• Welcome to Photrio!
    Registration is fast and free. Join today to unlock search, see fewer ads, and access all forum features.
    Click here to sign up

Fujifilm Exec's talk about Film

Status
Not open for further replies.
On the positive side he said that they plan to support film for 10 to 20 years.

The other side is that either we will eventually go to digital [which will be much better then] or we need to buy PE's books and start making film now as a back up plan. Should we start a Go Fund for PE?
 
A recent TV show had a scene in which a parent gave children digital cameras that ejected prints. If this is a real product (I have no evidence either way except the video that I saw) then it betokens the future. This impacts instax!

As for film, the trend is surely downwards but as with the stock market it has ups and downs. We are currently in an up. How long will it last? Anyone can guess, but no one knows.

PE
 
The problem is the fewer people buying film the more expensive it gets and its a cycle that's hard to reverse.
I am in Japan and can only speak of this market but since I started shooting film which was in Dec 2013, Kodak prices more than doubled and quite a few films discontinued.

This without a doubt puts new comers off.
Ben
 

It was probably a Polaroid Snap, my niece has one.
 
bvy said:
I can't imagine there's still a "downward trend." That would suggest there's a large enough group of people still expected to convert to digital. Maybe that's true in other parts of the world. Maybe I'm deceiving myself.
Click to expand...

According to Ilford Executive, you are correct.
 
georg16nik said:
On your computer display, maybe.
Is your darkroom cherry popped or you are still a wet-print virgin?
Ever shot Copex-rapid or Adox CMS 20 in 135 or MF format? Printed some at 16x20 or larger?

Amazingly funny what bunch of amateurs craw APUG.
Click to expand...

Digital DOES out resolve film in comparable formats up to (and actually including though the price gets so silly it's a different sort of apples to oranges thing) anything short of 8x10. It's proven.

I've been making wet prints since...uh, I'm not 100% sure but I was about nine years old when I made my first one, which would have been 1972 or so. I have printed black and white, RA4, Cibachrome (in those days) and Type R 2203. I have a black and white darkroom now where I can and do print up to 16x20 from 35mm, 6x4.5, 6x6, rarely 6x7 (via rollfilm back on my 4x5) and 4x5 sheet film.

I have less than zero interest in printing any 35mm negative to 16x20, ESPECIALLY high contrast document-style films developed in trick soft developers (I didn't care for Tech Pan that much either.) Yes it can be done with good results but it's just much easier to get excellent results by starting with a bigger negative and more comfortable film. I have 16x20s (and more often 11x14s) hanging on my wall from 6x6, 6x4.5 and 4x5. I don't have anything bigger than 8x10 from 35mm but not because I couldn't, but because by the time I got larger trays and easels and such I had larger cameras too, and I haven't gone back to print my old 35mm negatives larger, though there are some I might eventually.

In terms of any objectively measured (and that's important - I am not talking about someone's vague ill-defined concept of a "look" but hard data) good full frame DSLR will just plain spank any 35mm film and most medium format and medium format digital will run at least as good as and often better than film up to at least 4x5. And at the very high end an 8x10 back will outdo 8x10 film:

https://luminous-landscape.com/iq180-vs-8x10/

Note that I don't do digital myself except for very casual snapshooting with my phone camera. I have precisely zero mounted prints from digital hanging on my walls and many from film. But that's because I enjoy film, I don't particularly enjoy digital, and film is more than good enough for my purposes. There is also that elusive "look" which I still think is more wishful thinking than reality if the digital is done carefully (but casual film will look different from casual digital - not necessarily better but different.)

But to claim that film results are so much superior is just arrogant nonsense. I think film is more fun, but that's a personal decision.
 
NB23 said:
Especially B&W, digital looks like craaaaap.
Click to expand...

Not if it's done carefully and well. That takes more knowledge than color, but it can be done. I've seen black and white prints (inkject yet) from digital that I thought were film and were excellent.

Now if you just shoot with a digital camera, convert to grayscale in Photoshop and print directly out on a regular injket printer, I agree - it's pretty crappy.
 

I'm all for promoting film. I shoot film, I develop film, I wet print black and white and will RA4 again when I get running water and some better ventilation again in the darkroom.

But I don't think promoting film should be about how it looks better - it won't, ESPECIALLY for someone new to it. It should be about how film is fun, film is different, film has a different (when done casually this is quite true) look etc. not that it's objectively better.

I don't buy expired film except for an occasional emulsion that is no longer made that I can't get any other way. I shoot color on film now, both slides for projection and negatives for printing but I have them printed - again until I upgrade the darkroom. Unfortunately the only really practical way to print from the slides now is to scan and output digitally, either at home with inkjet or via Lightjet type printers from labs.

I like working with 4x5 and periodically find myself lusting after an 8x10 kit, but always hold back because I can't print it optically, except contact prints and while those can be superb I really don't want to carry a camera four times as big and accordingly heavier, spend four times as much on film etc. only to make prints no larger than 1/4 the size I can make with excellent quality from my 4x5 negatives or even medium format, so 8x10 for me would mean scanning and...I'm just not interested. I DO have a sneaking, "someday" interest in wet plate, because I think the results are beautiful and because I like all kinds of old things from the early days of any technology, and for that you can't enlarge so that will mean getting an 8x10 or whole plate or similarly larger camera.

