Film is DEAD!
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presid ...@whorehouse.gov (Demetrios Hung, APA)
Ok, maybe not just yet but I couldn't help sharing this little review with you guys. I know, the photo newsgroups are a better place for this sort of thing but it's too easy to troll in there and besides a lot of motorcyclists take pics when riding about.
I've been a photography nut my entire life. Ever since I was 12 to be exact. Naturally when these digital cameras started popping up I sneered at them. Sure Photoshop and digital manipulation is cool but come on, there's no way that 1 megapixel camera you're sporting is going to offer a threat to 35mm let alone medium format.
In fact I took great pleasure in mocking the legions of yuppy scum that infest this town every time they bragged about their new digital whatever-cam. To their untrained eye perhaps a cheesy inkjet print is good enough but certainly any purist (read annoying twat) could spot the difference between a Cibachrome and an HP DeskJet print. Besides I was a dyed in the wool Fuji junkie using Velvia almost exclusively for its snappy hi-res imaging. So it was with idle amusement when I received a Sony 707 digital camera as an early x-mas present this month.
Idle amusement that is until I started fooling around with it. At 5 megapixels this thing is starting to butt in on 35mm territory. In fact unless you're using high grade slide film and lighting impeccably you're going to be hard pressed to achieve images that surp*** this camera with film. It easily outshines negatives processed at your local 1-hour quickiemart and to top it all off you get solid digital files to edit in Photoshop without having to engage in flatbed scanner hysterics which produce disappointingly flat images or send your film off to get scanned at a big buck pro-shop.
Sony pulled off a quality product made entirely out of cast magnesium which somehow appeals to my inner moto-neanderthal. In fact Harley missed out big time by not offering to license their name to this product. The lens is a Zeiss and it ain't one of them cheapie re-labeling jobs either. Can't wait to put it up against some of my Canon gl*** to see how they compare in resolution tests. It has a whopping 4 hour battery life good for 400 shots per charge and "boots up" instantly unlike the other digital cams I've tried. The only weakness is the exclusive reliance on Sony memory sticks which although they're cute currently max out at 128mb and are spendy little bastards running about a $1/MB.
Images at max resolution are 2MB per pic or a whopping 16MB per file if you use uncompressed TIFF output. The difference between the two is about 5% in terms of quality so although not critical you're gonna want to go uncompressed if you're looking for something to hang on your wall. I've done several 8x10s printed professionally and I'm pretty damn impressed with the results. Very good resolution, excellent color rendition and shadow detail that rivals the best film has to offer. Even better is the complete lack of grain which is downright stupefying. Top o' the line films may offer better resolution but the grain kills the effect.
Of course lemme not even get into the whole WYSIWYG aspect of it all.
Or the fact that you're not spending arms+legs on processing just to see the results. Or the fact that you don't need to own expensive equipment other than a nice inkjet to make color proofs. Or the fact that hi-rez digital prints made on actual photo paper around here cost about $8 for an 8x10 which is way cheaper then doing it the old way.
Or the fact that your images are permanently archived without worrying about color shifts or negative fade.
Old way: Slide Film $5 Processing $5 Scanning ideal shot $15[1] C-process print $8 Total $33 New way: Film $0 Processing $0 Scanning $0 Print $8 Total $8 Of course if I went straight from film to print I'd do a Cibrachrome which means custom printing @ $30/pop.
Anyways I'm really stoked (to use californiaspeak) about the whole concept and will soon be discarding my 35mm gear on ebay where some sap can buy it for 89% of new. Now of course if you're into medium format digital still has a ways to go before they can compete although them 16 megapixel camera backs they have for that format sound mighty tasty. Their $35k pricetag does not however. I'll be keeping my Mamiya stuff awhile longer thanks. I'll also relish making stunning pics with my $350 40+ year old Rollei TLR.
Perhaps the most promising aspect which also winds up being the achilles' heel is the planned obsolescence. Like yer CPU it's only going to get faster/lighter/better/cheaper with each p***ing year. Of course while this means you once treasured camera will eventually become a useless relic as the megapixel count continues to spiral upwards it also means that someday soon we'll have 10MP cameras which whoop major *** available for the cost of a regular point-n-shoot in the very near future.
