It’s become one of the fastest-growing market niches in the tech world — machines for people who like doing things the hard way.
Most of us were perfectly happy when vinyl records and cassette tapes gave way to CDs, MP3s, and streaming music, and digital cameras overtook film. The electronic substitutes are easier to use and cheaper too.
But increasingly consumers are willing to put up with the messy imperfections of analog media over the cool precision of digital. They’ve come to enjoy the clicks and pops of a worn phonograph record, or the flamboyant, exaggerated colors of images captured on celluloid instead of silicon. There’s also something of a retro-cool factor at work, and increasingly tracking down old albums or seeing movies in original film format is a social thing among friends.
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That helps explain why consumers bought $416 million in vinyl records in 2015, the most in nearly three decades. Or why Fujifilm’s sales of Instax film-based cameras, 5 million in fiscal 2015, surpassed those of its digital cameras.
I began to understand this intensity while at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) earlier in January. There were a number of companies showing off vinyl turntables; my favorite was GPinto, an Italian outfit that makes a $3,000 platter with a built-in amplifier driven by old-school vacuum tubes.
Meanwhile Eastman Kodak Co., inventor of the digital cameras that nearly drove it bankrupt, will push analog nostalgia to the limit with a new kind of movie camera that costs more than most laptops. The $2,000 camera, due to go on sale this spring, shoots Super 8 film, a format invented in 1965. Each film cartridge costs around $25 and delivers just 2.5 minutes of shooting time. That’s a hundred bucks to shoot a 10-minute movie, not counting the cost to develop the film.
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Yet company spokeswoman Louise Kehoe said Kodak has been ”inundated with inquiries from people all over the world” since it first proposed to build the camera last year. The company has begun designing cheaper versions of the camera for the mass market, and it recently resumed production of Ektachrome, a movie film it stopped making four years ago.
I’m late to the analog explosion, but David Sax saw it coming years ago, and has written a new book, “The Revenge of Analog,” about the old-tech renaissance.
During a phone chat, Sax said for most folks old enough to be reared on analog gear, the transition to digital devices still seems miraculous. But for millennials, “there’s nothing necessarily special or magical about digital technology,” said Sax. “It’s what they’ve known.” To them, the obsolete analog stuff seems smart and sophisticated.
Do vinyl records played on vacuum-tube amps sound better than digital? Who cares? What seems to matter to most fans is the deeper, more social experience of tracking down old albums, admiring their ornate covers, or showing off your collection to friends.
“Nobody goes to somebody’s house and says, look at my Spotify playlist,” said Sax.
Analog is also catching on in recording studios, Sax said. Bands like Alabama Shakes and Arcade Fire have rebelled against digital gear that lets them record two dozen takes of each song, digitally snip a few notes from each one, and cobble together a “perfect” version. With analog recording, the musicians just play and sing as best they can, and produce recordings with the immediacy of a real performance.
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The same goes for cinema, according to Diane Carroll-Yacoby, the commercialization manager for Kodak’s movie film business. Renowned Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese and Christopher Nolan insist on film rather than digital video.
“People revere the shots done on film, because those are the money shots,” said Carroll-Yacoby.
She means that literally; a single canister of pro-grade movie film, enough for about 10 minutes, can cost $1,000 or more. So when the camera rolls, “people do their best, and they do it in two or three takes,” Carroll-Yacoby said. “They may not get as much, but everything they get is special.”
But few of the new products are purely analog. The GPinto turntable-amp features USB and Bluetooth support, to allow it to also play tunes stored on your smartphone. The Kodak Super 8 camera includes a fold-out video viewfinder, just like a digital camcorder, as well as an audio recording system for giving the movie a soundtrack.
Still, at their heart these gadgets rely on costly, clumsy analog methods to record and reproduce the sights and sounds of the world. To geezers like me, still intoxicated by the simplicity of our digital gear, this all seems too much like work. But for the analog loyalists, harder is better.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeTechLab.