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Hard times for Film aficionados.
Not only Fujifilm is discontinuing their popular films like last the Fujichrome Velvia 100F 120, but they also closed important film factories. The one in Tilburg (Netherlands) was closed several years ago, and its equipment is now on sale via auction (look inside the factory and check the auctions at troostwijkauctions).
There seems to be just one last bastion for Fuji’s film: the booming world of Instax! As I told you here, Instax cameras and instax film are stable at the very top of the OVERALL AmazonUS camera & photo ranking,
Instax are winners! That’s why Fujifilm continues to develop new models. The latest one is the new INSTAX WIDE 300 camera, launched along with the X100T and graphite Fujifilm X-T1. My personal favorite is still the Instax Mini Neoclassic 90, launched about a year ago. The success of the Instax cameras pushes, at the same time, the sales of Instax Film.
The earnings from the booming Instax Business are also used for developing the X-line.
But film means also Instax SHARE Smartphone Printer SP-1. Since Christmas I’m a proud owner this little device and I have to say I love it.
However, as said, Instax Film is probably the last bastion, where film is still selling well.
Look at that:
Here is a graph (via Mirrorlessrumors) that shows the inexorable decline of film caused by the arrival of digital photography, and the ongoing decline of digital cameras due to the smartphone-selfie-era. But the interesting part is also that little red bar… curious to see how it evolves in future 😉 .
Howard Curtis Smith commented this graph on facebook here and said:
“There are a couple of interesting things in this chart. Camera production while down significantly from its peak, is still ahead of 1999 which was the zenith of film camera production. There was a large run up in sales as customers purchased digital cameras in huge numbers rapidly causing market saturation. Now that the market is saturated it needs to find a new level. Sales growth of three fold over a 10 year stretch was not sustainable. Add to that the point and shoot market has been decimated by the camera phone and probably will not recover as camera phone quality is good enough for most uses and is only getting better.
The high-end DSLR market is hurting less, but still hurting as the newspaper/magazine industry is in free fall and so not replacing older equipment. The rate of improvement in DSLRs has slowed causing a slow down in customers upgrading. Mirrorless systems stand to gain share from prosumer DSLR and high-end P/S cameras, but they are still building out their lens lineups and feature sets. I would not be surprised if sales halved again before stabilizing. 4K video will probably be the next driver in the upgrade cycle.”
via petapixel via Mirrorlessrumors
28 Responses
Bad times. I still LOVE using film, as well as my Fuji digital.
I would like a printer (SP-2 ?) with wide film !
I was just about to say that! Yeah a Wide film printer would be amazing
Ditto. An instant 8×10″ would be stellar!
Fuji should spend some marketing money on analogue culture.
Fuji FP-3000B should still be in production.
Someone said that vinyl died a long time ago, but vinyl survived cassettes and CDs.
Expect great little things from film, and from instant film in particular.
Maybe 35mm analogue photography lost some sense (maybe: i can see a huge difference between my printed VSCO files and my prints from negatives… I’m not saying something is better than something else, just… Different), but instant photography is a media that can say a lot, and say it loud.
https://bonjourn.al/blog/12-save-fp-3000b-an-interview-with-michael-ash-smith
The 1st paragraph says: “it was closed several years ago, and its equipment is now on sale via auction”.
So the only real “news” here seem to be the details for an unused equipment sale.
C’mon, man, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good headline. 😉
So true. This place is really embarrassing. Look at how awful the writing is regarding INSTAX. Reads like 100% pure Fuji copy.
Vinyl survived because superannuated audiophiles refuse to move into the 21st Century. It now has a resurgence because beardy-weirdy hipsters love a bit of retro to go with their ironic ‘dressed by Filson’ lifestyle.
Vinyl has managed to return to its early 1990s sales position, rather than its 1985 sales. It’s a few million LPs rather than hundreds of millions. It’s success is being overhyped by the audiophile magazines hoping to find readers that don’t die off when the weather gets cold, and because the music business sees it as the one of the very few money-making ‘success’ stories in an otherwise downward spiral.
Vinyl survived because it is a true object with a true soul. Far from technology, big, tactile and warm. A little object of art, with a totally new allure and a totally new role in the market. It is now the media where old school (audiophiles) and new school (social media communication) mixes into a new form of exchange between musicians (or fine artists: take a look at the Vinyl Factory catalogue) and audience.
Everything that lacks a touch screen is said to be hipster, but everything that is geek is said to be hipster. I cannot understand. Maybe Araki is hipster, or the young and talented italian analogue photographer Renato D’Agostin is hipster… I don’t care.
Maybe I’m hipster because i print my digital photos… Oh, no! I’m bearded! Now I know for sure I’m a hipster.
