It's funny how many people have misconceptions about digital. The most common one is that "it's free, no need to buy film". It's not free, because you need to buy memory cards. Sometimes you need to have many memory cards or IBM's PCMCIA-card format disk drive. They're electronic devices, and like anything these days - they fail. Is it going to work 3 years from now? Maybe or maybe not.
Are they repairable? No.
What about the cameras themselves? Chances are, in 3 years you won't be able to repair cameras that are manufactured today. The only exception might be the DSLRs, but then the repair cost might be so steep that you will need to buy another one instead.
What about the TIME you spend transferring data from your flash cards to your computer and then burning backup copies to your CD (or DVS or whatever), creating archive index (so that you can find the picture later when you need it), working on that image so that you can actually print it out and get something looking decent?
What about the money spent on software (such as Photoshop, Genuine Fractals, Nick's sharpener, whatever else), getting new "hip" LCD screen, getting new inkjet printer (and its inks), upgrading your OS, computer hardware, printer, whatever else every few years? Costs will run well over $4000 for any serious amateur just to start. And then thousands more in the years ahead. Think about it, how many of you have computer that is more than 3 years old and is STILL running Windows 98? (I'm the only one I know of in my company for instance
Compare it to:
1. One Contax ARIA and 4 lenses - D28, P50, S85, P85. All bought used for less than $1500. Camera
will last 10 years at least. Lenses even longer.
2. $4.00 per roll of film
3. $16.00 spent for development and double-printing of 36-frames film on 4x6 paper (total of 72 proof prints).
4. 5 minutes spent to put the film inside your film album and writing down some info about it on top of the plastic sleeve-sheet
5. No need to have computer to see your images (how stupid is that to begin with?)
6. You can send film over to any professional lab out there any time you want and let them know exactly how you want it printed. If you're doing enlargements, they will even do a free proof print for you.
7. Real resolving power far exceeds any digital-do-everything camera out there. Just see the last CLN from Zeiss. You can get 90lp/mm on Portra 800!
I can probably go on and on about pros/cons of digital forever, but what it boils down to is this:
1. There are many people out there that will buy digital soap-boxes and think that they will make better pictures now. They will toy around for 3-6 months and then throw it back into a closet where they have their hip Sony video camcorder collecting dust for the last 2 years. These are the people that never bought SLRs in their life, have little clue about photography in general AND, they used to buy zoom-shmoom-do-everything P&S film cameras in the past. They also probably believe that megapixels alone define quality of image and most likely have no clue that their monitor has resolution of 72dpi, their inkjet printer doesn't actually have resolution of 1440dpi and their eyes can't see more than 8lp/mm.
2. There are people that will buy digicam, toy around for a little while, learn something about photography and, SURPRISE, buy a film SLR and start using it (it's actually quite amazing, but I saw many people that first tried their photography with digital and then became interested in film).
3. There are many pros that will switch to digital because that's what WORKS FOR THEM. News reporters were never truly interested in quality. They need speed first and foremost. They need to get these shots taken and published fast, otherwise they get no dough. Sometimes even glamour photographers will find it useful. Yet others won't.
Overall, film camera manufacturers will see much less sales of P&S film cameras, slightly less sales of the top-of-the-line film cameras, but more sales of SLR-lenses in general (and wide-angles especially!), much less sales of "entry-level" SLR cameras (speaking of which, most of Canon, Nikon, Minolta and Pentax "entry-level" SLRs are pretty bad anyway).
But does it all matter anyway? I don't think so.
Just keep using what you like and who cares what other people are using. Just look around, not that many people are using Contax and YET, you're! If it works for you, who cares what works for somebody else?
Keep shooting and be happy
Film is here to stay, even if Kodak abandons it. By the way, I don't use Kodak anyway, with exception of TMAX. But I can use Ilford or Fuji instead!
Mike.