This might be an issue of geography, but is it really that hard to find a place to develop & print 35mm film? You can certainly still buy it.
Amen.
Folks, this isn’t change for the sake of change, or change to make money. They are making products that provide better results, and the people buying them for those better results.
I know you like your daguerreotypes, but sometimes newer is indeed better.
Do you play in an 80s cover band?
Availability of 35mm film is limited; it’s easy enough to find 400ISO color print film, but slide film is pretty much limited to specialty outlets, Kodachrome is no longer made, and Kodak even discontinued most of its Ektachrome films.
Getting film processed can be done at most drugstore-type labs, but optical printing is no longer done: negatives are scanned and digitally printed, and not always well.
Traditional B/W film usually needs to be sent out for processing and printing. And there’s so little film being processed that even having color negatives done by a local minilab can be hit or miss.
That said, I agree with the above posters who prefer the digital methods. I spent eighteen years printing my own black and white; I don’t miss it all. My work is cleaner, faster and far more detailed than I could ever accomplish in the analog world.
The point would be to have a better experience, whether it’s getting a better recording, building a stronger building, or curing a bacterial infection more efficiently.
Unless you have that backwards: “What’s the point of sticking with the old-fashioned way if you can’t sneer at the people who eschew tradition?”
He mentioned having a film camera, which I (and others here, I think) assumed was a 35mm still camera.
I wasn’t commenting on the quality, only clarifying incipient confusion between the 8mm film and video formats.
However, it is not yet true that all digital systems are better than their analog predecessors. In motion picture photography, 35mm film cameras still have some advantages over the best pro digital cinema cameras. Although few people realize it, Kodak worked hard over the past 20 years to improve the emulsions it made for motion picture stocks, dramatically increasing their resolution, sensitivity, and dynamic range.
And no one is even close to being able to match, much less exceed, the quality of IMAX film cameras, which have a frame that is ten times the area of a 35mm frame. This is why Christopher Nolan shot about an hour of The Dark Knight Rises with IMAX cameras.
I wasn’t trying to correct your post, just expand on it. It takes longer to transfer an 8mm tape to the internet than a digital file, AND it looks like ass because it’s an 8mm videotape. Even if he’s using Digital8 video, that’s still a 13-year old format.
As for his film camera, it’s of course true that some formats of film give a still higher quality picture than any digital camera out there, but I’d be surprised if what the OP’s friends are dissing is his IMAX rig.
hehe…no. 
Yea, it’s a Sony Digital 8 that uses little 8mm tapes and has USB Streaming Live to net if you wanted to.
It was the fact that it wasn’t new fangled latest $1000 digital device…So,It must SUCK. :rolleyes:
Hell, it even has Infared. 
Im not breaking out the giant VCR cam from the 70’s the new crews use. 
So wait a minute, if it’s a Sony Digital8, then IT IS digital. I assumed that your recorder was Video8 or Hi8, both of which are analog recording formats. Digital8 is a digital recording format (duh!) which, as Sony says, “delivers 3X the color bandwidth of VHS with significantly less video noise, providing stunning video performance. Digital8 records digital audio and video comparable to MiniDV on affordable Hi8 tapes.”
So apparently your friends were scoffing at the fact that your camcorder records onto tape instead of a memory chip, because they (and you) mistakenly conflated tape with analog.
But your recordings are digital. And since it’s DV format, it’s 720x480 pixels, slightly better than standard NTSC (640x480), although, as Jenaroph will hasten to point out, not as good as HD. But the fact of recording onto tape does not, in and of itself, make it significantly inferior to a DV-format memory chip recorder, with respect to picture quality.
Of course, tapes have certain disadvantages: Being mechanical, they, or the recorder, can physically jam or break. If a bit of the oxide flakes off the tape, you can get a drop out in the image. And as I originally mentioned, you have to transfer footage off them in real time. So tapes are significantly less robust and convenient than memory-chip recorders.
Now about that film camera you mentioned in the OP: What exactly were you talking about? A still camera or a motion picture camera?