T- series of cameras started to kick ass. Glad I got rid of my older Nikon gear, too, because I am sure it just went down in value.
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Nikon bricks (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the message? (Score:2)
Our new stuff is awesome, it never breaks, but if it does, you get a new one for free.
Or
Just give up and use your cellphone like everybody else.
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I thought it was "buy Pentax" myself.