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 bought a Nikon F2 in 1973. It has been run hard and put up wet ever since. I used it personally and professionally and it is currently in semi-retirement. I now have a Canon A200 (a little 2.0 MP jewel) and a Sony CD400 (4.0 MP). I love digital! No chemicals, no working in the dark and instant results. There will always be die-hards and uses for film shots. I imagine buggy whips are still being made and their market still exist...somewhere.
First of all,with the exception of several "niche" products that they made,Polaroid never thought of its products as "professional quality".Their market was the guy shooting his kids in the back yard,kinda like many of Kodak's most popular products of that era.
During the 50's,60's and 70's (my father's tenure),what they did,they did well.The technology was cutting edge,particularly the chemical engineering side of it. It's not a coincidence that their headquarters was within walking distance of both Harvard and MIT.My Dad had many,many MIT grads working for him in their hay day.
Read up on the history of the company,particularly its history during my Dad's tenure.Read up on their R&D department *and* their marketing department.
Polaroid never cured cancer.They never even made a truly professional grade camera or film.But it was a damn fine company that made products that many folks wanted over a four-plus decade period of time.
I have two of these Pentax ME cameras. Both now retired. I am learning the Canon 20D system, slowly.
I sold my Canon A-1 with Vivitar flash, wide angle and telephoto lenses and bag at a garage sale last summer for $50.
I am so done with film, and photography for that matter. I used to be the guy that took pictures of everything. I don't bother any more. I found that worrying about what would make a good picture, etc. was taking away from my BRAINS ability to soak in and store events.
We bought a Toshiba 3.2 megapixel a couple of years ago and really never use it. We don't even take a camera on trips any more. And if we want pictures of the grandkids, well, their parents keep us in constant supply.
Drew, question for ya. We have some wedding picture prints that we scanned on a HP 2100. For some reason, and with no human intervention, the scanner scanned and saved one picture as a JPG, and the other as a TIFF. Uh, why is that?
I just replaced my old 3 Mp digital with an 8Mp and I still own teo Nikon F models, which have been used once in the last four yesrs.
Since 1998, when I got my first digital camera, I know I have saved at least $9000 in film and processing costs... A net savings of roughly $8k
Probably true, but out of sheer necessity and volume, film scanners will continue to improve and sell for much longer than that.
10,000 negs and slides for me alone. Many decades of family and trips worldwide.
Don't plan to visit Pago Pago and the remote end of Ibiza island again any time soon...
I gave away my 25 year old Canon AE1 to my photographer daughter. She loves it. It looks very much like your posted picture. I have a two year old Olympus digital camera that is just fine for my purposes. Less weight, less bulk, I can carry it in my purse everyday. Hard to do that with the old Canon AE1. Things sure have changed.
I am getting better images from a 5 mp Nikon than I got from film, and I did my own processing for years. I even did color prints at home.
However, I have some Kodachromes taken in the 60s that I recently scanned at 27k dpi, 48 bit. They make grainless 24x36 inch files and 25 meg psd files in photoshop. To get this in digital you need a large format camera and about 22 megapixels.
I give consumer SLR cameras about three years to reach this level. Five, tops.
I have a little Fuji digital for fooling around but the only thing that could tempt me into digital full time would be a digicam with an ultra wide (17-20mm) zoom.
No digis I am aware of get wider than 32mm or so unless you want to inve$t in a whole new Nikon or Canon system.
The kind of photography people in my generation think of when you say Polaroid (the instant developing picture) was a landmark achievement that truly enabled the everyman photographer. One of the best parts of digital photography for the everyman (being able to review the finished shot and retake the picture if you don't like how it came out) was the truly brilliant aspect of the classic Polaroid, of course then it was 5 minutes and now it's 5 seconds, but up until 10 years ago it was an amazing technical achievement. It's a real shame Polaroid didn't spot which way the wind was blowing sooner, they could have been on the front end of the digital revolution instead of desperately trying to survive it.
Konica Minolta is getting big into the multifunction printers, the margin on those is pretty tasty, and there's less need for a wide variety so development costs are less.
Compared to 1/2000 or .0005?
Race car=225mph=331fps X 0.01=3.3 feet; 331fps X .0005=2 inches.
You won't even be able to see the G in Gatorade.
Before he died,my Dad and I used to talk about this very question.During its heyday,Polaroid's only real competitor (in the US) was Kodak,and that competition was,at the most,a partial one. Both companies did well in their particular fields because they did rather different things.
With the dawn of the digital age,Polaroid would,more and more,have be competing with giants like Sony,Panasonic,HP,etc.Of course,the same is now true of Kodak.
I sincerely doubt that Polaroid would have lasted long against such competition regardless of how early they hopped on the digital bandwagon.
If you read up on Kodak,a much larger (and better funded) company than Polaroid ever was,you'll see that they're slowly (or maybe not so slowly) losing that very battle.
I think Panasonic has a winner in its DMC-FZ30 model which is around that price.
In addition to 8 megapixels (raw), it has 12X optical zoom and shutter speeds to 1/3000, no shutter lag and lots of other goodies.
Steep learning curve but a real value for the price...
(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")
(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")
(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")
I hgave a film scanner, an Acer ScanWit, now sold by BenQ. It cost me $300.
At first I thought it was crap, because everything came out very grainy. Then I experimented with its options. I turned on the unsharp mask filter on the scanner driver, cranked up the resolution to the max, and suddenly the scans are great. The files are so big, however, that I have to cut them back a bit in photoshop. they are almost 50 megs before trimming them down.
My dad bought one of the first Polaroid outfits (a small suitcase) at the PX in Yokohama back in the late 1950s. I remember the b&w prints that came out of the back of the camera after pulling and peeling, then painting the print. I still have it somewhere...
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