Some folks have said that film will stick around. After all a cheapie disposable is only $10 vs. the $1000 list for the Sony 707 (although the street price is considerably lower). However this technology will eventually filter down to the $100 price point (minus the high end gl***) and what then? I mean who wouldn't buy a 35mm replacement that doesn't need processing and can give you photo quality output on your printer?
I've also heard arguments that some people prefer the "film look" and will continue to shoot it for fine arts. Guess what dingleweed? The moment digital cameras are sporting 20+ megapixel counts you can now "throw away" pixels and enable software based film grain emulations that mimic all your favorite film stocks of yore.
Another fine point is the fact that photochemicals have always been our dirty little secret. While they're relatively harmless as far as serious toxic wastes are concerned, I certainly wouldn't want to drink any of them and that's precisely where they all wind up. If there is a hell me and my erstwhile photographers' *** will roast there in eternity for all the chemicals I dumped down my sink during the home darkroom sessions as a younger lad. To say nothing of the billions of gallons pumped out globally by the photofinishing biz. Digital eliminates all of these consumeables.
Still though I'll miss the scent of developer. Walking into a photolab and smelling the tang in the air fires off the synapses in every shutterbug's brain that they've arrived at their second home. Like the perfume of a former lover long past one whiff will always send us old school types reeling and back to the days of standing in the amber glow of a safelight for hours on end just to get one stinking print right.
Someday it'll all be replaced by the whir of inkjets spitting out perfect digital copies in the comfort of your own home. Hell my local lab has been spitting out Giclee (hey snooty photographers need to have fancy French names to cover up the work "inkjet" otherwise their snob clients would be appalled) prints for years now. The romance of fooling around in the dark will be gone, replaced by sitting in front of a computer monitor and putzing around with your photos in between chat sessions on AOL. Eventually this will create an even bigger deluge of crappy "serious amateur" photographers with an emphasis on the amateur aspect.
For me there's no tragic loss as it represents less work and more options. I was lucky enough to cut my teeth with the same technology that my uncle did many decades ago. Kids today (damn I'm already talking like this at 28!) though are gonna miss out. They're gonna miss on the manual labor it took to become a serious photographer. Of crafting the image with your own hands often through trial and error.
All of it replaced by the clinical charm of the school's computer lab.
I'll never forget that goth chick who hated my guts in photo101.
Always "accidently" bumping into me in the darkroom on purpose to annoy me sending my carefully focused image to hell right as I hit the enlarger switch. Delivering harsh tongue lashings at every open critique of my work. I'll also never forget the time we shagged like mad during crunch time when we were both trying to deliver our portfolios before the deadline. Every arthouse film cliche was broken that day as we made love underneath the safelights. What kind of sex are you gonna get in a computer lab? Wanking off to internet porn?
People our children's sexual proclivities are in jeopardy!!!
Motorcyclists say that every driver should be forced to ride a bike for three years before getting their car license. This brings about an appreciation for being considerate and aware on the road that pilots insulated behind their jumbo-SUVs are completely oblivious to. In a similar vein I feel sorry for all those poor bastards who will come after me never having set foot in a real darkroom. Like the SUV dillweed jabbering away on their cell phone while making yet another unannounced lane swerve they are completely oblivous to the physical world outside their own pretentious minds. Being shielded from the harsh disappointment of working with inferior tools and trying to get an appreciable result will result in photographic atrophy for all future shutterbugs.
Maybe that's a good thing. After swimming in a sea of urine the ambrosia tastes much sweeter. Perhaps the truly talented will stand out greater in the digital era and everyone else can enjoy their processing-free piccies.
[1] Sorry I can't afford a $30k drum scanner although I may have already bought one by now if you tally the scanning chrages... :(
"Klaus Schroiff" m...@photozone.de
Tell me how to project your digital shot on a 1.5x1m screen with the same quality like an analog slide - otherwise I'll keep on yawning.
Klaus "Demetrios Hung, APA" <presid...@whorehouse.gov> wrote in message ...
nwea ...@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU (Nicholas Weaver)
The quality of even the mid price ($150) inkjets is getting damn impressive already. I have one of the Cannon separate ink cartridge ones, and it seems quite nice for making fake labels for various projects.
