Fujifilm Exec's talk about Film

Photo Engineer said:

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.

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A real-life example might be how the Impossible Project has struggled to duplicate what Polaroid had done - and they had, I think, the advantage of enlisting a few former Polaroid employees plus rescuing some equipment (or a plant itself).

But that prompts the question: isn't any of this stuff written down? Or is it like our inability to build a Saturn V rocket again?

One of the reasons young digital photographers think film has poor resolution is simply because they've only seen poorly scanned images from film. That is, the limiting factor is how the film was scanned.

Theo Sulphate said:

A real-life example might be how the Impossible Project has struggled to duplicate what Polaroid had done - and they had, I think, the advantage of enlisting a few former Polaroid employees plus rescuing some equipment (or a plant itself).

But that prompts the question: isn't any of this stuff written down? Or is it like our inability to build a Saturn V rocket again?

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A lot of the information was compartmentalized in order to protect trade secrets.

And probably to make individual employees less valuable to anyone seeking to "poach" staff.

Not to mention that many, many key people were and remain bound by confidentiality agreements.

Film was a huge and extremely profitable business for a very long time.

Until it wasn't.

And by then, so much of the state of the art was oriented toward high volumes that "right-sizing" is very difficult.

To give you a sense how compartmentalized things were, my father was the supervisor of colour processing services at the Kodak lab in North Vancouver, BC Canada for more than twenty years, but he was never, throughout all that time, privy to the exact numbers for what the film development volumes were. I can only assume that those volume numbers were considered to be commercially confidential, and therefore known only by a few "higher-ups".

Photo Engineer said:

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

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And look at the difficulties Film Ferrania has had. The have the very people who ran the line they are resurrecting, and it's taking them 2 years or more to get it going.

bence8810 said:

Talking about Fujifilm:

http://www.fujifilm.com/news/n160122.html

Here it goes again.
Ben

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Does B&H's price of Acros already reflect this increase? Anyone know?

RattyMouse said:

Does B&H's price of Acros already reflect this increase? Anyone know?

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Nevermind. I looked up my order history and found that the price today is the same. It has not been increased. Yet.

OK, film is dying and it won't be long until its gone completely - 10 years max - its done forever.

The companies trying to make a future out of it will fail - the business it too difficult, competition from digital too great, costs un-controllable and selling the benefits of film to end users - almost impossible - no market.
The knowledge and equipment to make film is too vast, no-one can recreate it, no one knows anymore and all the film manufacturing equipment has been shredded.
The current and new photography user base will not continue to see any reason to shoot film - analogue cameras and equipment to shoot and print film are tough to find, expensive and film is no different from digital so why bother

The Fuji execs have convinced me.


seriously:
I see film as having a rough time recently - and some Fuji exec saying he wants to make digital cameras instead.
What about all the positive news - a lot of it right in this forum?

...not convinced film is on its death bed. Film industry is changing -yes, shrinking - yes, dead or dying and soon gone forever -no

Michael R 1974 said:

Don't waste your time on this argument, Roger. There will always be people who think they can see the difference.

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Well, if I wasn't seeing the difference so clearly (of film vs digital), I definitely wouldn't be stupid enough to continue to shoot film.

The question is really about high tech films like Tmax 100 & 400, Portra and Fuji's Provia and Velvia slide films. No worries about traditional B&W emulsions but if Kodak or Fuji go then I don't have much hope for those films or their qualities being resurrected elsewhere for the reasons already stated. Still though if say Fuji go on for another 10 years then I buy up and freeze loads of Provia that gets me to maybe 20 years assuming I can still do E6, 20 years is more than long enough in life to not worry about it.

Speaking only from a technical perspective, I remember a that a few decades ago a photo magazine had an article about reaching 100 lines/mm resolution. (In this context, 100 lines/mm means 100 dark lines interleaved with 100 light lines, i.e. line pairs.) In fairness, they used a high contrast target, and resulting 100 lines/mm image was basically at the visible limit, i.e. low contrast. I think the film was Panatomic-X, which isn't made anymore.

Anyway, They were able to get very close to 100 lines/mm with with a number of lenses when used at optimum aperture, and they even reached that level with a few lenses.

There is something called the Nyquist sampling theorem, which states (in the case we are discussing here), you need at least 200 sampling points/mm to resolve 100 lines/mm. What does this imply? It means that you would need at least 34,560,000 image sensor, i.e. about 35 Megapixels for a 24x36mm image, i.e. a 35mm image.

How does 35 Megapixels map onto current technology? It means that with a 70 Megapixel camera you could come close to resolving 100 lines/mm.

