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 April 1, 2006 Death by Digital
Near my house was a store that was a throwback to another time. It was run by two older guys, and, I suspect, when it opened decades ago it may well have been on the cutting edge. It was a high-end camera store that stocked a multitude of cameras and accessories, and even did topnotch photo developing. The thing is, it was a film-based camera store, and the owners refused to accept that the market was moving to digital. "Digital is seriously flawed," one of the owners told me the last time I was in there, referring to some of the shortcomings he saw in digital photography (forgetting, conveniently, that film has plenty of shortcomings, too). So, he wouldn’t stock digital cameras, nor would he entertain the thought of stocking any accessories for digital-photography buffs. Not surprisingly, then, after decades of selling only film-photography products, the store went out of business. This story of reluctance to accept a paradigm shift within an industry wasn’t unlike that of some audiophiles when digital audio entered the fray in the early ‘80s with the introduction of the CD. Most welcomed it, but some naysayers complained about a lack of resolution from the new format and a decrease in "musicality," and a few even compared the high-frequency playback from a CD to that of frying bacon. They nitpicked, conveniently forgetting CD’s improved dynamic range, lower noise floor, and overall durability. They also neglected to consider that CD was much more convenient than its analog counterpart, the LP. In short, despite the minority, the majority rejoiced, and within about five years of CD’s introduction, LP sales were down -- waaayyyyyy down. A little over a decade later, the same scenario played out with photography. Like early CD players, early digital cameras weren’t very good at all. Resolution was limited and colors were often off, and digital cameras had other little glitches that had film-based camera buffs balking. The naysayers were having their day, too. But digital had promise and wasn’t going to be stopped. And as important as it was with CD, digital photography was convenient in a way that film couldn’t touch. It didn’t take long for one-megapixel cameras to be replaced by those with two, and two with four, and so on. The color accuracy got better, the battery life became longer, and the convenience improved further. Suddenly digital wasn’t just an also-ran to a good film-based camera; it was as good -- if not better. Today, no new credible digital camera sports less than six megapixels, and its output when printed on an inexpensive inkjet photo printer can rival the quality of a good photo lab -- if you can even find a good photo lab for comparison any longer. Although digital technology revolutionized photography the same way it did audio, many of the photographic biggies still got caught off guard. Perhaps the audio companies that lasted through the shakeout of the early '80s should have warned them. Kodak, the US-based photography giant, has been having troubles for years because of the rapid change to digital, and they have been well documented in the press, particularly because of the huge number of layoffs. Most likely, the company never saw the digital revolution in photography starting and ending so fast, making it hard, if not impossible, to turn a huge company around fast enough to respond to such a rapidly changing marketplace -- particularly when its main strength was in the dying medium. Fuji Photo Film Co., Japan’s largest film maker, recently announced massive restructuring that will focus on improving their digital offerings and slashing drastically film production. As for Canon and Nikon, the two camera hardware giants that were leaders in the world of film photography, their stories are much brighter. Both companies have been successfully selling high-quality digital cameras for years, and today they’re considered the industry leaders on the digital-hardware side as well. They obviously saw the change coming a long time ago. As for their older film cameras, they’re still available in limited quantities, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find them stocked in stores. One of the few remaining high-end camera retailers I talked to told me that his store’s shelves are at least 95% stocked with digital products, with just a smattering of film-based products scattered here and there. Film’s days aren’t numbered anymore. They’re over. The parallels between what happened with the CD overtaking LP and digital photography overtaking film photography are striking, but hardly surprising. Low cost and high convenience are digital’s hallmarks, and they’re applicable whether you’re talking about music or photographs. In fact, people e-mail music and film today as easily as they turn to a water tap and get a drink from it. However, although the LP has long since been declared obsolete, we still have people who buy and play them today, and still will for some time. Quite likely, then, we’ll likely still have camera buffs who will continue to shoot on real film despite the way the market has turned. Niche products will always exist. But, when it comes to the general marketplace, it’s safe to say that film, like the LP, is dead and digital now dominates. If there are still any camera stores out there run by a couple of old guys who refuse to make the move to digital, you can be sure that they won’t last much longer. ...Doug Schneider
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