“Fuji X-T1 isn’t hipster. Fuji X-100S is hipster. But less than the vintage X100 and more than the new X100T…”
Communication and culture are the keys. When I take an Ultra hipster Polaroid SX-70 to a party and give away shots people go crazy. “Where can I buy one? But the film is out of production, right? I thought Polaroid was dead!”. That’s the point. Marketing. Culture. People can’t desire (and buy) what think does not exist anymore, or what does not know. Camera firms decided people had to go megapixel: 2,4,8,16,24…
You can’t sell cameras if you don’t share photographic culture: badly dressed anti-hipster prosumer that shot leaves and mountains and badly dressed models won’t cover the R&D expenses… Sell old technology and FUN costs just some cleverly used marketing money.
Don’t worry. “Hipster” is a generic pejorative used to insult someone else who is not as hip and tuned in as me, since I don’t know what else to call those lowly losers. They are poseurs and wannabes, whereas I, on the other hand, am truly the real deal. Most importantly, they use different cameras than me, and whatever I use is the correct one.
yes: Fuji FP-3000B should still be in production! 100% agreed there, it was a fantastic instant film.
Patrick,
Do you know if fuji planing to FW Update x-e2 for direct i stay share print Like on x100t and x-t1?
I haven’t heard about such plans
Thank you Patrick. That would be great and convenient instead transfering to my iphone first and than print it. Hope fuji will Update that in further FW, this way i also can put my x100 SD card into x-e2 and print from there 🙂
if I’m not wrong, the X-E2 is the only X-WiFi camera without direct printer support… even the XQ1 has it. That’s, well, ridiculous. Fuji must support direct X-E2 Instax printing.
Yes, you are right, xe2 is the Only one, thats why i am asking, because this doesn’t really makes sense. Maybe you can Find out why, maybe the simply forgot to add it to the latest FW:-) ?
I don’t know why… but if they do not add it in the next half a year, be sure that I’ll write an own article about it and critizise it.
Though it may be true that film is in decline for mass market. Within the art world film photography is still strong, so many of the artists you see exhibiting in galleries use film.
This is because film prints will hold value over a digital one and of course digital still cannot compete with the benefits of large format or even 35mm within the ability to push and pull an image.
If you look on sites that sell film you will see that new films have been developed in the past 5yrs or so which indicates a small but steady market in film.
I for one love film photography and the craft of developing film and processing images. It is still taught at uni’s and I think it will remain in use, maybe niche or just within professional use, but it’s too important to lose through digital
digital has surpassed film in the 35mm range and it has nothing to do with push/pull, digital has greater dynamic range than 35mm film.
I too still shoot film, but only MF. I am very disappointed that sometime ago Neopan 400 was discontinued. It seems that very soon we won’t see fuji in film at all, this will leave the fine art king of films in 35mm tri-x and then Ilford range. In color I just don’t see the point any longer, digital is much better for accurate color management than any print film and better dynamic range and exposure latitude than color slide film.
I have a fridge full of hundreds of rolls of Neopan 400 so I have enough to last me until someone makes a b&w camera that produces results that look as good as film. I suspect someone will in the next few years, it won’t be fuji though – they are still stuck on the tiny format and seem to resist evening talking about this as a dead end. Most likely innovation will come from Sony and be packaged in a Canon. Possibly Leica – after all they invented 35mm, but so far the M isn’t it, it does produce some lovely results with decent local area contrast and tonal range but it’s still inferior to me than film. Inferior as in produces prints that to me eye don’t look as good as a film print make in the darkroom on some nice warmtone Oriental fiber paper.
Colour reproduction has surpassed in digital 35mm. Dynamic range no. I can’t, not yet. You develop a high contrast image in film you can bring those highlights back even seemingly overblown ones, as well as very dark parts of the frame. Doing this does not make the image quality suffer. You try and do that with a digital file, no way, you ‘push’ or ‘pull’ those shadows or highlights too much and they start to deteriorate, even MF digital does to a degree when you try to bring to much back in. And if the digital file has bad highlight burn you will not get that back at all.
This is not a jibe, I agree with what your saying, but had to respond about the dynamic range in digital being better cause it just ain’t true.
Cheers
Yeah, except it hasn’t. Standard films like Portra and Tmax are in the 19-20 EV range, and the best Sony sensors are somewhere around 14 EV.
Digital still has problems with color rendition as well – it seems we’ve taken a step back from the color rendition of cameras like Fuji’s own S3. Contrast transition is an even more noticeable place where digital doesn’t do as well.
Digital obviously crushes film in terms of cost per shot and ease of use, but the only IQ-related aspect where digital has clearly surpassed 35mm is resolution (and not by much). A $300-$1000 medium format setup will best even a D800E in virtually every area of image quality, including resolution (if you drum scan).
Digital is pretty amazing and gets better every year, but it will be a long time before anything *affordable* is competitive with 6×7 or larger formats in resolution or IQ. If you’re not printing larger than A2 it really doesn’t matter though.
Flatbed scanned color 35mm film is about 4mp. Film is not the darling you make it out to be. Film is pretty much dead. It does not ‘out produce’ digital as you say.
Sure, you have the archaic holdouts. They are ‘in love’ with the process and not so much the photo. I read on one blog how the guy gave up street photos cause it is too expensive for film. He could buy a cheap used Pentax dslr for $125 on eBay and take up street work. But prejudices stop the film knuckleheads at every turn. Most film devotees produce snapshots or junk.