If I get a better digital camera, which I may, it will be for two uses: 1) family snapshots where I really don't want to go into the darkroom and emerge two weeks later stinking of fixer after making a couple of hundred 5x7s to share with family *g* and 2) for very low light. In a recent PM exchange I shared this story with someone I was corresponding with, about how I had been somewhere with a film camera, the fastest film available, and just put it away because it was too dim where digital would have worked:

I remember a trip to New Orleans with my now ex wife, when I found myself hanging out with some friends and drinking absinthe in a converted warehouse occupied by a troupe of tattooed and pierced clowns and watching an adult (lots of sex related gags etc.) clown show for someone's birthday. In the words of Captain Picard, "sometimes number One, we must simply bow to the absurd." I had my Pentax LX, 50 1.7 lens and TMZ, and even at 6400 it was just too dim. I could have got some usable highlights but still with movement and difficulty focusing so I finally just thought "I need digital for this" and put the camera away and enjoyed the show. Or at least enjoyed the absinthe. TMZ and now Delta 3200 are superb-for-speed at 3200, usable but not nearly as good in my experience at 6400, and far inferior to decent digital at either speed not to mention being black and white only. I love black and white, but sometimes I also want color. (Though for some shots nothing beats the grainy mostly-highlights and empty shadows of really pushed to the max B&W too.)​

Horses for courses. I wouldn't try to shoot that clown show on 4x5, though I might have shot it on 6x4.5 IF a) it had been a couple of stops brighter, and b) I got that 80/1.9 for my Mamiya I want. But it wasn't a couple of stops brighter and film shots just weren't happening.

I love film. I will use it as long as I can, and where it works. But I'm not going to refuse to use a different tool where film WON'T work, just because it isn't film. (I won't enjoy it as much though. *g*)
 

The link you refer to compares scanned 8×10 Fuji Acros film vs digital back, not prints.
Unsurprisingly disappointing amateurs hour, again.



You say “good full frame DSLR will just plain spank any 35mm film”... but in reality you never experienced ISO 50 or slower films.
That's just brilliant!!!
 

I never, EVER, said that I never experienced slow films you "brilliant",..ah-hem, person. I said I didn't LIKE Tech Pan, not that I never tried it. I shoot Pan F+ regularly and used to shoot a fair amount of Agfa Ultra 50 when it was available and shot a fair amount of Panatomic-X back in the day, probably back before you picked up a camera.

I may have been overly strong in my wording because I was riled by your arrogant nonsense but I stand by the gist of it. On the whole I think I will continue to enjoy APUG as I have for years, that is without hearing you. Welcome to my ignore list. As we used to say on Usenet, *plonk*


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk and 100% recycled electrons - because I care.
 

What's ill defined about a person's preference?
 
anta40 said:
On the other side, there's a rumor that Fuji is doing research on digital medium format cameras.

Maybe we can see the real thing 5 years later.
It's kinda "ironic" though a company that called themselves "Fujifilm" don't make film cameras anymore
Click to expand...

Research? Who makes Hasselblad's H series 645 camera bodies & lenses? Fuji. They have been making them for years. And they no doubt have had an inside look at Hasselbald's digital backs for the H Series.
 
Roger, you need to look at those tests again!

The analog samples show obvious digital artifacts, especially in diagonal objects which show up as jagged stepped lines. Something went wrong in the scanning. It appears to be digital aliasing due to extreme high resolution.

PE
 
RattyMouse said:
What's ill defined about a person's preference?
Click to expand...

Nothing, for them. But if they can't articulate a clearly visible reason for it then it has no relevance to anyone else. I prefer film too. But that's a subjective preference and it's not going to persuade many people, if that is one's goal.
 

Point taken but: I may have overstated it, but he started out by going way overboard about how digital looks so inferior and people who don't realize it just can't see or something to that effect. (Is your darkroom cherry popped? Ever print [high contrast document films in special developers] 35mm to 16x20?" If I am going to optically print to 16x20 (which I do) I prefer medium or large format with much more conventional and less temperamental films.

At any rate, if digital were that inferior it wouldn't have taken over virtually all professional uses, including some (though of course not all) of those selling "fine art" prints - though granted they often sell to people who really don't know anything about image quality. But whether a scanning back can really beat 8x10 when examined minutely or not, that's not how we, even those serious about it, actually view images. My real point is that the "bashing on digital, film is so superior" approach isn't going to work to promote film and is just going to come off as a rant coming from a cranky eccentric. Heck, I love film, have and use a darkroom etc. and it comes off that way to me. I can understand where some people get a view like his, because it's easy to do bad digital, of which the overwhelming majority is and which still looks acceptable to most people, but is clearly inferior to good film work. But good digital from a careful worker looks very, very good indeed and all the wishing and fulminating in the world will not make it otherwise.

