I think I'll go shoot some Velvia.
Posted on 05/25/2006 10:08:01 AM PDT by Drew68
TOKYO - Japan's top camera maker, Canon Inc., will stop developing new single-lens reflex film cameras as more people abandon film for digital, company officials said Thursday.
The Tokyo-based Canon's move followed a similar move by its closest Japanese rival, Nikon Corp., which announced earlier this year it would stop making seven of its nine film cameras and concentrate on digital models.
Canon will continue making film cameras already on the market as long as their demand remains. Whether to withdraw from the film camera business will be "decided appropriately by judging the market situation," said Canon spokesman Hiroshi Yoshinaga.
Japanese camera makers sold a combined total 64.77 million digital cameras last year globally, compared with 5.38 million film cameras, according to industry figures. Yoshinaga said his company could not disclose the number of cameras sold.
Meanwhile, Tsuneji Uchida, president of Canon, told reporters that demand for film cameras will be limited to "special needs" like camera buffs, Kyodo News agency said.
In January, Konica Minolta Holdings Inc., another Japanese optical manufacturer, said it was quitting the camera business altogether — digital and film — and selling its digital assets to rival Sony Corp.
I think I'll go shoot some Velvia.
Hey, I'm still schleppin' along with this mutt (2.3 MP), complete with duct tape holding the memory card door shut.
The title and article don't match.
I've got a Vivitar 8.1 megapixel digital camera myself. Very easy to use and takes fantastic pictures. Not to mention I can upload the pictures on-line to Walgreens and pick them up later the same day.
That is still really all you need for personal photography. Mine will shoot photos in .tif format but I've never once shot a photo with that much resolution. For obvious reasons, I use lower resoultion so that I can send my photos via email. When I print them out on paper, they look just fine.
I haven't even checked to see what resolution cameras today are capable of shooting.
I still take great shots with my CANON AE-1 Program.
I like to shoot pix of high speed objects, like race cars and airplanes. Digital cameras haven't met my needs yet in the same price range.
But, casual pix are all digital-- a old Kodak point and shoot, and a Fujifilm S5200 5.5MP SLR. 0.01 shutter lag is pretty good.
I bought the Canon 20 D for Christmas. Got the 1.4 lens. My old Pentax ME is officially retired.
Well, a digital back [if made modular] could be always attached to an SLR instead of the film back, like they could do with Hasselblads. Lens, viewfinder with exposure metering and the shutter are the same anyway.
Interesting how many technologies that dominated the 20th century are dying or have died in front of our eyes: film photography, analog audio recordings, land-line telephones. Lots of changes, mostly for the good.
I spent under $80 on an HP Deskjet 5440 and I use their software to edit my photos. I used to use yahoo to print my digital pictures and mail them back to me. I had pretty good results from them. Now I just do it myself (admittedly, it is a little more labor-intensive but the results are just the same).
With all due respect to your father, I don't think the two emotions would be that similar.
His attitude would be more similar to what I experienced when the A-12 and F-23 programs were canceled at McDonnell Douglas.
Great products that will never be used again.
I can recall saying this would happen several years ago and being shouted down. At the time I said it a six megapixel camera seemed like a dream. Now I would say that consumer grade cmeras will reach 20 megapixels by the end of the decade.
Semi-pro cameras like the Rebel will have, by the end of the decade, more resolution and more exposure lattitude than Kodachrome, and good noise specs at ISO 1600.
There are theoretical cameras that can be focused after the exposure, a kind of hologram. The crystal ball is cloudy five years from now. But film will disappear from consumer channels.
I would love to see a high speed 5+ MPix SLR digital camera for less than $500 so I can change lenses. I also want a pony. :-)
It runs on bat trees so I not be tied to a dock when I want to cruise.
My wife's brother lives in Rochester, NY, hometown to Kodak. The HQ's a ghostown. Prices will drop, new features will emerge, but silver film is going the way of the buggy whip and lead type.
The buggy whip is making a comeback.
And it is happening so fast! The last time I had a land-line telephone was specifically so that I could use dial-up internet service. Now I don't even have that. I just can't foresee a need for a land-line phone anymore.
AS far as the other technologies you mentioned, I think of the music and movie industries. People can already record studio quality music in their bedrooms with inexpensive software and recording equipment. Soon, people will be making studio-quality, feature-length films complete with high-tech special effects and downloading them on the internet for people to burn onto a dvd.
The entertainment industry will need to be radically overhauled to deal with these new challenges to their hegemony.
I own a Sony MVC-FD95 (2.1 Mega Pixel) and a Sony DSC-V3 (7.2 Mega Pixel. Digital cameras are the ONLY way to go!
Yes,yours is probably a better analogy.
Still film has a certain unpredicability to it that can make for some interesting photos sometimes.
You disappointed me..from you, I expected a pic of Matthew Brady's camera...(g)
Landlines aren't dead. There's still plenty of companies going after the landline market. For many individuals landlines are unecessary, but for many they still are, many others just like them, and then for any business that is going to deal with a lot of phone traffic the landline is still king.
