Canon has announced that the company will not be designing any NEW film cameras, whether point and shoot or SLRs, and will decide the fate of their present line of film cameras in the not-too-distant-future.

Film cameras are a small fraction of the business compared to digital camera sales. Canon said that they will channel resources toward more profitable areas of the industry, the digital side of things.

After Nikon made a similar move, Minolta dropping from the race, and Mamiya's agreement with Cosmos, this should not be much of a shock. The writing is on the wall.

It is unrealistic to expect hold-outs in the film industry. While it's true that digital images do not have the color latitude of film, at this point, and printers cannot handle the dynamic range of traditional photo process, the rule of present-day economics will prevail. I'll clarify this.

IBM wrote OS2, a fantastic computer operating system. It was highly superior to Windows in just about every way, but, it only sold 15 million copies. In former times, 15 million units sold would be a stellar success, but in our "modern" times, compared to over 100 million sales of Windows 95, OS2 was a monumental flop.

With over 5 million dollars in sales of film cameras, compared to 67+ million dollars in sales of digital cameras, we are seeing another OS2 v. Windows battle. Collectively, the camera makers are seeing sales figures and the quality of images really does not factor into the equation.

In all fairness, I have seen the differences in my own images. There are limitations in digital that film exceeds, true enough. But, the shots I have hanging on the wall behind me are some of the finest I have ever taken and they were shot with a digital SLR. My gallery includes 35mm film, medium format, and digital images. Digital shots were cheaper and easier to handle after the shutter was clicked. I had no trips to the lab, no processing delays, and I was in control of the image from start to finish.

This is one more nail in the coffin of film photography. No, it's not gone, but, film is on the way out, whether we like it or not.