"William Robb" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >
>In affluent parts of the world, I expect enough consumers will go to digital >to dictate what every one else will do as well. <snip> >As far as film hanging around because of non computerized parts of the world >will be using it, I have a few thoughts: >Consumer photography is a luxury item. >In order to have consumer photography, you must have a market with a certain >amount of affluence. >Once a society has become affluent enough to have consumer photography, it >will generally also have things like flush toilets and electric lights. >Computers won't be far behind that, and so much for film photography in that >neck of the woods. > >Digital prints should be less expensive than projected prints anyway. There >is far less labour involved. >We have it set up so that the customer does most of the bookwork, so there >is a time savings there, and we don't have to handle film or do as much >quality control inspection to the prints. What's interesting to speculate to me is what will happen in places where there is *no* film processing infrastructure now. Digital kiosks are much less expensive, smaller and easier to manage than C-41 minilabs. I wouldn't be surprised if some places go straight to digital without ever getting film-based photography at all, just as there were surely some places a hundred years ago that experienced photography first as film and never went through the wet plate phase. -- Mark Roberts Photography and writing www.robertstech.com