I don't think home produced music or movies are going to seriously impact the entertainment industry. People have been able to write their own stories forever and it never hurt the novel market. A lot of the entertainment industry is more about who than what, unless I can play guitar like Jimi Hendrix nothing I ever do at home will satisfy my desire to listen to Jimi Hendrix.
No doubt about that. The last time I used one of my film cameras was because I wanted to take some pictures of a lunar eclipse and my digital cameras didn't have the exposure time, remote release or zoom lens to handle it.
I should have taken a digital camera out and put it on a tripod to compare results. I wouldn't have wasted shots trying various exposures without seeing immediate results like I did on the film.
Right now I think the megapixel race is becoming pointless. The difference between a 4 MP and 10 MP will really only show if you blow it up really big or zoom in on a small section of the picture. And if you are compressing it, you lose most of the benefits of the extra pixels anyway. I now want a higher shutter speed more than more pixels.
We had a hurricane go through the DC area two years ago; power was knocked out (mostly by falling trees) for a week. That meant no internet OR cell service. The hard wire land line and battery powered radio were our only links to the outside world.
Yes, of course satellites will eventually replace the need for cell towers. We already have satellite phones that can be used from anywhere on the globe. Soon, they will be the industry standard. Internet connections will follow.
I generally agree with you. My Mavica FD-7 was surprisingly good in low-light conditions, which led to a little disappointment with my newer digital SLR even with the large lens I have on it. The point-and-shoot does poorly by comparison to the Mavica, but with such a small lens in front of 6 MP I am not surprised.
Those were beautiful, weren't they? Brings back fond memories, --the sound they made, the clicking motion of winding the film, and the slight shake when the shutter opened. Almost sad to see them go.
The Nikon D50 DSLR has shutter speed up to 1/4000, 6.1 megapixels, and costs about $550 new these days.
I've seen what I think are digitals laid out like SLRs, with similar apeture and other mechanisms adjusting like the old days, so dyed-in-the-wool photographers can use the electrics? Am I right, or have I slid into a parallel universe?
If only there was a retrofit digital film unit easily available.
I remember seeing one advertised years ago, but not since.
I used to have a Nikon FM2, and I loved having a camera that was mechanical. Between it and a sekonik incident light meter I carried around (and the wide latitude affored by Tri X Pan), I loved taking photos for my school papers (in college). I sold it a few years ago, and don't really miss it. If I want to use film, I still have my Olympus OM2n. But I love my Nikon D70s. Digital is fun too, but I miss the exposure latitude.
Mark
Bee-HAYVE!
That's what I'm thinking. The optics are important!
How the mighty have fallen! My realized ambition in college was to own a Canon F1 to shoot the yearbook. The F1 was the ultimate system camera. Over the years I accumulated a number of accessories such as lenses, viewing screens, speed finder and even macro bellows. The thing I still detest about digital camera is the shutter lag time -- nothing beats a leaf-shutter rangefinder for closeup sports photography.
Ahh, the Sekonic light meter (which I still have) combined with my Nikon F, 50mm f1.2, 24mm f2.8 and 105 mm f 2.5 were all a budding college photojournalist needed. Combine with Tri-X push to 1,000 ASA.
Digital cameras take great picture while film cameras take great photographys. I look over here at my bookcase and look at a century of great film cameras, Brownie, Zeiss Ikon, Rollie mini 2.8, Rolleflex, Eastman Kodak bellows, Nikon F, Canon A2 with a Contax compact thrown in. Plus more good and bad gadgets than one can count. What memories.
Carolyn
Once digital cameras get to 14 megapixel they will then be as good as film.
English is my second language. And as a photographer I am far from spectacular - so I must be equally bad at both.
Many of the younger folk don't appreciate basic performance quality; they would rather have speed and gizmos instead.
I could be nuts, but I think that although my old 78 records sound scratchier, they still sound better in other ways than do my CDs.
And people who talk to me on cell phones or portable phones are most annoying, because their signal fades in and out and is often not the clearest.
I haven't experienced digital photography yet, so I cannot comment on that.
Speaking of land-line phones, for the quality of basic feature--ruggedness, sound quality, efficient and practical use--no one's yet beat the old Western Electrics Phones. They remain the best.
They even had concave faces on their buttons to ensure more accurate dialing, unlike most crap being sold today, which have convex buttons (probably only because they look good to the moron public).
And where there's the option on a radio, I always switch-off stereo reception. I never saw the point to stereo to begin with, and stereo reception is often not as clear as mono.
See calculation in # 43. for 24x36 mm frame a really good lens could resolve 80-100 megapixels. Best films (Velvia, Kodachrome, TechPan)could resolve up to 300 megapixels in that frame, if the lens were good enough.
You are right. Weren't pony carts one of Hillary's recommendation the other day for energy conservation? She also adviced keeping them under fifty five miles an hour for greater fuel effeciency.
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