Yes, you are right. he cost of film plus processing can be daunting. I have both digital and film bodies, and the day all the film is gone, I will be unhappy...in a way.

There are two sides to it. Someone gave me a Leica IIIC and a couple of lenses, but I never used it. If film is gone, I'll never get to see why people praise Leicas so much.

But, on the other hand, the logical side of me says to not throw good money after bad, i.e., don't buy more film. I suspect there is no really good answer.

I went on ebay looking for the lowest priced FF dslr for less than $500, and that's how I came across it. They still sell on ebay from time to time. The 14/N designation meant Nikon mount. They also sold other mount types. This camera is strictly for low iso work. Above 200 iso the noise gets bad. But I really like it as a landscape camera, or studio camera with bright lighting, flash or long exposures in lower light. No live view, but immediate review on the lcd screen. Lots of presets for white balance. I shoot in raw mode and tweak the color temp in PS.

No question, film is mostly dead, and the film industry is bleeding out quickly. The shots were fired in the mid-1990s, but the animal is so big, it's taken a couple of decades to bleed out.

I lived through the digital revolution in the pro photo lab world. We started making low resolution scans and printing small items digitally in 1995. We started scanning film to print everything digitally in 2000. We ripped out the optical printers and recycled the metal in 2004. We ripped out the film processors and recycled the metal in 2007. The last film scanner was retired in 2009. By then, everything we did was digital, and was more consistent and of better quality than before it was digital.

Yes, you can still order film from B&H, Adorama, and similar large camera stores. Kodak still makes professional films and Tri-X and Kodacolor. But they killed 'chromes completely. Agfa branded slide films and Fujifilm slide films are still available.

If you process and print your own, or have a lab you trust, using film is not a problem. But for the vast majority of photographers, for the vast number of end uses, film is a severe inconvenience!

Think about it. MOST imaging is headed for the Internet these days. It goes on commercial web pages, on sharing sites, and into private cloud libraries.

Images used for 4/color process printing are captured digitally, processed in software, separated in software, and imaged onto digital plates with lasers — no film involved.

Images used for high end, archival quality prints are printed digitally on Epson, HP, or Canon pigmented inkjet printers, right from a computer.

Commercial photographers may create one image in camera, that is used in a catalog, a video commercial, a web page, a point-of-purchase display, a newspaper ad, a magazine ad, and perhaps on the product package itself. ALL are manipulated digitally, and sent around the country or around the world at the speed of light.

We can do in minutes what used to take hours or days!

That is why film is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD.

In the future, ultra-high definition monitors of all sizes will be so common that printing will be a lost art. Why kill a tree and pollute water to make paper? Why waste good diesel fuel to truck it all over the country? Why sell a book for $29.95 when you can deliver it instantly over the Internet for $9.95 and make $9.00 or more doing it that way? Why not use a medium that includes still images, video images, audio, graphics, and text, rather than just images?

The digital revolution is a thought revolution, a time compression revolution, a possibility revolution. Film was an addictive drug, and Kodak was the pusher, which reminds me of a Steppenwolf song used in Easy Rider...