----- Original Message ----- From: "Emily L. Ferguson" : Although there may always be film, and the business may shift to : boutique films, once there is a digital point and shoot that's a : viable business model, I believe it's over for film as a commodity. As Bob Talbot said some time back, there are economic and environmental barriers still in place which prevent a large chunk of the worlds population from moving to digital. Access to digital output devices, initial setup costs, access to reliable electricity.. I stopped in at the local Fuji distributor a couple of weeks back and found about 12 minilabs sitting in their storage facility (optical). Apparently they're destined to be shipped overseas to so-called third world countries and resold. it's not a case that they're only being sold 'old' technology that the first world doesn't want but rather, they WANT the optical minilabs as the consumers there (wherever 'there' is) are shooting film. chemicals cost a helluva lot less than inks. Mechanical cameras cost a helluve lot less than continual upgrades to newer digital models. software upgrades? only this week we were talking about the cost of PS CS2! : Gonna be tricky for the high altitude adventure photogs, but : batteries will get better and storage media will get less energy : hungry and digital sensors will become less temperature sensitive as : well. not sure about the sensitivity to temp. that's always been a problem for electronics manufacturers .. in far more critical applications than photography! on rapid charge batteries: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0503/05032903tosh1minbatt.asp also in the headlines: "Hitachi Global Storage will come out with hard drives containing 230 gigabits of data per square inch" (expect 60Gig microdrives in 5-6 years) ..and a big heads up on potential new lenses: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/start.html?pg=10 Of interest to some maybe, I advised three people this last week on setting up new black and white darkrooms - one commercial photographer and two enthusiasts. The main reason for the switch for them was ease of use! all had tried monochrome printing and found the cost of a dedicated printer too high, the expense of a wide format unjustifiable, the cost of inks and media prohibitive compared to chemicals and b&w paper. Longevity was also a determining consideration. One with former darkroom experience managed to get everything in place within a couple of days and came back so excited, proclaiming she'd forgotten how fast and easy it was to get out a couple of dozen prints in a short space of time. funny thing was, she made the comparison to printers and talked of the ease of producing very large prints without having to upgrade to a bigger enlarger as she would have done with a printer. I have to agree with her. Having run the darkrooms and the digital lab at he college where I worked, I've seen the costs involved for both old-tech and new-tech. with 1600 hundred students accessing the areas continually (30 macs in the digital area, 45 enlargers in the chemical areas) one could liken the experience to something of an accelerated test.. old tech was a very, very, very clear winner on cost and time ! me? I've 5 B&W enlargers ranging from 66 to 5x7, 2 colour a 6x7 and a 4x5. A b&w processor, trays for the big stuff and not two weeks back I bought another RA4 processor. It's cheaper to run than the inkjet printer and the results are still the standard against which inkjet is judged. I'm not a graphic designer so I don't need to tamper heavily with my images, and there's always the inkjet printer for that. I classify myself as an enthusiast these day. I don't want to be a pro in the ultra-competitive market that exists here in my home town, where folks will sell images (and surrender the copyright) that end up as billboard advertising for less than $350 USD. no way.. competing against every fool with a digital camera who'll undercut you at the drop of a hat. This is the state of photography in Perth, Australia. in a country internationally reknown as early and enthusiastic neophiles. prey that this trend doesn't spread to your part of the world. k
