The stubborn-ignorant. I have multiple family members who refuse to listen when I explain to them that digital files can be printed to glossy 4x6’s just as easily (actually even EASIER and CHEAPER) and effective as film can. They keep on using their film camera because “I want to look at photo albums, not a computer screen”.
You can do much with digital sensors these days, often as good, or at least as workable as film IMO.
As someone mentioned above, holography is NOT one of them. You basically HAVE to have large pieces of film, they need to extremely fine grained, and often the holography requires not only largeish pieces of film, it requires the film to actually have some THICKNESS as well.
Its gonna be a longgg time before you have sensors that are literally millions of pixels by millions of pixels and are 5 to 10 inches across, much less record the light distribution in the the 3rd/thickness dimension with significant resolution.
Not only that. Even if you ever get a sensor that records such things digitally, you’d ALSO need an “adjustably transparent” display that has those same characteristics if you want to “play” your digitally stored holograms like you display your digital normal photographs.
I imagine dedicated holographers are sweating bullets right now and I am sure some are experimenting with making their own films/emulsions. ISTR that some important holography films have already been discontinued. There may always be a tiny niche market for these films, but you will most likely loose the economies of scale and competition from the heyday of mass film production. Not that holography film was ever particulary cheap in the first place. When film mostly dies, its either gonna be brew your own (not cheap or easy either I suspect), or really pay out the nose for a rare product.
A decent analogy might be in the very early days of flight. Do you think these airplanes will ever be more useful or more capable than our zepplins? Could be. Think we could go into space? I dunno… Will it be really cheap and easy? cough cough…
fusoya, I don’t know if they’re stubborn/ignorant or maybe just snake-bit.
I have more than 10,000 digital family photos on my computer. How many have I printed out over the years? Eh, maybe 10 to 20. Those are now much more faded than normally printed photos, which, I suppose is due to the quality of the paper/ink. However, I find that I can take zillions of digital pictures, but then I never get around to actually taking the time and effort to print them. (and yes, I suppose that’s my fault) However, with technology progressing the way it does, digitally stored pictures depend on current technology to be seen and manipulated. Having a physical photo doesn’t require any special formats. I don’t know. I can just imagine that people are taking enormous amounts of digital photos and never having the inclination to go through them all to print the good ones out because it’s a bit overwhelming.
That’s so true - when we did film, we kept even the crappy pictures, which we value now because they’re of, you know, people who will never be babies again, dogs that are dead now, etc. Now I print almost nothing out and I just don’t have them around like I did when I was a kid. I don’t really have any pictures up on the walls or anything.
Shawn1767 raises a very important point that will be of concern for future historians and ordinary people who just want to know what their ancestors’ lives were like.
For the first 150 years of photography, particularly in the area of home snapshooting, the vast majority of photos taken were also printed as a matter of course. Most homes have shoeboxes full of pictures, and probably, their negatives. For as long as they physically exist (and if well stored that can mean 100 years or more) any human being can see those pictures with no more equipment than their eyes and some light.
However, as we’ve transitioned to digital, the cost of taking a picture has dropped from a few cents per shot to nothing. So we’re freer to take lots more pictures, but it takes quite a bit more effort to have prints made. And typically, only a very small percentage of digital shots are printed. Of course, many are posted all over the Internet, a capability that had virtually no analog in the analog era.
Also, we now store the “negatives” of our images as files on a hard disk somewhere. One good thing about this is that most of them contain at least some data about when they were captured, which was rarely the case with film images.
But the downsides include the fact that it is somewhat harder to know what you have and where it is, and it’s also quite easy to lose everything if your hard disk fails and you haven’t been scrupulous with your backups. I’d wager that more irreplaceable family pictures are lost to hard drive failures than things like house fires, which were the most likely way to lose everything in the analog age.
And although most people assume that, barring hardware failures, their digital data are safer and will last longer than papers, photographs, and negatives, there are serious concerns about the archival stability of digital data. Digital information has to be periodically migrated to the latest file and media formats to ensure being readable, and it’s unlikely that ordinary non-technical people will routinely do this. Ultimately, billions of digital snapshots (and videos, and audios) could be irretrievably lost if the technology to display them becomes obsolete and unobtainable.
It’s still possible to have your old 8mm movies transferred to digital video, but that’s in large part because motion picture film, in all its formats, was probably the most durable modern storage medium. However, there are early videotape and computer magnetic tape formats for which few if any working machines are still extant. Any tapes recorded in those formats, if they haven’t physically degraded, are as good as lost.
Everyone thinks this can’t happen with digital formats, that computer technology will save everything for us, but don’t count on it.
All this is one good reason to continue to shoot film. (Not that I do: I haven’t shot a frame of film since I bought my first digital camera nine years ago.)