Are you hanging onto your old film cameras?

That is not a bad idea. The digitized image cannot match the quality of a well exposed negative but it is better than nothing, isn't it?

CPT Jack Durish - going to disagree here - because I have tested that theory personally - take a SLR with a good lens and a DSLR with a good lens - take a photo of the exact same image, print both - give them to 10 people and ask them to pick out which is digital and which is film - they won't be able to if you run a controlled test.

Secondly, 10 years from now, even with good storage, a print from your negative will not be as good as the original, the print from the digital RAW file (the negative) will be EXACTLY the same. Also, 95% of people (including serious hobbyist photographers) don't store their negatives properly according to the manufacturer guidelines.

GySgt Carl Rumbolo - You are correct. Not one in ten can tell the difference. But, maybe one in a hundred can. I can. Digital images produce discreet transitions from one chromatic value to another. These can be seen in super enlargements. Some can be seen in even normal sized views. Film can produce an image with gradations of changes from one value to another. It's essentially the same distinction between digital music and live music. Personally, I have a tin ear and can't really tell the difference but there are those who can.

As to longevity, digital images can degrade depending upon the medium on which they're stored. Even CD's and HDD's will degrade over time. A catastrophic failure of an HDD would be similar to negatives being burned. CD's can be lost which would also be catastrophic. Thus, there is no such thing as permanency when it comes to photographic images. (On as side note, did you know that glass photographic plates were once used as window panes in green houses when the images were no longer wanted?)

CPT Jack Durish - If you invest in storage, the risk of losing images is quite low. For example I buy server class drives with high read/write lives - I use WB Red Pro drives exclusively in my NAS arrays. I use very high quality Blu Ray DVD for archival copies, stored for long life (properly stored they are good for 100 years). I have an online back up system that stores a complete set of digital images and all my software. Plus I keep an off-site set of hard drives in static storage (powered down the data is good for 50 years - and it is refreshed every year)

All digital images are stored as RAW and TIFF (non-lossy formats), video files are uncompressed HD (mostly 1920x1080) - I am just starting to mess with 4k video - that is a storage challenge

So I have no fear of image degradation at all, no work is done on static stored images, if I want to work on images and edit - I transfer a copy to my work station, and do all the work on direct copies (keeping them on an SSD on my workstation makes it faster). If I save edits, they go into storage the same way.

Expensive, yes - but worth every penny. I lost a complete NAS array last year, a motherboard failure that crashed a raid array and resulted in a disk failure. No big deal. Built a new NAS, new drives, new RAID controller, copied the data from storage, lost nothing.

No digital camera can correct perspective like a monorail camera, huh?

CPT Jack Durish, exactly. Plus, the tradeoffs between film speed, grain size, and inter-negatives which was the basis of many rules of exposure and enlargement and color balance.

In the digital world there is only the point of pixelization, which is a function of the camera sensor. And color balance is now a function of Photoshop. It is a brave new world.

Must have been a Leica. Superior optics. When I was a Sea Scout on the Chesapeake Bay a member of the yacht club where we moored our vessels had a Leica. He also had a pair of binoculars taken off a German WWII Uboat. I had looked through many binoculars from cheap ones to good ones. Nothing matched the clarity of those German binoculars.