Why were we so quick to abandon film?

[scoundrel1728]

There are some "gotchas" to digital, just as there are to film.* Admonitions to back up your critical data - including images - abound, but people often don't do it until they lose something important from ignoring the warnings.* If your CD-ROM starts to act flakey, make a backup while the data is still recoverable, preferably more than one, and preferably on disks of different brands.* Ideally, you should make your backups as soon as you upload your images to the computer.

Incidentally, film images are also vulnerable to damage, degradation, and destruction, especially if they isn't stored properly, being vulnerable to dust, fingerprints, scratches, bacterial and fungus attack, fading, decomposition of the base. Catastrophic events like fire, flood, vandalism, or theft can also result in loss, damage or destruction of film images.* And with film, copies are expensive and not as good as the original, so backing up critical images is seldom done.

[photoman39]

This question can be answered by saying, technological advances increase sales. All the responses in favor of a digital world are correct and arguments for film are also correct. They, film and digital, are two different ways of getting to the same end, a visual means of remembering an event, neither one should exclude the other.
I do wonder if my great-grandchildren will be able to find and use my carefully archived digital files as well as I can access and use my great grand parents photos?
Digital is the future, the present, of capturing the moment but I am not so sure that film should be buried.
Steven

[Wilt]

>>I do wonder if my great-grandchildren will be able to find and use my carefully archived digital files as well as I can access and use my great grand parents photos?
<<

At last! Someone else has the same doubts that I have in this regard...the continued availability of digital data captured today to future generations who have the desire to know a bit about their family's history or to historians who want to look back into the 'dark ages of digital photography' when Nikon and others promoted proprietary RAW files and consumers blindly pushed the shutter and then immediately forgot about the archiving of their data.

[scoundrel1728]

Losing data can be a problem with digital photography but it can also be a problem with film too, particularly the stuff processed at the corner drugstore. Those can (and sometimes do) deteriorate to unusability in a few decades. It should also be pointed out that most of the snapshots are processed in this way. Sometimes, even people who should know better run into this problem. The original Star Wars film, for example, had to be restored (digitally) before it deteriorated beyond full remediation. The movie Gone With the Wind also had to be restored digitally after a few decades.