I remember seeing one advertised years ago, but not since.
Ah, yes... the "EFC-1" (Electronic Film Cartridge?) from Silicon Film:
Neat idea, too bad it never made it past the "vaporware" stage.
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.
One shot digitals are already on the market. Film is gone as a grocery store item. I tried to buy a blank VHS tape at the grocery last week and was told they no longer sell it.
Once this stuff is not mass produced it will disappear quickly.
Kodak is losing the same battle for pretty much the same reason, Kodak had spent decades positioning themselves as the great photopaper company (with good cameras and film to go with it) and then people stopped caring about paper. Probably the biggest problem Polaroid would have had jumping on the digital thing is they were positioned at the low end of the market and new technology is never cheap, so that would have been a hard conversion to make, but they were so perfectly positioned for the instant gratification aspect of digital they might have been able to leverage it. It's always a shame to see such a landmark go down, sad to think that in a generation or so when you hand somebody one of those classic square pictures with the white border they won't know that that's not just any picture, that's a Polaroid. Going through my grandmother's stuff last year when she died I was reminded of that, there was two different sentences when we found boxes of photos.
What's film?
There's something to be said for preserving every bit of resolution from film.
With recordable DVDs now, a low end DVD disk is good for 80 full-size images. A good option for those must-save shots....
Yeah, but only in bath houses in San Francisco!
Leitz optics are wonderful, but to my eyes they aren't wonderful enough to justify the price premium. What I'm waiting for is a wideangle digital with reasonably priced Japanese (ie Vivitar, Tamron class) optics.
Believe it or not, 80 images per DVD is not sustainable for anyone who takes a lot of pictures. Recordable optical media has an uncertain shelf life. I have three year old CDs that are unreadable.
I'm going with external hard drives, at least two of everything.
I have so many accumulate family pictures, about 15,000 now from several generations. I have sixty years of my father's pictures, a bunch of my father-in-law's, My kids' pictures, plus mine.
I would rather have good hi-res jpegs that I can keep multiple copies of than perfect ones I can't keep backups of.
20-30 years ago when there were a whole bunch of 35mm SLRs on the market, the specialty lens companies could make one basic lens in a dozen different mounts and benefit from the economies of scale.
Now that there are only three or four interchangable lens camera makers, and the lens mounts themselves are much more complex, the camera maker has no competition to fear and lens prices have gone through the roof.
You are using an old camera. The shutter lag time on the Canon 30D, Canon's latest DSLR, is 65ms which is basically non-existant as it is non-detectable unless you are shooting bullets piercing playing cards.
Exactly -- it's why I use my CANON and a speed lens for shooting cars at races.
By the time most digital cameras finsh whirring and thinking and adjusting and asking me questions, the car is in the next turn.
Analog still beat digital for the price. (until u develop all those LOSER shots on proofs ...)
If I'm not mistaken, the film divisions of both Ilford and Agfa are bankrupt, no longer in business, and no longer producing film. You had better stock up.
You are using the wrong (older) camera. The Canon EOS-1D Mark II shoots digital images at 8.5 frames per second at 8.2 megapixels each with a shutter lag of 55 milliseconds. Your film camera is certainly slower than that.
I remember seeing one advertised years ago, but not since.
Ah, yes... the "EFC-1" (Electronic Film Cartridge?) from Silicon Film:
Neat idea, too bad it never made it past the "vaporware" stage.
You are right about Agfa (still have a couple dozen rolls in the cooler) but Ilford is back in business.
http://www.bestpricecameras.com/prodetails.asp?prodid=193802&start=1
CANON EOS-1D ?????
Well no Sh!t Sherlock, it's a $6000 digital camera, then add lenses.
I get great shots with my old AE-1 and have maybe $2K in it over 10 years +
Leica has a digital back for their SLRs...
However, I believe that it's substantially more expensive than many "ProAm" DSLRs, like the Nikon D200.
Mark
Momma don't take my Kodakchrome away....
OK then, the Canon Rebel XT (8 MP sensor) has a shutter lag of 95 milliseconds (also undetectable) and has a street price of $479.
Drooool. Nice unit.
That's my ultimate photogasm dream. A digital SLR. I just can't afford nor rationalize the expense right now. Someday.
My ultimate hope is that someday the technology will be such that I can use all of my Pentax bayonet mount lenses on whichever camera I eventually buy.
I've invested a lot of dough on some very nice lenses and it would be a gass to be able to use them on a digital SLR.
Probably a pipe dream though.
There are only three labs in the entire world where you can still get Kodachrome film processed.
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