Why just "close" and not all the way there? There are actually three reasons. One has to do with the fact that a 70 Megapixel camera has 35 Megapixels of green sensors, which sounds good because it meets the Nyquist limit for the green region of the spectrum, but it only has 17.5 Megapixels of blue sensors, which means it can only reach 70 lines/mm in the blue region. The same goes for the red, i.e. 70 lines/mm. Therefore, a 70 megapixel camera would not be able to reach 100 lines/mm for a full color image, even in the best theoretical case.

The second issue is that the Nyquist limit is, in some ways, too generous. If a sampling device (e.g. an imaging sensor) samples a periodic signal at the peaks and troughs then all is well, more or less, but if it samples a periodic signal at the nodes (between the peaks and troughs), then the recorded signal is a constant, i.e. no image detail at all. Therefore, the Nyquist limit actually underestimates the practical difficulty in recording the image, and more pixels are needed.

The third issue is that in order to avoid "aliasing" one needs to apply a filter to the image to eliminate higher frequency components, but that reduces the detail in the image. It's actually worse than this, because we don't have good "brick wall" filters for images, so the filter cutoff for spatial frequency needs to be even lower than theoretical, which means that the image is filtered to be even fuzzier before it hits the sensor.

Now, as a practical matter, for a lot of photography 50 lines/mm might be considered a better number than 100 lines/mm. The theoretical limit to achieve this would be a sensor of at least 25,920,000 megapixels, i.e. 8,640,000 blue sensors, 17,280,000 green sensors, and 8,640,000 red sensors. Here I am assuming the sensor is a conventional Bayer sensor, and I am also assuming that the sensor megapixel specification is specification is given in the usual commercial (deceptive) way. For other reasons discussed above, even a 26 Megapixel camera would not achieve 50 lines/mm.

Of course, there is more to image quality than just resolution, but I did want to interject at least a little bit of rigorous science/math/engineering into the discussion.

Photo Engineer said:

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

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Why are comparisons between analog and digital always made in the digital domain?

Thanks Alan, an excellent post!

Also, I never said film was dying. I said it would be hard to start again if it ever did die! There is a big difference. Note the Kodak announcement of a new 8mm MP camera!

PE

rbultman said:

Why are comparisons between analog and digital always made in the digital domain?

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Because you can't post an analog image without scanning it, thus making it digital!

That is the fault of all comparisons. You need prints to make an eyeball comparison!

PE

Photo Engineer said:

Because you can't post an analog image without scanning it, thus making it digital!

That is the fault of all comparisons. You need prints to make an eyeball comparison!

PE

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Seems unfair, no?

What's your exit strategy when film production ceases? Wet plates? Dry plates? How possible is DIY film without some industry behind it?

I am happy for now with the color and B&W emulsions available. I marvel at the detail available when I run Porta 400 through my GA645. The colors are fantastic. The camera, so simple.

I can only hope that FF succeeds and other boutique brands spring up, possibly from the ashes of the likes of Kodak and Fuji via spin-offs. I don't shoot E6. I hope wonderful color negative films survive.

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.

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Not necessarily.They also may just be expected to die out.

Photo Engineer said:

Because you can't post an analog image without scanning it, thus making it digital!

That is the fault of all comparisons. You need prints to make an eyeball comparison!

PE

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rbultman said:

Seems unfair, no?

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That is entirely fair, my eyes are living analog organs.

Sirius Glass said:

That is entirely fair, my eyes are living analog organs.

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I meant that it was unfair to analog that it gets compared in the digital domain. Kinda like being the away team playing in the home team's stadium.

OK then we agree.

rbultman said:

What's your exit strategy when film production ceases? Wet plates? Dry plates? How possible is DIY film without some industry behind it?

I am happy for now with the color and B&W emulsions available. I marvel at the detail available when I run Porta 400 through my GA645. The colors are fantastic. The camera, so simple.

I can only hope that FF succeeds and other boutique brands spring up, possibly from the ashes of the likes of Kodak and Fuji via spin-offs. I don't shoot E6. I hope wonderful color negative films survive.

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Making good to excellent B&W films and papers are rather easy to do in the home darkroom. I've taught several workshops on this and at present George Eastman House is teaching workshops. See their schedule. Nick is busy coating plates and film at GEH in preparation for the upcoming workshops.

Color is a bit much but can be done.

PE

Photo Engineer said:

...I've taught several workshops on this and at present George Eastman House is teaching workshops...

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I seem to be on an off-topic tear lately, but here goes anyway.

On October 6 2015, George Eastman House changed its name to George Eastman Museum. Yes, Ron, I know, old habits die hard.

