[monochrome]

"The only way you can make sure that a film or anything of a moving image is gonna be around, maybe, 60 to 70 years from now, interestingly enough, ironically enough, is celluloid" (Martin Scorcese)

My wife's shelves full of binders of sleeved photographs, and the boxes and boxes of prints she inherited, and the framed portraits that line the cover of our house and the hundreds of 19th Century prints her grandmother donated to the Colorado History Museum prove this point. They are actually evidence of history.

[ElJamoquio]

This apply to photography too ! How many picture have you lost because of a dead hard drive ? way too much to my taste. The only way to save those is to print them, or make them on film.

0.

I have a RAID and a couple of backups.

How many offsite-backups do you have of film?

[millsware]

I hope one day people realize both digital and film are different kind of shooting experience and .... continue to shoot both.

I just got few rolls back and holding the prints in your hand is specials.... even missed focus shots are special

This is why I wanted to try film in the first place. I have several nice MF lenses and if I use film and APS-C, It is like doubling the number of lenses I have, because they have different fields of view.

Please don't turn this into a thread about the lack of FF DSLR.

[Nuff]

0.

I have a RAID and a couple of backups.

How many offsite-backups do you have of film?

Few weeks ago, I deleted by mistake (user error) my photos from my last trip to japan straight after uploading them to LR. I thought I was deleting one photo. Big oops! There was no offsite backup of my raid made. They run at night around 2am. Nor local backup.

Since I shot that trip on film, I rescanned them.

Well, for completeness I have lost all of my photos from 2004 to 2008. Hard disk crash, 6 months travel around Australia lost. Other overseas trip were lost too. I just love digital. I work in IT. Got to love planned obsolescence to sell newer hardware too. DVD-R or CD-R will only last a year or 2 before it dies from bit rot.

I like my negatives. The latest E6 chromed are dye stable for around 200 years and BW silver is the same. And no power is needed.

[monochrome]

0.

I have a RAID and a couple of backups.

How many offsite-backups do you have of film?

I have the negatives secure-stored offsite and the prints stored where I can see them.

[aurele]

How many offsite-backups do you have of film?

good news is that i doesn't need back-up, it doesn't need upgrade, no need for power, or anything. Just a dry closet and a proper box.

I know that any of the picture that i take on film will last well beyond me, i will be able to see them anytime i want.

Film is peculiar because it's a record medium and a storage medium. And so far, many sing that film is dead, but it is, so far, the only way to be sure a picture of you, your wife, your kids, will still be around for the next generation, and the generation after.

[rt22306]

Yes, the number of lab is shrinking, because the user base has already shrinked, compared to the golden era of film (around 2000).
But the market is getting smaller, of course, there will be less labs, but they are going to be again very profitable. And, only the best ones are going to remains.

I hope that indeed is the way that things develop (pun intended.. ) in the not too distant future, Aurele.

[LFLee]

lomography still selling all kind of low-tech cameras... and they seem doing pretty good.

I bought a Belair camera. So yes, I will buy! did you see how crazy those old film GR is selling? o.0

[redrockcoulee]

No I would not and I do not think it would be wise for Pentax to make one

1) cannot make a new one that would be competitive with existing used ones
2) which model? a fully manual metal one or an updated MZ-S, even on this list no one agrees
3) the existing new camera market is for niche items such as the lomo/Holga type or for field cameras that are basically assembled by hand and can be customized for each buyer

I shoot very little 135 film usually only when I am off shooting digital anyways and have one of my two film Pentaxs with me. If I am going to shoot film I grab either the Hasselblad or the 4X5. I often will also take one of our low fi cameras as well, some images just look better not sharp.

Last week I was in a used camera store and there were tons of 35mm cameras and for Pentaxs starting with Spotmatics and on to more modern models. There is still just to many available used and with a huge choice on features and constructions that to make a new model just to me seems like a waste of company resources. For the price of what a new metal mechanical camera would cost to make one could obtain a Bronica with one or two lenses or a great TLR.

I will shoot film until I cannot process a roll anymore but as much as I would like to see more people shooting film and film cameras I just cannot see a market for any product that Pentax would produce.

[ElJamoquio]

Just a dry closet and a proper box.

Just an operable hard drive and an outlet. What could go wrong?

[stevebrot]

0.

I have a RAID and a couple of backups.

How many offsite-backups do you have of film?

The issue with electronic photos is not their lability, rather it is the tools to read them. Consider the matter of sending a RAW image or even a JPEG file as part of the payload on a deep space probe as a message to the advanced beings that are out in the great beyond. You could even send the viewer software or even the source code and a compiler, but it is unlikely that it will ever be deciphered and viewed. There is a reason why an analog recording was sent as part of the Voyager space probe series.*

Now move a couple of generations into the future when our electronic image formats, the tools to view them, and even the tools to convert them to new tech are obsolete to the degree that all but the files themselves have been lost. Sound far-fetched? It is still possible to work with WordPerfect for DOS files, but getting progressively hard to do so, even with the original executables. Consider too our images stored to DVDs in an age when DVD players disappeared decades before. When was the last time you saw a 5 1/4" floppy drive?

On the other hand, a film negative with reasonable care may last hundreds of years.


Steve

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

[aurele]

Just an operable hard drive and an outlet. What could go wrong?

- crash your computer and corrupt data
- get virus and corrupt data
- get an electric shutdown and burn your computer and lost data
- if RAID 0 : one of the disk burn and you loose everything.
- Harddrives get wear out after times and you lose data ( the kind of "tac .... tac....tac....crik..crik ..crik" sound)
- mis-click and delete everything

and so on.

---------- Post added 18th Mar 2014 at 05:50 PM ----------

Now move a couple of generations into the future when our electronic image formats, the tools to view them, and even the tools to convert them to new tech are obsolete to the degree that all but the files themselves have been lost.

more or less like Betamax or VHS today... only 10 years ago it was the best recording support.

[stevebrot]

more or less like Betamax or VHS today... only 10 years ago it was the best recording support.

There are still places who will convert VHS to DVD, but pity the poor person with a closet full of Betamax home videos...


Steve

---------- Post added 03-18-14 at 09:55 AM ----------

- if RAID 0 : one of the disk burn and you loose everything.

Yep, RAID 0 for speed...RAID 1 for safety...good catch...


Steve

[monochrome]

Just an operable hard drive and an outlet. What could go wrong?

I have another box full of cassette dubs of college buddies fiddling and flatpicking 'grass - accordion, mandolin, yodeling, a beautiful soprano girl, whose name I can't remember. The Blue Ridge mountains in the spring is a special place.

Someday my cassette player will die. I digitized them, but they're different. Etc. Etc.

[6BQ5]

I would, but have mixed feelings about it. I see younger folks running around with film cameras (the fellow next to me
at the zoo recently was much younger than the Minolta XG-M with winder he was carrying) that perhaps are art students; but the labs/processor network is ever shrinking as others have mentioned. For those of us without our own lab, we may have..10 years?

The number of labs is no doubt shrinking but I don't think they'll ever disappear. There will always be a minimum sustainable base for the minority like us. As long as LPs are still being made film will still be made and processed somewhere!

From what I can tell a lot of people who shoot film don't get prints. They get a disc with JPGs. That to me is a big shift. Prints take space and I think people today are used to having their images virtualized on a monitor.