One problem I have will be lifetime issues. Black & White (silver nitrate) films and prints are nigh-ageless. Color films die quickly, as (I'm guessing) color inkjet outputs. Electronic archives are even worse, as they really need to be kept "live": every X years (2-5 is probabyl a good number), the files should be taken off the storage media (CD-R for now, some successor media later, the reading will allow the error correction coding to work. ECCs have the property that up to a certain number of errors/unit byte are perfectly recoverable, beyond that, you can be ****ed), loaded, saved in the latest format AND the old format, and recopied back into the archive. Otherwise, one runs the serious risk of having old file format/old media format data which can't be read at all, and might as well be lost.
An officemate of mine got a pretty good, low cost slide/negative scanner, he seemed happy with it.
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Nicholas C. Weaver nwea...@cs.berkeley.edu
Robert Rodriguez e...@brightdsl.net
Yawn.
Robert Rodriguez Elyria Color Service e...@brightdsl.net
"Mike Russell" ge...@pacbell.net
Just go back to sleep.
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http://www.zocalo.net/~mgr http://geigy.2y.net
"Mike Russell" ge...@pacbell.net
LOL! Great article, and covers the bases nicely as well as being funny as hell.
"Demetrios Hung, APA" <presid...@whorehouse.gov> wrote in message ...
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"Casey" Writ...@gte.net
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yadda, yadda, yadda.....
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Now, don't get me wrong, I like my digital camera. I use my digital camera a lot. I make money with my digital camera.
...and one of these days, I'll be able to do a 24X30 portrait like the ones I do in the darkroom with my slimy old film camera.
"McLeod" cerv...@mb.sympatico.ca
Ummm...I do that every day in an operations center on a 10x10 foot screens with LCD projectors.
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"Uri Al" Ur...@pits.org
Gee, to bad the digital camera is already obsolete.
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bhilton ...@aol.com (BHilton665)
Instead of dinking with the Sony point-and-shoot get one of the Canon digital bodies that let you use all that great Canon gl***. Rumour has it they'll be offering a 10 megapix model within 12-18 months.
"Loafy" mmadnes...@NOSPAMhotmail.com
That's a big part of it, working in the darkroom is definitely therapeutic.
Being a avid photographer, but a bigger computer geek, I bought into digital early on... and hardly ever use it anymore. I found the quality of my work suffered - I was more careless with composition and exposure since I could fix nearly everything in Photoshop. I just returned from a week in Northern California lugging my SLR and huge bag of lenses around, and got some of my best images in years by leaving the digital at home entirely. My 20-year-old camera finally bought the farm on the last day of the trip, and I had the chance to replace it with digital at a great price... but I bought the modern equivalent of my old camera, a manual-focus 35mm...
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Paul R., DoD# 2180 1981 Honda CB650 Custom, 2001 Yamaha V-Star Cl***ic Network Administrator, Arena Motor Sales www.arenamotor.com - Muscle Cars & Motorcycles Authorized Yamaha retailer
"Yamil R. Sued" ys...@hamilton.net
You are right there.....RUMOUR!!!!
That's the best one I've heard so far though!!
Y
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presid ...@whorehouse.gov (Demetrios Hung, APA)
Agreed. I'm buying a Canon S800 which is pretty damn good for $250 @ 2400x1200 dpi.
Supposedly they're improving the ink quality and I'm sure with time they'll get some pretty decent life out of it. Then there's chemical C-prints off of digital files which have their own fading issues. Of course the real "print" is the file which as a digital copy is damn near ageless.
Also note that Ilfo/Cibachrome is supposedly archival with lifetimes of 200 years. I'd imagine it'd be possible to output digitally to that if anyone is interested in developing the process. Then there's also color separations onto B+W film.
True, which is why with important data you back up several copies onto different media. ECC may fail, but every successful copy is an error free duplicate ***uming a successful read. The chances of having the same file fail one several copies of media is pretty slim. Slim enough to make it less likely than damaging analog originals.