Hello,

when Fuji's digital execs talk about about film, then mostly......much ado about nothing.
There is a long history over the years that these guys are not very well informed (I am also talking from my own experience with some of them... ).

Let's come to the details:

RattyMouse said:

DPR posted an interview from two of Fujifilm's corporate execs. Mostly this is all about digital cameras but there were a few questions about film. Here they are:

We talk a lot about digital imaging, but Instax is still very popular. Why is that, in your opinion?

TT: Instax is being used by the younger generation. They have never seen prints! So a print popping out the side of a camera is a [novelty] for them. And physical pictures. Exchanging pictures has become a new mode of communication.

Do you think film in general will have a resurgence?

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Well, some years ago the same people have said there will be no revival of instant film!
But what happened instead? Since 2004 the demand for Fuji Instax films has increased by a factor of 40x (!!!).
The Instax cameras are the most popular and best selling cameras in the whole photo industry. They are selling much much better than any other digital camera! Not only better selling than any other Fuji digital camera (for which these Fuji execs are responsible for), but also better selling than any other digital camera from Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax, Panasonic etc..

To satisfy the increasing demand for Instax films Fuji has to run its factory with three shifts each day, continuous 24h operation!
Here is the source (Fuji Marketing rep.):
http://www.wiwo.de/technologie/gadg...ben/12751648.html?p=9&a=false&slp=false#image

RattyMouse said:

You mentioned in your presentation that demand for film peaked in 2000. Can you give me a current idea of how that compares to demand today?

TT: We sell less than 1% of that amount now. Across all formats.

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Sorry, but that is absolutely impossible. It cannot be true!
Here are the reasons why:
The sales record in global film sales was 3 billion films in 1999 / 2000.
1% of that is 30 million films. But the current market for BW films alone is about 20 million films p.a. (source: Howard Hopwood and Simon Galley at the last Ilford factory tour).
And the colour film market has always been much much bigger than the BW film market. For example here in Germany up to 2012 95 % of all films sold have been colour films. The market percentage of BW is higher now, but still more than 80-85% of the market is colour film.
The current film market in Germany alone is about 4 million films p.a.
So you see at once that the number given by the Fuji digital guys is wrong and far off the reality.
They may know their digital stuff, but they don't know the status of the film market.

By the way, Ilford has seen significant increase in demand for film in 2015. I've got similar reports from all other BW film manufacturers / distributors except Foma (stable demand there). Professional colour film is doing better as well in many markets. Amateur colour negative film is still weak, unfortunately.

But, it is just simple:
Film manufacturers (just like almost all others manufacturers) are opportunist. Well, they have to be .
If you buy their products, if demand is increasing, they will continue production, and give you what you need. If demand is strong enough, they will even re-introduce former discontinued products. Or develop new products.
Look at Instax as an example: Demand hit the bottom in 2004, it was tiny at that time. But then increased steadily year for year. Fuji invested in marketing and in new products, and the demand even increased more. They were "forced" to do by the consumers. And they did.

That can also happen with the other, standard film types. It is in our hands as consumers:
- shoot more film, and all types of it
- spread the word about the unique characteristics of film and the fun of shooting it
- get other photographers interested in film
- if you are active on social media, use it and spread the word (I've just started that: https://www.facebook.com/Filmreif-Photographie-1589626601326930/ )
- educate the young photographers (I am doing that for years, and the response from young photographers is excellent)

Don't be part of the problem. Be part of the solution!
A grass roots movement for film can keep it alive and kicking!

Best regards,
Henning

P.S.: Concerning the just announced Fuji price increase: Kodak will increase prices, too. 15%, from February on. Source: One of the biggest worldwide online film distributors. An absolutely reliable source.

Henning Serger said:

P.S.: Concerning the just announced Fuji price increase: Kodak will increase prices, too. 15%, from February on. Source: One of the biggest worldwide online film distributors. An absolutely reliable source.

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So basically everyone is increasing their prices?

I spent most of the day getting prices for almost every available film and paper out there around the world to help me decide where and what to buy. Here's a short price comparison I just finished. I chose 3 films from 5 manufacturers and looked at their pricing for 35mm and 120 roll film sizes from 5 different major retail sellers:

I consider that 1% figure given by Fuji for their colour film sales very plausible based on the figures I got.

To be fair to Henning I must say that the year of the peak varied for the product and the market and that the decline was different worldwide, and that we are in such small regions that contingencies in the figures calculations are based on will have greater effect.


More important to me though is that I see a strong reduction in the rate of decline.

rbultman said:

Why are comparisons between analog and digital always made in the digital domain?

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A more pertinent question is why aren't the comparisons done by scanning prints of the same size as the final print is the only thing that counts?