----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruce Dayton"
Subject: Re: Slides vs. digital
> Sadly, the numbers are against us. The fact that it is slowly
starting to
> happen is an indicator.
I still disagree with this. Even if what Mike says about SLR
users abandoning film in droves is true, the SLR user is not who
is driving the film market right now. Compacts have outsold SLRs
by about 10:1 over the past 15 years, and this is the market
that is driving film sales. This market keeps getting bigger.
The compact market is also very price conscious. The base cost
of a point and shoot is about 1/5th of a comparably featured
digital camera.
I can certainly see a diminishment in the number of emulsions.
The loss of Ektar 25, Ultra and APX 25 is a blow to the SLR
user, but went completely unnoticed by the other 95% of the
marketplace.
We forget that we are already an extreme minority in the photo
marketplace. Our numbers (that would be the film based SLR
photographer) may get smaller, but as a whole, film sales
continue to expand.
What does worry me is the politics of photofinishing. What may
well kill silver based imaging is governments regulating
effluent discharge to the point it is not viable to run a photo
lab. In California, silver effluent discharge is already
regulated to below the level of naturally occurring silver in
many water systems (which is REALLY ridiculous). While labs now
do practice silver recovery, we still discharge a lot of
chemistry down the drain. At some point, the bureaucrats are
going to realize that they need to regulate this, if for no
other reason than to make room for more bureaucrats in the work
force.
This will make photo processing more expensive, as complying
with government regulations always costs more than it is worth.
As the price goes up, the volume will go down. This will make
the entire industry less profitable, and will probably be the
beginning of the end for silver imaging.
William Robb
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