Looking it truns out to be close, both working in the 1830s.

Scott

They abandoned not only the gear, but the emulsions they loved.
Photographers who had religious zeal for Velvia dumped it without a whimper
and switched digital.

I'm having a hard time switching to digital photography, but that wasn't the
case with audio.  I worked in radio for about 25 years, but left just before
digital production became the norm.  After leaving radio, I continued to do
free-lance production at home and had no trouble putting my high-end
two-track tape decks in storage and going digital.  I never sell or throw
anything away and I still have all of my analog audio gear.  I still have
one of the first cassette tape machine models made, a Norelco that was a
Christmas present in 1960s.  I seem to have more of an emotional attachment
to film than I did to analog audio.

SW

It may have something to do with not being able to find the emulsions we
loved, or to have them processed, as in the case of K64 (not to mention
K25...)  Reala, Velvia (not my favorite, but that of legions of others) a
large group of Kodak color and black and white films, all have disappeared
or are very hard to find.  I'm still mourning the loss of Panchromatic X and
Ektar25, although digital had nothing to do with the demise of those two
films.
I've kept my film gear, but find little use for it, since my 5D does pretty
much all that my 1n did, and I don't have to take the color film in for
development.  I certainly don't miss the darkroom, loved working there, but
it was in our laundry room, and the setup and teardown was a pain in the
rear, not to mention the unventilated nature of the workspace.  I didn't
even have the command dial of my A2 repaired when it finally, and
inevitably, failed.

Well I think a lot of us still have our film gear but simply don't use
it, what is the point?  Film was such a huge pain to scan I for one was
delighted not to have to do that any more, well except I still have not
scanned all my old negatives.  And a lot of my old film gear works
great on my DSLR so it is not like all of it has gone to waste.

Scott

Scott, you're living in unusual circumstances IIRC-- Hawaii, where
you've said that film is ruined by mold within several years. Of course,
the people there would be using digital but that doesn't mean that your
experience translates to what the rest of the world is doing. There are
plenty of people using film.

Well, FWIW, all of the *pros* I know shoot both.

That wasn't what I meant. I know serious photographers are moving to
digital as well. What I was trying to say is that although people who
take photography seriously and know what they're doing are likely to
have evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of film and digital
before deciding what to do, in the more general case this isn't true.
If you include all the happy snappers, _most_ people who have switched
to digital haven't considered the pros and cons because they haven't a
clue what the pros and cons are. They've just seen digital cameras in
the shops and have thought "new, shiny, want one".

I hope you don't think I'm totally anti-digital (it has it's uses and it
is very very good at what it does), but at the same time I don't worship
it. I use both film and digital at various times. Practically all
commercial work I've done in the last 3 (maybe more) years has been
digital simply due to the speed. For my family snapshots, I use digital
almost exclusively too, and a digital P&S'er at that. I know that any
DSLR or FSLR would do better than a digital P&S, but the P&S is good
enough, and is small and compact.
However when I want something with quality, black & white, or something
that will be a "keeper", it goes onto film. As for resolution - the
current crop of 10MP DSLRs win over 35mm, no question about it. But I
can't put my finger on it, but film still looks better to my eye. Pretty
much every digital camera I've seen (and sorry Canon owners, but Canon
seem worse at it), tends to make people look plastic. On technicalities
digital wins hands down, with the only argument from me being it's
handling of highlights. Perhaps it is because it is less technically
perfect, but I still prefer the look of a film print compared to a
digital print (even when the film has been scanned before printing).

Being a part-time minilab manager, I'm finding that there are a whole
new lot of issues when it comes to printing digital, and that we do more
reprints for digital customers than we ever did for film customers
(partially offset by the fact that we do more prints fullstop, that is
something good about digital).

With film, colour balance is controlled by the machine and the operator.
Most of my operators are pretty good at picking the colour balance and
so we can get it pretty well spot on most times. We have regular
customers, some of whom have complained about our selected colour
balance in the past, and now we can compensate for them. For example
some of them prefer a warmer cast on their prints, some prefer a cooler
cast, and so now we get it "right" (iow, right according to their eye),
most times.  I even have some customers who shoot a grey card as their
first frame - in those cases it is dead easy to set WB for the first
frame and the rest of the roll is spot on.

With digital I find my most common cause of reprinting is incorrect
cropping. It's a pain in the butt that almost all digicams shoot at 4:3
while the favourite print size is 6x4 at 3:2. With 35mm film, 6x4 was
the same aspect ratio so cropping wasn't a major issue (even though we
never printed the whole neg).  Even with enlargements though, where
cropping was also present from film, we have to do more reprints because
of unexpected cropping. The simple reason was that from film, the lab
operator made the cropping decision, whereas with digital the machine
chops evenly unless the _customer_ manually crops differently. Because
the lab operator no longer has any input into these types of controls,
it isn't being controlled by someone with experience. Decisions related
to cropping, colour balance etc are now in the hand of the customer, who
in many cases doesn't understand the issues.

Our lab is set up to not do any auto-colour adjustments to digital
images. The lab up the road is using the same frontier machine, but with
different software to ours, and it does very agressive auto colour
adjustment that can't be turned off. I get customers using our lab
because they know it will print as they see it, and won't undo stuff
they've done to the image. At the same time I have people who complain
that our lab doesn't auto-correct - one customer had a wedding photo
where the dress was a mid orange because the colour cast was so bad -
the lab up the road printed it white, our lab printed it orange - until
we manually adjusted the colours. The same customer also had outdoor
shots that our lab printed correct, but the other lab printed with a
strong magenta cast, obviously compensating for the green grass. Who is
right? I think we are because we print the digital files the same as per
the file. I'm sure the lab up the road thinks they are correct because
they compensate for errors. Ideally we'd both have an option to print
as-is or with auto-adjustments, but unfortunately the software doesn't
do that, and if it did, it would be one more option to confuse customers
who think that it is already too hard.

One thing I notice more in the digital age (and really I can't
understand why), is that I see many more prints come through the lab
with blur caused by movement of the camera. Is it because digital
cameras tend to use longer shutter speeds to ensure correct exposure,
whereas many film compacts would simply under-expose? is it because the
smaller cameras are harder to hold? is it because people are shooting at
arm-length? Is it because most digicams have bigger zooms than most film
compacts? In theory, because of the faster lenses that most digi
compacts have, motion blur should be less of an issue. But then I
suppose most film compacts were used with ISO400 film, whereas digi's
tend to use ISO 64-100 (and most low-end compacts look disgusting by the
time ISO lifts to 400).  Whatever the cause, it is a common cause of
complaint about our printing, because the motion blur will show up on a
6x4, but because of the limited resolution of camera screens it's not
visible on the camera.

In summary I don't think digital is automatically better than film
simply because of the more control it offers in the printing stage. It
is only better if the customer knows colour balance better than the lab
operator. I would say comparing most of the people who post here vs most
minilab operators I've encountered that there is no doubt that the
posters here are smarter than most lab operators (even the ones I
frequently disagree with). However I think even the worst lab operators
I've encountered still have a better grasp of the basics of colour
control than a lot of the mum & dad shooters.