Dude you sure get around, don't you? The thing you keep missing about your "audience" here is that they don't really care about how cheap digital is. Why do you insist on continually trying to convince APUG members of this? You're simply mistaken if you believe that the majority of people on this site want or even believe themselves that film is a mass-market consumer player.
Dude.
I was responding to one person who opined about some mass market equivalency. You're the one on the soapbox.
And you get around more than I do, as one can conveniently see from your posts
Also, you're seriously ignoring one obvious aspect about the "shoebox phenomenon": that in the wake of bad treatment or storage, by and large most still have some semblance of their images - even if said images have suffered over the years. Anybody sane will take a degraded but still perceivable analog image over a stream of completely lost or unreadable binary.
Why would binary be unreadable? There are standardized ISO formats, as film is a ISO format. Binary is math and unless you encrypt, the primer is algebra. Careful migration is/was a factor for celluloid as it is for digital. There's a lot of people working on it in a variety of ways.
But..oops! now you are engaging in the vs. debate. It's the "completely lost" hyperbole the I take issue with. That is hardly a common phenomenon. Carelessness in analog is as damaging in digital. It's more human behaviour than inherent in the medium.
The deeper issue is the treatment or cultural valuation of the photograph as a visual medium rather than the actual medium of the photograph. Lowering barrier to entry so low that images are now almost ephemeral and costless has resulted in the "no limits" effect: even more crap that's given less attention to than it ever was before.
I totally agree. So archiving a lot of this stuff that no one will ever look agains is either not worth the social or economic investment, or a clever huckster trick to sell through fear.
I would argue that the 1-hour photo did a huge amount to over-click in photography regardless of medium. The problem still existed, and the issue for film is now one of having difficulty downsizing once having thrived on the establishment of the scale.
However, film supporters need to care about the economy of digital because that is the benchmark. Film dies if it gets too expensive relative to digital. That's going to be a critical measure in the salvage of Kodak's emulsions, which is the topic of the thread.
I like the blue sky,thinking, Gibson's analogy. I'm not sure it translates to the mass production of film, because guitars never reached that size market nor are produced through such capital intensive industrial processes, but hypothetically the premise is sound as to what might happen with Kodak.
Yes, I don't think anyone on apug needs converting.
