Steve Mills, senior salesman in Ted’s Digital Corporate division, says that the last Nikon F6 film SLRs had to be sold at a loss to move them off the shelf.

Mills says that film sales to serious photographers, along with photographic paper and chemicals, have been declining at the rate of 20 to 30 per cent a year. At the same time the sales of inkjet printers and associated consumables have been increasing at the same rate. The last enlarger that Mills sold was “some years ago” and since then he has sold only one enlarger lens. It is not so surprising then that Nikon abandoned the manufacture of enlarger lenses in January this year.

Sales staff at Ted’s city store reckon that they sell one compact film camera every fortnight.

It is now four years since the milestone was reached where more digital cameras than film cameras were sold world wide. This year the digital cameras are taking 92 per cent of the market. Companies that were slow to appreciate the speed with which digital would be embraced have been swept aside, the most prominent casualty of the revolution being the proud of company Agfa, admired by serious amateurs and professionals for the quality of their black and white photographic paper as well as being a major supplier of minilab processing machines, chemicals and paper. Kodak has survived, but only by shedding thousands of staff around the world and closing their Australian manufacturing plant.

Andy Wu, manager of the suburban Kodak Express camera shop and processing laboratory in the Forest Hill shopping centre, says that some of the lost film sales are compensated for with camera memory card sales. Sadly for the retailer memory cards are reusable, unlike single use film.

He says that he usually has one compact film camera in stock for the occasional customer not ready to make the transition to digital. Sales of film cameras run at about one every two weeks.

Wu has a particularly loyal customer base because of his shop’s reputation for quality processing but even so his ratio of prints made from film and from digital files is now about 1:1.

Life is particularly tough for the operators of small camera stores with on-site processing. Supermarkets have entered into the one hour processing in a big way with do-it-yourself kiosks for customers with digital memory cards. And the big electrical goods retailers all sell cameras that these days qualify as electronic gadgets. Put bluntly, the digital revolution has left a huge pile of casualties in its wake.

How long will companies like Kodak and Fuji continue to make film? Steve Mills believes that the availability of 35mm film will always be tied to the motion picture industry. As long as movie makers shoot and distribute on film it will be economically feasible to cut the film into strips and load it into cassettes -- after all that is where it all started with the first Leica in 1925. But, once the movies go beginning-to-end digital, film will be finished, at least for the amateur photographer unless some small start-up company moves into the vacuum left by the retreat of the big companies from the business. Silver-based photography may survive but in an expensive and esoteric and slightly eccentric form.

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