That's good for 35mm but there's nothing that can pull off medium/large format scans that doesn't cost ten arms+one leg.
IMHO digital has already begun to make 35mm a moot exercise and will deliver the final blow in another generation or so (ie 1-2 yrs max).
presid ...@whorehouse.gov (Demetrios Hung, APA)
Hey you and your pal Rob seem to have gotten a case of African Sleeping sickness. Wasn't from shooting all that film in the dank jungles of Borneo on your latest nature expedition was it? Keep up the good work! The world needs more self-absorbed National Geographic wannabe loners sporting their oh so cute photo-vests and spouting off paid one liners about the latest Tokina lens! Keep them flower shots coming!
Speaking of sleep the mark of the terminally boring has always been the slideshow, usually drawn out 150 transparencies too long. You may continue to safely cuddle up in your living rooms admiring your handiwork in solitary while the rest of us will seek out the thrill of the paid ***ignment and of showing our work in public spaces, usually on a cibachrome, magazine or increasingly a commoner's inkjet print.
We'll continue to call them "giclees" so as not to awaken the traditionalists to the digital revolution happening all around them.
Yes your film is such a powerful medium! We all know it's the brand of camera and film that makes the photographer! Let's talk about aspherical bokeh! Let's debate the finer points of which lens can make the most pristine reproduction of a testing chart! Let's argue endlessly about the proper way to interpret such data! Damnit where are the latest MTF curves!!!
While we're at it let's ignore the bulk of fine photography created during the last century, often on equipment/film vastly inferior to the latest digital cameras. What the hell did Bresson know anyway?
I'll bet he never took the perfect shot of a USAF chart!
Let's also ignore the fact that the technology exists to make hi-rez projections of digital files but that's it too damned expensive for home use. Let's also ignore that you can output your digital files to film and project it to your hearts content for a few bucks at any decent photo lab.
As another already mentioned sorry to have awakened you. All I wanted to point out was that the latest generation of 5MP cameras offers quality damn near to that of 35mm and that I won't be sorry to see film go as the technology matures which is something I never thought I'd say.
"Matthew Powell" mattpowe...@home.com
Call me when a digital SLR comes in at $500 (a little more than I paid for my Canon), with the quality to match film.
Larry xlax Lovisone nette...@ns.net
You needed that much camera to shoot one stinky Yamaha Raaaah 6...8-) Larry L (have a wheelie nice day) (friends don't let friends ride hog) 94 RC45 #2 http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/-xlax-/
presid ...@whorehouse.gov (Demetrios Hung, APA)
True only if you're using medium format or better.
For now you can enjoy decent 8x10s using a medium that offers many options that film does not. Most folks have the common sense not to blow up 35mm beyond this size. The creative freedoms offered by digital exceed those of film by a wide margin.
Robert Hoffman sand...@interaccess.com
Looks like Klaus hit a nerve...
milgs*nosp ...@mail.travel-net.com (georgio)
it's not dead..it just smells funnyu..
you know what..i'm still going to be using my 35mm camera because i want to learn to be a good photog..i couldn't do that if i'd be using a digital because it's not as .. let's see....it's adaptative to any medium..
georgio In article <3c0e80f5.7650...@news.prodigy.net>, presid...@whorehouse.gov (Demetrios Hung, APA) wrote: ...
"Christopher Bush" cb...@dialupnet.com
This is why cross-posting is strongly frowned upon. An MF newsgroup is not the place for discussion about consumer-level digital cameras.
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Christopher Bush http://www.christopherbush.com Demetrios Hung, APA <presid...@whorehouse.gov> wrote in message ...
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ajacobs2 ajaco...@tampabay.rr.com
Possibly in a Wisdom Tooth!
"Big Ky-Oh" sfair...@netcom.ca
***hole....................
"Demetrios Hung, APA" <presid...@whorehouse.gov> wrote in message ...
"jenner" j5n...@attbi.com
Demetrios has something here, even if you don't want to admit it.
I've shot for a long time. I've been paid to do it and published. I'd give up film in a minute when it becomes good enough and, as Demetrios pointed out, it is right on the cusp of doing so.
Film will be dead, if not already.
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-- jenner
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