I can’t remember the last time I saw a portable x-ray machine in a hospital or dentist’s office that used film. They’ve gone digital like everything else, and ultimately, that’s good as it really speeds up re-dos in case the “film” wasn’t placed right, and once a good image is captured, the x-ray machine operator can wing the image files to the radiologists to be “read” via wireless.
If anything, Hollywood will keep someone making film for a while. I know that industry is also nudging over to digital imaging, editing and presentation, but it takes gargantuan investments to change the existing film-based methods - especially at the neighborhood theater, where replacing an already expensive film projector with the latest digital projector may just not be feasible.
My uncle worked at Kodak for a long time and employees were actually allowed to borrow digital cameras in the mid 90s to sell their friends and family on this new technology. The problem was that the Kodak cameras were clunky, cumbersome, and expensive than their competitors even back then.
This bankruptcy has been a long time coming and isn’t really a shock to anyone in Western New York as we all saw first-hand how Kodak bungled their surefire entry into the digital camera business.
I was actually scanning in some photos taken in the early eighties and discovered how badly they faded when I scanned in the negatives and compared them.
Here is something I posted on facebook, so I don’t know if can see it here, of a picture from about thirty years ago. The image on the left is from the print and the right is from the negative.
Not sure about this-I have a Kodak digital camera-the Schneider-Kreuznach lens is excellent, and it was very nicely priced.
I just had an old VHS video tape transferred to DVD-and not a moment too soon (the sound is gone from half the tape.
I do some health screening imaging. For a while we used a specialized Poloroid camera and film. A few years they quit making the film. Other brands might have continued to be available. We now use an even more soecialized digital system. I take pictures. the doctor evaluates them For now we mail printouts. Maybe the next step is asking the schools I go to for their wifi password. Of course we still have paper permission slips that go home to be signed. We also need them for contact info if we find anything.
CRT TVs still look better than LCD. It’s only the resolution that makes them look better. At the same resolution, CRT wins hands down.
The same is true of film: we still don’t have, in everyday use, cameras that can handle the resolution of film. Yet if people are convinced that LCD TVs are better, then they are likely convinced that digital cameras are better, despite actual drawbacks.
To many thats a pretty big ‘only’ and theres also size, weight, cost, true flat screen, flickering etc.
Similarly with film vs digital cameras, theres a whole lot more to gain than resolution, ie ISO, instant review, lack of grain & noise etc. When the final medium is almost always digital anyhow, it isnt even a contest really.
Sure, but people store negatives and prints in all sorts of horrible conditions as well, and they do degrade.
My point was that the digital information itself won’t age; it’s the storage media that will, and that can be upgraded, changed, etc… a lot easier than transferring an image to a new negative, and with no loss of fidelity either.
I agree that there will definitely be a bunch of people who’ll copy all their photos onto DVD-Rs or on un-backed up hard drives, but that’s no different than the people who didn’t hang onto the negatives after the prints went into the photo albums.
I have digital photos that are 12 years old, and look exactly the way they did when I took them. The resolution’s nowhere near what we have today, but there’s been no change in the intervening decade and change.
I also suspect that there will be a thriving business in consumer data recovery for exactly the reasons you mention; people won’t think about it, and 50 years from now will need someone to get their cherished family photos off that dusty old SATA drive.
One reason I like shooting film is that the quality of scanners can ONLY get better. Negatives scanned on my $200 Epson V500 flatbed scanner look great; imagine how they’ll look with the scanners available to consumers in 20 years! 30 years, 40 years, etc!
On the other hand, the photos taken with my digital cameras are stuck at that level of quality forever. Stuck exactly as the sensor captured them - which is to say, passable, but nowhere near the level of a 35mm negative (to say nothing of a medium format or larger negative) scanned with a top-level film scanner.
Yeah, my experience differs. This is a contentious issue, and the numbers are all over the place. The best studies I’ve read seem to equate 35mm film with around 16-20MP, but this is a bit of comparing apples to oranges. Once you start going up the ISOs (anything 200 or above), in my experience, digital is the clear winner in terms of detail. I’ve shot about 100,000 frames of film, and probably about 750,000 digital, and my impression is that digital (on a 12MP sensor, in my case) delivers crisper images at anything but <100 ISO. The main advantage of negative film, for me, is its ability to retain highlights. While digital has really caught up in terms of dynamic range, once you blow your highlights completely, they’re gone. With film, you can often coax them back into detail with some aggressive burning. Also, when making mega-huge enlargements, film tends to have a nicer, more “organic” look to it than an upsampled digital image (unless you really know what you’re doing.) Plus, film tends to perform better with skin tones. (Most) Digital skin tones tend to be on the reddish side, in my experience, and (from what I understand), that has to do with how Bayer pattern sensors work (with two green pixels in an array for a green and blue.)
(Also, color film processing is really not much more complicated than black-and-white. You have to be a little more careful about temps, but that’s about it. I personally found color film processing easier and faster than black-and-white.)
Im not sure they could get meaningfully better, given we’re already at 32 bit and very high resolutions. And of course you have to be willing to store all those negatives in good condition for that length of time, which can be a bit trickier than storing digital images once you get into serious numbers of images.
The main limit in most viewing these days is monitor screens which limit both digital and film cameras for now anyhow.
I’m amazed at home much information is in old black and white photos from the '50s, not to mention prints. I was able to blow up a passport photo of my dad’s to A4 without too much of a drop in quality and almost any of the old photos we can reveal new details when blown up a bit.
For all practical purposes this is untrue. You can make prints up to 8x10 with any but the most basic digital camera today that is indistinguishable from a print from a 35mm film camera. That’s more than most people need. If you go to a DSLR, they actually are producing better images than film.
Related to what Eve mentioned, though, is the fact that photo albums have, to some degree, gone through a sort of curating, where specific photos were chosen, and placed in a certain order. I think the real tragedy right now is not digital media itself, which is wonderful for all the reasons mentioned, but that it encourages us to gorge ourselves on limitless amounts of information. Ten slightly different shots of the same thing, and I’ve kept them all, because, well, I can’t quite decide which is the best, and why not, I’ve got terabytes of storage? Historians of the future will just have to wade through billions upon billions of low-rez, poorly lit photos of drunken 20-somethings at bars and parties.
I’ve basically made the transition to digital photography (though I don’t know if I’ll ever let go of my OM-1, despite having not used it in probably three years). My mom is good about getting important photos printed on appropriate paper, and still puts albums together. I hope I can manage enough energy and creative process to do the same at some point. Pictures on a hard drive, set as your screensaver are all well and good, but it doesn’t make you do any of the self-selecting that turns a bunch of pictures into a narrative, or weeds out unnecessary information.
