What is that, film?
What difference can ten years make? A lot, in some cases. Imagine the kids who were born in this new millenium, the successors of generation Y, some call them the “New Silent generation”, some call them the “Digital generation”, but let’s call them the generation Z here. When they grow up to the age of teenager, at some point they will have a camera, and it will certainly be a digital camera, be it a point & shoot camera or on a cell phone or on the MP3 player, they will definitely not have a film camera (at least in the Western countries).
Ten years from now, it will hardly be possible to see any store selling film to the public, even less of those film development shops, no more will be seen the familiar Kodak Gold and Fujifilm logos in most convenience stores. To the eyes of gen-Z, the idea of capturing pictures on film will be as obsolete as recording musics on audio tape. Coincidentally both storage mediums do have quite some similarities: they’re both analog medium, both have similar color and texture, both do roll over during usage and rewind at the end of usage, both are protected in a plastic cover. And also ironically, both “technologies” are being replaced by the same new digital storage, such as SD, Memory Stick, Compact Flash, MMC, etc.
It will simply be difficult for the gen-Z to imagine the date where data were not stored in digital format: text, voice, music, image, movie, etc. It’s like for me (a late gen-X guy) to imagine the date where data were stored on punch cards, and computers were made of light bulbs instead of transistors and printed electronic circuit!
Ten years from now, I expect films to be as scarce as audio tapes are today on the marketplace. It was only a dozen years ago when I still buy musics on tapes, and take pictures with a P&S film camera, of course. Ten years is an extremely brief period in the scale of history, but yet we do witness many paradigm changes within this short period of time.
Ten years ago, digital camera was still a joke, nobody expect it to be able to compete with film’s quality ever, since it would require at least 3 – 6 millions pixels sensor to match a typical film quality, and at that time most experimental digital cameras only had half a million pixels and it was more expensive than a Mercedez! Today any typical P&S camera sold on Walmart can equal to a regular Kodak Gold film quality. The best digital cameras provide far better quality than the best professional films on the market, with a tiny exception in some few narrow fields, which undoubtly will be surpassed in a close future.
In ten years, wireless connectivity will be so common in our daily life gadgets that CD and DVD might seem obselete as well. Why would we store anything on a DVD (or Blu-Ray Disc II or HD-DVD III or whatever) if we can get it instantly from the home PC or from the Internet?
While reading some photography magazines, I frequently see some photographers saying that they started shooting pictures with an all-manual SLR and B&W film, and they had to develop themselves. I can at least claim that I started shooting with P&S film and I had to wait till the whole roll of film is finished in order to bring it to the photo store for prints. And it was always an exciting moment when I went to pick up the photos, not knowing how the result would be at all.
Ten years is a very short time, but enough to shift to an all-digital paradigm of storage technologies. We’ll see ten years from now, how a 10Mpix camera would sound ridiculusly unsufficient and unsophisticate… Today, I have a CompactFlash card of 4GB for my camera, which is pretty big compared to my friends’, and I have around 500GB of storage in my PC. I wonder in ten years whether my cell phone will have more storage capacity than that! We’ll see…