I’ve seen people expressing “analog nostalgia” for all kinds of pre-digital devices; film cameras, phones with rotary dials, audio tape, vinyl records and so on. That wouldn’t be all that weird. The weird part is that almost exclusively, people expressing such nostalgia were born after this tech went functionally extinct.

For instance, when I hear a young person in their twenties spewing such nonsense, I instantly get an allergy attack from their affectation. A person who is 26 years old was born in 2000. There were no rotary phones then. I had my first cellphone in 1999, and I was actually not an early adopter. By that point, we all had wired phones with multiple memories and nobody I know had a rotary dial on theirs. CD players were a thing for a while; audio tapes and vinyl did stick around, but by the 2000s, it was CD era. Film was at its peak in mid-1990s, in a crisis by 2004 and dead by 2008. An average gen-z person knows film only from faded-out prints that were kept in someone’s hot attic, and had degraded into a greenish-blue mess. They don’t actually know what film looked like when it was the current technology. So, when they say they are nostalgic about film and they buy cameras with greenish-blue presets that supposedly emulate film, I don’t actually know what the fuck they are about, because film didn’t look like that. I know, because I was there. I made scans of fresh prints and fresh slides when they were a current technology.

This is what a scanned fresh C41 print looks like:

That’s what “looking like film” actually means. And this is what E6 slide looks like:

Fuji Astia 100F, Canon EOS 3 and EF 85mm f/1.8

Fuji Velvia 100, Canon EOS 3 and EF 85mm f/1.8

Fuji Sensia 100, Soligor SR-300MD and MC 50mm f/1.4 Rokkor-PG

Yeah, it doesn’t look at all like what you’ve been told film is supposed to look like. It doesn’t have the greenish or bluish faded-out “nostalgic” tinge. It’s not all warped, fucked over and full of all sorts of artefacts. That’s because it wasn’t shot with a potato and developed in cat urine, and then left in a kitchen drawer by the stove for 30 years for you to find it there and think “oh, this looks like shit, it makes me so nostalgic, I wish everything looked like shit again”.

So, why shoot film if you don’t want to make it look like shit? No reason whatsoever, because the modern digital process can make things look as great, or better, than they used to look in film’s prime. The only reason why you’d want film today is affectation and a misplaced fake-nostalgia over believing that things used to be shit, and it would be great if they were shit again.

Olympus E-1 ZD 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 early digital camera.

Canon 5d 35mm digital camera

Modern 35mm digital camera.

Sorry to ruin your fake nostalgia, but film actually looked good. Digital also looks good. Go fuck yourself with your fake faded-out greenish shit, you don’t know what you’re talking about. A vinyl record, if fresh and not scratched, sounded exactly like a CD. An audio tape sounded reasonably good but worse than a CD, which is why we stopped using it. I hear that people stopped using horse-drawn carriages because cars, unlike horses, don’t leave piles of shit on the streets. Also, rotary phones were shit and we replaced them with numbered dials in mid-1980s. Yes, old cars had great visibility because they had bigger window panes and less metal. You know why we moved away from that? Because more metal means better structural rigidity in a crash, which helps if you don’t want to die or sustain grave injuries.

Fuck old technology.