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.
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