Saw the oddest thing the other day in a TV show. I was watching an episode, from last season, of “The Good Wife.” There was a scene in which a man who has just committed a murder grabs a camera — a nice-looking SLR — and strips the film out, to destroy evidence.
Wow. Who uses film anymore? No one on-screen explained it. (The character was wealthy and quirky, and perhaps that was supposed to imply an explanation; I don’t know.) Anyway, today Roger Ebert brings our attention to this:
At the turn of the 21st century, American shutterbugs were buying close to a billion rolls of film a year. This year, they might buy a mere 20 million, plus 31 million single-use cameras – the beach-resort staple vacationers turn to in a pinch, according to the Photo Marketing Association.
Eastman Kodak Co. marketed the world’s first flexible roll film in 1888. By 1999, more than 800 million rolls were sold in the United States alone. The next year marked the apex for combined U.S. sales of rolls of film (upward of 786 million) and single-use cameras (162 million).
Equally startling has been the plunge in film camera sales over the last decade. Domestic purchases have tumbled from 19.7 million cameras in 2000 to 280,000 in 2009 and might dip below 100,000 this year, says Yukihiko Matsumoto, the Jackson, Mich.-based association’s chief researcher.
For InfoTrends imaging analyst Ed Lee, film’s fade-out is moving sharply into focus: “If I extrapolate the trend for film sales and retirements of film cameras, it looks like film will be mostly gone in the U.S. by the end of the decade.”
I’m a traditionalist, and was slow to give up film myself. But eventually — in the middle of this past decade — affordable digital got good enough. And since about 2005, my excellent Nikon 8008 has sat abandoned in a drawer. Which is sad. It is SUCH a better camera than I use today (in fact, I seldom use my actual “camera” any more, because the iPhone is so good for most purposes), enabling me to control the image so much better. But who can deal with the hassle and expense of buying the film, paying to have it processed (or paying even MORE in chemicals and such to do it at home, which I used to do), and then store the film safely, etc. And now you can see whether you got the shot immediately — and take unlimited exposures…
But it’s still sad…
There are diehard holdouts, connoisseurs who insist that there’s a quality to film that is lost without it, but to my philistine eye, the difference has disappeared. Same thing with vinyl records: But since I got a USB turntable and started digitizing my vinyl a couple of years back, I’m become pretty acutely aware that sound files that started out digital sound better than ones that came from my records. To me. Which probably also indicates I’m a philistine.
Ah, progress…
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