Discussion
I'm not one to fetishize film; though I respect those who prefer the medium, I haven't looked back since switching to digital over 15 years ago in my own photography practice.
But man, this article on Kodak's film manufacturing process (focused on cinema and IMAX) absolutely made me drool.https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/arts/kodak-film-the-odyssey.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AlE.eBow.qn44pwdKlLQ6
Spent a lot of years processing film and doing custom darkroom printing. I assumed that digital imaging would be less wasteful but didn't count on people discarding and replacing their cameras at such a high frequency.
I do not miss film with our full frame DSLR. It uses legacy lenses from our film cameras and at about 7 years old it still has sufficient resolution, quality, and features. A good camera will serve you well.
That said, I still have some niche uses for film.
@mattblaze Recently I learned that there is a quite substantial range of colors, generally cyan, that computers and digital photos cannot display because no RGB combination will match; you would need negative red.
@mattblaze That is, we can see it but can't take an accurate digital photo of what we see.
@not2b@sfba.soci That's partly true, and true for RGB display technologies. But the color gamut of a digital SENSOR is mostly determined in post processing (and by the particular color filtering used in the sensor).
As a (still) photographer, I use digital almost exclusively. It was a learning curve, but it gives me much more flexibility to achieve what I want.
But I would much rather you look at my photos printed on paper than on a computer screen. That's what I'm producing for, and the look is undeniably different (but not so different that I'd refuse to put my work online).
So I wonder if the same applies to cinema, and that film directors who are film advocates are mostly talking about the look of projected film vs digital projection (under current technology), rather than anything inherent in the look of scenes actually shot on film.
@chillybot Not currently; just not set up to do that properly at scale.
@mattblaze it’s a good article, but a stretch to say Kodak is the only place still making it. Orwo makes motion picture film, and others still make 35mm and 120 for still cameras.
@tellyworth I was surprised to read that Kodak was the only maker of motion picture film. I'm not sure what they were talking about. Maybe the only one with sufficient quality for major productions? Dunno.
@mattblaze could well be true that they’re the only ones making 35mm and larger cine film formats. Almost certainly true they’re the only ones supplying Hollywood.
@mattblaze Not as many hoof and ear men as there used to be.
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When people say they "prefer the look of film", they might be taking about two things: image capture and image display.
Digital sensors have surpassed the capability of film by almost every measure. There's now essentially nothing you can capture on film that you can't obtain digitally. The difference is the process. And different artists legitimately have different preferences.
But display is much less clear. Computer displays, paper prints, and film projection have different capabilities.