January 11th, 2006
Nikon to Stop Selling Film-Based Cameras This Year
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
I guess you can’t say this is shocking but it sure happened faster than I expected. If you have any rolls of film and some decent equipment, I’d look into unloading it unless you feel nostalgic. Don’t get burned like I did and was unable to get rid of a 17 inch monitor for more than $5. $5??
As the film camera market shrinks and the popularity of compact digital cameras increases, demand for products that offer advanced features and extra value is continuing to grow. High performance digital SLR cameras are performing well as users shift from film-based SLR cameras or upgrade from compact digital cameras to digital SLR cameras.
As a result of the new strategy Nikon will discontinue production of all lenses for large format cameras and enlarging lenses with sales of these products ceasing as soon as they run out of stock. This also applies to most of our film camera bodies, interchangeable manual focus lenses and related accessories. Although Nikon anticipates that the products will still be in retail distribution up to Summer 2006. Source: Nikon via Digg
We say: Looks like the film camera joins the VCR and tube-based monitor on the scrap heap of history. Haven’t touch my film camera in two years now.
Tom Campanile says:
Sounds good to me, I hate Nikon anyway. F’ing nips.
January 11th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
Alice says:
Well, rude slurs aside, Nikon is doing really well in the digital world, that is definite. The question is will purists stick to film like audio purists stick to vinyl or is it just a sea change with a small group that no industry truly cares about as time goes on.
January 11th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
Michael Lyon says:
A sad development (no pun intended) as a life long photographer (since a teen) I recognize the use and specialization that film has - as well as the tremendous power of their latest digital.
Loosing touch with the origins of ones craft / passion is something to mourn - while photoshop allows tremendous creativity, the challenges of the early darkroom is a difference that matters to the creative eye.
I know that we have assurance that media will be able to handle the aging of electronic files, but I still have negatives that are 50 years old - my disks from 15 years ago are not useful ….
Michael
January 11th, 2006 at 6:26 pm
Charles says:
Michael, I agree with you regarding the storage of the images. It seems to be the greatest hurdle to overcome right now, which is how to maintain digital media over a great deal of time.
Slashdot just ran a story about a storage expert at IBM claiming that CDRs are only good from 2 to 5 years. He recommends a tape drive… a TAPE drive! It’s as if we haven’t advanced at all.
I think of this issue every time I go to a museum. I was at the DeYoung recently and studied the enormous stone tablets that are thousands of years old.
Does anybody have any confidence that one picture you take, or one word you write will be around 2000 years from now? How about 200 years from now? I don’t.
January 11th, 2006 at 7:17 pm
Mike says:
Looks like i will be selling my Canon SLR for $5 down the road also…:( - Digital SLR cameras are WAAAAYYYYYYYY too expensive, and my little kodak 5mp doesnt have hardly any zoom on it. Maybe the prices will come down for the digital slr if more companies do like Nikon is doing.
Mike
still sux :p my 300 zoom lens on my canon slr is just very nice, better than a 10x on the kodak
maybe Nikon will take trade ins as a promotion..:)
January 12th, 2006 at 3:44 am
strfry says:
How about a little balanced reporting here?
The article title is not only wrong, it seems to be deliberately misleading and sensationalistic. Nikon is still going to sell two 35mm and one 85mm film cameras. They also will support any product for up to 10 years after the sale.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.pl?ACCT=130907&TICK=NIKON&STORY=/www/story/01-11-2006/0004247596&EDATE=Jan+11,+2006
January 12th, 2006 at 7:22 am
Jim Frost says:
“Slashdot just ran a story about a storage expert at IBM claiming that CDRs are only good from 2 to 5 years. He recommends a tape drive… a TAPE drive! It’s as if we haven’t advanced at all.”
The IBM guy is an idiot. The primary issue is not the stability of the media; it’s no problem to find CD-R media that is stable into the tens of decades, it just happens to be about four or five times as expensive as the dye-based CD-Rs.
The primary problem with CD-Rs is that the CD readers are going to start to disappear relatively soon and, when the interfaces that current CD readers use are obsoleted, it will become difficult to read them at all.
One of the reasons that the IBM guy is an idiot is that this has already happened in the tape world. I have a 1/2″ tape I wrote in 1986 that I have not been able to read for years. Nobody I know has a 1/2″ tape drive that actually works anymore.
The solution to this problem is not to treat your backups as archival, but rather as ephemeral. Archive management must be done via migration. The best way to approach that is to make the data as portable as possible. That means stuffing your data on the fastest, highest density media you can find.
That’s a hard drive, not CD-R or DVD-R or tape. I note that hard drive storage is also much more stable than typical CD-Rs or DVD-Rs, easily into the tens of years.
As the drive interfaces change (gonna be hard to hook up an old IDE drive pretty soon) you migrate the data from drive to drive. This is not very time consuming because the drive interfaces are relatively fast.
I have been using this technique for twenty years, migrating data from drive to drive as the systems change. These days I even back it up on attached (USB or FireWire).
The more critical problem for image (and document) management is proprietary formats. JPEG and TIFF have been stable for well over a decade but RAW formats change from model to model and it is already difficult to find support for some RAW formats. Nikon just screwed a bunch of people by deliberately encrypting certain RAW file information — it will become very hard to recover that information when (not if) they stop supporting the format. Unless reader code is publicly available it becomes unlikely that the software will be available very long.
The smart digital photographer will convert RAW formats to a stable format (hopefully DNG or something like that, but right now TIFF is your best bet) at the first sign of obsolescence of their RAW format, if not sooner. I’ve been using TIFF for my most important images but it is too bulky for storage of all of my digital photographs and I’m looking forward to an industry standard like DNG.
jim
January 12th, 2006 at 8:13 am
Dave says:
I tend to agree with strfry. The key element understressed is the fact that they’re discontinuing production of all lenses for large format cameras. Film-based SLRs are not considered “large format” cameras. These bigger brothers are ones you’d see used for much more specialized work like wall-sized prints of sprawling vistas or maybe even aerial photography.
January 12th, 2006 at 9:27 am
Charles says:
Jim, I agree with all your points. Would even say you give the best solution for the situation at hand. However, I’m thinking in terms of a system/process/format that can be forgotten for 100’s of years and still be accessible. Nothing like that is on the horizon.
Arhival quality CDRs aside, you also brought up the issue of a CD reader.
Even though it is ‘possible’ to maintain the integrity of images, documents, and other files, through media format swaps, just how realistic is this solution for the majority of people? Most people struggle with just keeping a backup of their Outlook PST file, you know?
On a side note, the passing of film-based cameras will be sad. Developing a roll of b&w film and then printing the negatives in a dark room is a load of fun. Very cool stuff…
January 12th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Phil says:
The teeth-gnashers make it sound like every film-based camera in the world is going to mysteriously shut down due to Nikon’s announcement. Relax. Worry about it when FILM is no longer available or Canon drops their last film camera. Meanwhile, let Nikon shoot themselves in the foot….again!
January 13th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
phentermine says:
phentermine
crackpot jaundice salon bawling illusion phentermine http://phenterminehclhere.blogspot.com/
May 18th, 2006 at 9:58 am
ivaeuw says:
Hi My Name Is ivatob.
May 12th, 2007 at 5:04 pm