Follies of the Madmen #301

Out of curiosity, I find that Kodak still offers consumer Super-8 equipment and film. One would think that analog photographic equipment and film was on its last legs in the digital age.

@KDP -- Film is still the gold standard for making movies. Making some smaller for home/amateur use doesn't have R&D costs, so it can be a nice little profit center. Digital still has a long way to go before it's equal to film -- you'd need a 175 MegaPixel camera to match 35mm film in DPI, and you'd still be missing out on contrast and colour (even high-end digital cameras use 12 bits, the best film scanners use 36 bits without reaching film's true color depth). Someone with far too much time on their hands calculated each frame of a 35mm movie would need more than 2Gb to store digitally. A standard 1 Terabyte hard drive could hold up to eight seconds of a movie.

I agree, Phideaux. On a personal note, I have enjoyed the self-developing cameras for years until Polaroid stopped production. I thought my instant film days were over until Fuji released their system here in the States. Although not as large as the Polaroid format it gets the job done.

Recently I found that a company in Europe purchased the Polaroid production lines and recreated the process from scratch. The film chemistry formulas weren't included with the production machinery. I haven't checked on purchasing that film here, but will pick up some of that film when I vacation in France in a few months.

I remember the family's first Polaroid Land Camera. There was a pink applicator stick you had to brush across the finished photo. I absolutely loved the smell of that stuff!

Compatible instant film packs for Polaroid cameras are made by Impossible. Their web site is impossible-project dot com.

Phideaux - I imagine your numbers are for uncompressed digital. I imagine that compression would work well at those resolutions, removing most of the information that the eye could not discern. Of course, if one wanted to zoom in on the imagery, one might need the full resolution.