I hear you. There are clearly some areas where film is better, and in any case image quality is not determined by any single measure. But I think digital long ago surpassed the point where we could effectively promote film use by claiming that it's better. Maybe it is at the very high end done by a very careful worker, but those folks don't need film promoted to them. They already know what they like, what they can do, and the best tool for their job. (This MIGHT change as film becomes more of a memory and even careful, experienced photographers have all started out with digital - but that time is not yet I think.) Among casual users it's going to take more work and learning with film to get results they consider as good, never mind better, and way more work and experience to eek out any real superiority if it's even there to be eeked out. If digital were that bad it wouldn't have taken over as it has. Granted that at the consumer level convenience and cost have always trumped quality (at least until a certain quite low quality level is reached - even the consumer market didn't seem to like the tiny disc format) but digital hasn't been limited to that. It's taken over for high end working pros as well, with the exceptions of a few artists and specialists. So I think promoting film, to be effective, needs to center around things other than claims of quality - film is fun, film is different, film has many different nuances, film has readily available inexpensive equipment, film is even, ah-hem, "retro-cool." But we can't go around claiming how it looks so much better as people look at their digital results, are delighted with them, and dismiss us as raving Luddites.
 
I'm more concerned about the continued availability of color printing papers, for which Fuji is the key player. But those don't seem to be in any danger since many of these RA4 papers are cross-platform and are necessary for digital printing environments as well as optical darkrooms. For continued color film availability, a freezer will buy you another decade if push comes to shove. I'll be pushing up daisies long before I print all my good color images already on hand; and I'm still shooting plenty more. I don't think black and white film and paper will ever be out of demand. But it's easier to manufacture. I'd hate to lose ACROS, but there are alternatives.
 
... what about vinyl records?

I wouldn't put too much weight in the interview with the Fuji execs.
To me what it said is Fuji is not pursuing the film business; film business is out there if they want it but Fuji is not going after it and not promoting it.
They are promoting their Fuji digital lines and that's it.
That's really what they were saying.
If the Fuji digital business were to top out- they may change their tune.
Companies that need revenue and understand a business can turn on a dime for revenue. Chameleon characteristics - agility - its a strength.

I don't think film is going to die completely any time in many upcoming decades. It may shrink and then grow again but it won't die out.
Remember the vinyl record? The vinyl record industry got the crap kicked out of it for a while at the advent of the digital CD in the 1980s.
Vinyl records were touted as imperfect, inconvenient, and bulky in comparison to digital CD sound.
Many listeners abandoned the vinyl record in quest of "The perfect sound forever" - a marketing pitch from the CD world.
If you listened hard and compared though, vinyl still sounded better, more organic, more real to life.
People who enjoyed vinyl stuck with it, bought up the vinyl records that others dumped for a fraction of the original price (sound familiar, can you draw any analogies here?) and enjoyed collecting and listening to the analogue treasures. After a decades or more of declines; vinyl started to make a resurgence in the early 2000's. Small vinyl pressing plants started up and pressed new vinyl again. Many new listeners took a liking to the analogue sound. New turntable companies emerged and more stores specializing in vinyl set up shop. Today the vinyl record industry is doing great and growing. The big players in the music biz also release on vinyl and well as the digital mediums. Old classics are being reissued on vinyl and there is a shortage of available vinyl pressing plants, new artists are also releasing on vinyl and the collector market is raging. Check out some of the eBay prices on blues and jazz vinyl from the 50's and 60's. People realize vinyl has SOUL and quality.

I don't think the film industry will be any different. People realize that film has SOUL and quality.
... so enjoy it, collect film stuff if you got the cash and watch out for the lemmings; they might just sweep you off the cliff with them if you are not careful
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Speywalker, this has been stated over and over, but you and others must realized that making an analog film is orders of magnitude more difficult than making an analog record. If a production line is shut down, it is unlikely to be restarted without millions of dollars in investment and many new people learning technologies that have become obsolete and - that were never published in the first place.

PE
 
A different scale maybe for analogue film but I fail to see why old equipment and knowledge in living people heads cannot be reinstated.
 
speywalker said:
...I fail to see why old equipment and knowledge in living people heads cannot be reinstated.
Click to expand...
With respect to the people, because a, they're not necessarily still living and b, even if they are, they've either retired or have moved on to other positions. There never were that many of them, and multiple sub-specialties without crossover expertise are needed.

As concerns equipment, the typical scenario when things shut down is that it gets scrapped.
 
Well if y'all want to believe that it will disappear forever in the next while - who am I to judge.
Personally that's not my belief or prediction.
 
Speywalker,

There are probably fewer than 200 people world wide that can make an analog B&W or color film. Many of them are of retirement age or older, and few are in a position to pass on their knowledge. A plant to make film is probably on the order of millions of dollars in cost. Only about 6 or 7 exist and only about 3 of them can do color.

I've been there and done that personally. Can you make a film? Or is that just belief.

PE
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Menu
Log in
Register