E6 Film Processor |
This dismantling and total waste of resources has happened time and again all around the country and world as digital technology takes hold. No more big processors and chemicals and pumps and motors. Just snap click and store to a hard drive or print out on a small affordable printer which costs $100.00 .
With the advent of digital photography hundreds of thousands of jobs where lost including feeder jobs as well which benefited from providing supplies like chemicals paper etc. Several well known film and camera manufacturers went bankrupt or fell into terrible finances as well including Polaroid and Kodak .
No one ever saw digital coming on so fast when the first digital cameras produced by Kodak hit the streets nearly 20 years ago. which where as big as a shoe box and cost thousands of dollars and are now in phones and can be acquired for as cheap as $10.00 .
E6 dunk tank |
Bernie's went from a 2 block operation and almost 50 employees to half a block and less than a dozen employees as he now rents out floor space in an effort to stay viable in the market as any one can now just walk into a Walmart and buy a high end Nikon Digital camera where before they where only available thru photo shops. But you will never see or get the kind of service you got from small photo stores like bernies from the big box retailers.
While digital has made taking pictures cheap and easy it also presents a major issue and that is storing all the images and being able to print them in the future. With film you had negatives which properly stored will hold for ever and can be printed easily. But digital media is changing all the time photos stored on 5 1/2 or 3 1/2 " disks can no longer be read on modern machines you need an old computer to read them. One click and you can loose all your pictures as well and long term storage what do you store them on CD,DVD, Thumb drive? If you do not keep moving and updating your storage media when you do go back to find and print that image it may have degraded or you may no longer be able to read the media not a problem with negatives.
Where is the industry going? well they talk about the cloud for storage but thats risky as well. and if we are not careful to store the important images properly they will be lost to history like so many old movies which where stored on nitrocellulose film and self destructed.
84" film processor |
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