The AP has a report out somewhere today saying it will be two generations before digital will displace film.

Yes, I too read that Reuters story on Yahoo! news. I suspect that the ongoing popular press chatter on the subject will, to a great degree, become a self-fulfilling prophecy by channeling the public's expectations. Here in Chicago the transformation is already beginning to take place at a few of the larger downtown theaters. People who have seen features on one of our digital screens have begun to rumor about how much better the image is (at least to their eyes) and thus the tsunami begins.

It will not be next year, but it certainly also not be "generations". And film projection houses will remain for the foreseeable future, even after Hollywood stops producing for that medium.

I think, and this is purely my view, is that digital will surpass film a lot faster than everyone expexts. Film has had over 100 years to mature, and in that sense digital is still a baby, but its growing up very fast indeed, think about it, look at how much computers have developed (only around for around 20 years!) i still remember playing with C64 and Amstrad 128K just as if it was yesterday and now look we have 128BIT consoles and AMD 64 BIT computers. In fact the technology is here already but its more political and ecomonics at the moment that is slowing the momentum of the digital wave. Not long now give it another 5~10 years then people will be saying "F..ILM...huh? what was that all about?"

I mean think about when was the last time you used a film based still camera after owning a digital still camera? :-)

Anyway just my View..

I didn;t know The Last Samurai was digital! HOLY SMOKES!

Digitally projected, not digitally shot. When a digital camera can produce images as good as "Last Samurai", then perhaps there will be some true weight to the "Film is Dead" battle call.

Personally i think film will always have a place, theres something about thats different...

I have a digital rebel and i still use my film camera as well, depends on what im doing, theres just something about it that keeps calling me back

I mentioned in another post earlier that I attended a conference here in Japan this year where some speakers introduced upcoming releases in theatrical-quality digital projectors. They have a 10-year timeline mapped out before achieving the "ideal" situation, but as early as next year they'll have much cheaper and better models being released, and within 5 years they'll have models at such low prices, and with such high performance that I can't imagine any theater not converting.

It would be interesting to see how this timeline coincides with the HD cam and HD post-processing development timelines.

When HD cams are able to capture 60,000,000 pixels, film will be history and mini DV cams will be passe. :-))