Now, it is not sour grapes with me. I was heavy into film before many of you were even born.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/New_Year%27s_Eve…Skid_Row_Bar_copyright_1971_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg/800px-New_Year%27s_Eve…Skid_Row_Bar_copyright_1971_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/On_Leave_Copyright_1973_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr._mr.jpg/800px-On_Leave_Copyright_1973_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr._mr.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Two_Blind_Beggars_Copyright_1972_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr.jpg/800px-Two_Blind_Beggars_Copyright_1972_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/29/Untitled_no.1_Copyright_1971_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg/431px-Untitled_no.1_Copyright_1971_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg
Leica M4
I’ve done every aspect of film work from process camera to dye transfers to nitrogen burst processing. So…film was in my blood. And we all talk about the ‘film look’ versus the digital look. If you work at it you can get fine film look from digital.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Biker_no._134_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg/832px-Biker_no._134_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a1/Bikers%27_Mardi_Gras_no.29_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg/800px-Bikers%27_Mardi_Gras_no.29_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b3/Bikers%27_Mardi_Gras_no._106_copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg/800px-Bikers%27_Mardi_Gras_no._106_copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg
Leica MM
I’ve told you time and again, Fuji needs to make a Leica knockoff for $2500 to $3000. Then they can take some of Leica’s biz, if not most.
I had 5 Leica’s, sold 1 now have 4 that I will keep. But if a Japanese Leica knockoff cam on the market with a better sensor and lower $…I’d move. The Leica is overpriced and has a second rate sesnor. I only use it cause it is all manual and rangefinder. But for the $, what you get is way overpriced.
Yes Leica is made like a Rolex. But so what? I’m not a camera fondler, I need results not camera hard-ons. Your Fuji forum said they will ban me cause they don’t like me talking about camera fondlers. Too bad. If they produced great photos I’d say so. Most of what forum photogs produce is crap. All they talk about is what to buy next or how to pimp their cam…camera fondlers 98%!
Here is my latest artists’ book
(nsfw)
http://bikermardigras.tumblr.com/
Shot with M43, Fuji X and Leica. Without digital I would not be able to shoot it or make the artists’ book. But the film devotees will still suck their thumbs puning away while life and photos pass them bye.
Fuji produces a helluva great image for its little sensor. If Fuji ever made a FF 24 mp organic sensor for a Leica knockoff….Leica would shit their pants.
But, Fuji has the screwy controls. That is what I love about the Leica…simplicity and controls. What should have been done was to have Leica hire Fuji to make a FF 28 mp organic sensor. Then it may outshine the big boy Nikon 36 mp.
In any case, if your after the film look with digital you don’t need more sharpness you need less. So higher and higher mp’s is not the answer. Higher mp’s are good for keep a photo together when it stars to fall apart. When you push the Fuji and esp the Leica it falls apart. When you do doc and street work…your always pushing.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/Gathering_of_the_Juggalos_Kiss_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr._lr.jpg/800px-Gathering_of_the_Juggalos_Kiss_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr._lr.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Bikers%27_Mardi_Gras_no._36_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg/1024px-Bikers%27_Mardi_Gras_no._36_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fe/Pole_Dance_Selfie_%40_Bikers%27_Mardi_Gras_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg/612px-Pole_Dance_Selfie_%40_Bikers%27_Mardi_Gras_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg
If your serious about getting the image…forget film.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/GOTJ_56_Copyright_Daniel_Teoli_Jr._lr.jpg/800px-GOTJ_56_Copyright_Daniel_Teoli_Jr._lr.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Juggalos_no._4_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg/800px-Juggalos_no._4_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/Mosh_Pit_no._7_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg/800px-Mosh_Pit_no._7_Copyright_2014_Daniel_D._Teoli_Jr..jpg
Fuji X-E1
I still use film. I prefer Fuji films and these news don’t sound good, but we have to adapt.
This plant closed down close to 9 years ago so today’s “news” has nothing to do with current film sales.
Meanwhile, Fujifilm’s X cameras are not even above 3% market share.
And we can assume they’ll never get there in a hyper-competitive market, overall shrinking, with more and more premium players in the MLIC arena. That is not necessary a problem (see Leica) but we can assume Fuji’s margin per sold camera and lens is much smaller. And we all feel how they are facing the glass ceiling for a while to develop new models based on a better, cutting edge technology (a five years old Sony sensor isn’t). Developing premium glass is their business for years – well that’s a bit easier. But where stays the possible game changer like f.i. that organic sensor? The cry of many bloggers that these X-series are quickly replacing the major DSLR mounts now is just a fiction – we may be very happy Fuji just stays in this camera-manufacturing business in the coming years. By the time the organic sensor will be able to let shine all that XF glass as never before, Sony, Olympus, but also Nikon & Canon – and possibly even Samsung will be completely owning this MLIC market.
The good news part of the film story is that someone like Ferrania may buy the film making equipment for small runs of film production for us enthusiasts who still shoot film.