I'd also expect the storage convenience to have had an impact, you can store dozens to hundreds of pictures in a memory card the size of a nail (a pretty huge nail for CF cards, but most of the market will be consumers shooting on SD anyway) and you can offload them into a computer or a bigger storage system at the end of the day, instead of having to lug around cases of film.
There's also the ability to quickly remove "failed" or extra shoots on the spot without wasting a valuable spot in the card, where film... a photo taken is a spot taken, no going back.
> I suppose the lesson to be learned there is that Kodak spent a century making the very best film it possibly could (for the professional lines, anyway) when it turns out the market is perfectly happy with a 4 MP digital with a mediocre lens and chromatic abberation out the arse if it cuts the feedback loop down from days to seconds.
I'm not sure your argument is much helped by you comparing professional film with consumer point-and-shoot from 5 years ago.
Actually one of the cameras I was sort of thinking of when I wrote that was Nikon's D1H, which was very low resolution and not great at controlling sensor noise but was very popular among sports photojournalists because it was very very fast in use. If you were interested in the quality of the photograph you got, they were incredibly unappetizing.
But even comparing consumer film lines to consumer digicams of five years ago, the film had it all over the digicam in terms of resolution, color fidelity, responsiveness (not unusual for there to be a multi second lag time between pressing the button and a photo being taken on those), just technically slaughtered. But because you get results right now and don't need to spend $6 getting it developed, hey. One of the reasons 4 MP was enough was because consumers rarely enlarge a photograph past the 4x6 prints they get from the mini lab, so the advantages turn out to be mostly not interesting.
For the average consumer, $6 is probably less of an issue than the hassle of physically going to the drug store to get the pictures developed. I don't want to part with my 6 bucks, but I really don't want to waste two round trips to the store to get physical images when I could instead just upload them to the website of my choice (for free or at least cheap).
Beyond that, film is just a pain in the ass. You can carry a single card that holds hundreds of images, or you can carry 4 rolls of film and get 96 images. Every time you take a picture, you're counting down the number of images you can take. And you need to buy the right ISO, even though you're an amateur and don't know what the hell ISO is.
Film was destined to die out for casual photographers as soon as digital reached the "meh, these photos are okay" stage, because "okay" is good enough for most people, and film is just so inconvenient in comparison to digital.
I'd also expect the storage convenience to have had an impact, you can store dozens to hundreds of pictures in a memory card the size of a nail (a pretty huge nail for CF cards, but most of the market will be consumers shooting on SD anyway) and you can offload them into a computer or a bigger storage system at the end of the day, instead of having to lug around cases of film.
There's also the ability to quickly remove "failed" or extra shoots on the spot without wasting a valuable spot in the card, where film... a photo taken is a spot taken, no going back.
> I suppose the lesson to be learned there is that Kodak spent a century making the very best film it possibly could (for the professional lines, anyway) when it turns out the market is perfectly happy with a 4 MP digital with a mediocre lens and chromatic abberation out the arse if it cuts the feedback loop down from days to seconds.
I'm not sure your argument is much helped by you comparing professional film with consumer point-and-shoot from 5 years ago.