The camera on a tripod outside Edward Levinson's countryside home in Chiba Prefecture is deceptive in its simplicity. It has no lens or viewfinder, no focusing dial, and no shutter-release button.

"It's just an empty box," explains Levinson, sliding out the back and turning it upside down to prove it.

With that he straps a Polaroid film holder across the opened back and points the camera toward his 70-year-old home. There is, I remind him, no lens. At this he smiles and points to a piece of black tape stuck on the front, under which, he says, is a pinhole.

"When you're ready, just pull the tape back and count to . . . let's say, 20," he advises, surveying the house and the sky to support his guesstimate.

When the count is reached, Levinson replaces the tape and yanks out the Polaroid film. Then, a minute later, he peels apart the print to reveal a warm, atmospheric shot. "It's uninhibited and natural -- there is nothing between what's being photographed and what is catching it," explains U.S.-born Levinson, a professional photographer whose images are almost all made using pinhole cameras, many fashioned by him from wooden or cardboard boxes or cookie tins.

The pinhole camera is known to photographers and photography teachers the world over as the original camera; a tool that simply and elegantly illustrates the law of optics, such that when light rays are reflected from a subject and pass through a small hole they cross and reform as a transposed image on a flat surface behind the hole. When that flat surface is photosensitive material, the image can be fixed on it.

"Pinhole takes you to the very basics of photography -- and the basics of seeing," is how Levinson puts it. It is this simplicity, he says, that accounts for the recent growing interest in pinhole photography in Japan and the U.S.

"I think the revival is a kind of reaction to digital -- these days it's digital this, that and the other, and instant everything else," he says. "With the pinhole, during the seconds or minutes the 'shutter' is open, I'm right there participating with the moment. I don't know if we've got that with the digital camera."

The earliest photographers participated even more. When Frenchman Nicephore Niepce produced the first known photograph in 1827 -- using a camera obscura (essentially a dark chamber or room with a small hole in it) -- the chemicals he had concocted required an exposure of more than eight hours to absorb an image.

Today, photography is still about recording a moment in time and space, but exposures are now generally for tenths or even thousandths of a second. So it is that we can snap a motorbike passing at 100 kph, and have a perfect print of it from a photo lab in 45 minutes.

The entire process has been sped up in part due to technology, but also in response to our demands for convenience. It's small wonder, then, that the sheer immediacy of digital cameras -- not to mention their recent affordability -- is causing even diehard analog camera enthusiasts to refocus.

Shimpei Asai, who became famous overnight when, aged 27, he was appointed official photographer for The Beatles' 1966 tour of Japan, is one who believes the future of film-based cameras is uncertain.

"I think it will survive, but only as a style of expression created by human hands," he says, adding that social factors will play a big part in the outcome.

"From here on, obviously there will be those people whose first encounter with a camera is the digital type. There will always be those people who will consciously go back to analog but, with society structured toward computers the way it is, it's not hard to see which way most people are going to go."

Last rolls?

Just as the camera never lies, neither do the statistics -- and they appear to support Asai's analysis. From January to October this year, for instance, worldwide shipments of digital cameras totaled 13.1 million units -- 60.3 percent up on the same period last year, according to Japan Camera Industry Association figures. Meanwhile, over the same period shipments of film cameras fell around 16 percent, to 23 million units. Industry experts believe these trends are likely to continue, meaning sales of digital cameras will overtake those of film-based ones within a few years.

Indeed, some industry insiders are already writing the obituary. "The era of the film camera has all but ended," says Shin Yasuhara, founder of Yasuhara Co., a two-man enterprise he claims is the smallest camera-maker in the world.

Yasuhara, 37, formerly an engineer at Kyocera (makers of Contax and Yashica), quit his job to set up his own company in 1998 after becoming disillusioned with the "unimaginative" automatic cameras he was asked to produce. "My original image of a camera is something much simpler than today's models. Nothing new is coming out of today's single-lens reflex cameras . . . It's the same product as 20 years ago, only dressed in different clothes."

His idea was to go back to the drawing board, produce an all-manual, classic-style SLR camera along the lines of Germany's famed Leica brand -- then make it better without resorting to "unnecessary gadgets."

In the two years since putting out the first model, his firm has sold more than 4,000 units of its Yasuhara No. 1, which is assembled in China.

Japanese consumers' love of the latest gadgets could be the final nail in the coffin, he says. "Give it another five years and I believe the word 'camera' will refer to the digital variety, and film cameras will become a novelty item. They will almost certainly die out one day -- maybe not in my lifetime, but in the not-too-distant future."

However, this hasn't stopped some of Japan's camera-makers from taking advantage of a small but loyal niche market by producing classic-style models over the past couple of years. Nagano-based Cosina Co. has come out with its Voigtlander Bessa-R camera, Konica Corp. with its Hexar RF and, this year, Nikon Corp. with its FM3a -- a slightly upgraded version of a model first made more than 20 years ago.

A Cosina official said the use of the Voigtlander brand -- a once-leading German company that went out of business in the 1970s -- was a result of his company's desire to preserve and promote an understanding of conventional cameras. "We produce absolutely no digital cameras . . . and have a greater interest in producing models that show originality," the official says.

While he concedes that the market for film-based cameras will shrink as more consumers and makers go digital, he doubts that the analog market will disappear completely. "Film cameras are too good," he said, "and people's tastes are too varied for that to happen."

The quality of film itself is also too good to dismiss lightly, enthusiasts point out. Digital technology, they say, will never surpass the quality of film, which produces images with more accurate colors, higher resolution and better tonality than pixel-based ones.

In the last year, though, this argument has lost some of its bite as digital cameras with significantly increased data-storage capabilities have appeared on the market. Some, such as Olympus Optical Co.'s Camedia E-20 and Nikon's D1X models, exceed 5 megapixels (5 million pixels). At the same time, improved ink-jet printer technology has further closed the quality gap between analog and digital pictures.

But the difference is still formidable. Chosei Sawa of Fuji Photo Film Co., the world's largest supplier of camera film after Kodak, estimates that a frame of fine-graind 35-mm color film contains the equivalent of around 20 million pixels. Film for large-format cameras contains even more.

Film still in the frame

This is enough to convince people like Naohisa Hara, a professional photographer and professor at Nihon University's photography department, that film cameras are under no real threat from the digital revolution.

For art photographers, he says, the quality of the final print and its preservation are concerns that have yet to be answered by the digital world. One of the major problems with digital photography lies not just in the camera, but in the printers, he says. "There are [conventional] photos around that have survived for more than 100 years. But digitally generated images [printed out on compatible printers] have a tendency to fade within a few months or years. One of the most important roles of a photo is as a record of a time and place."

The only threat to film, Hara believes, comes from the ability of film manufacturers to survive the digital onslaught. "I believe that a certain proportion of photo film-makers may well die out," he says.

Indeed, signs of this are beginning to appear. Fuji's Sawa says the film market in Japan, which is the largest after the United States, fell for the first time last year, by approximately 10 percent to about 400 million rolls. Fuji estimates worldwide consumption to be 33.5 billion rolls.

"I don't anticipate any further growth here or in the U.S., but there are less developed nations where people cannot afford digital cameras. China alone is a potentially huge market."

To keep abreast of the trend, Fuji has developed its own high-end SLR digital camera, as well as a high-speed (ISO 1600) one-time-use camera to hold customers' interest in film. Indeed, such "throwaway" cameras now account for about 20 percent of the total film market, Sawa says.

Nippon Polaroid K.K., whose U.S. parent company recently filed for bankruptcy due to the bludgeoning impact of the digital camera market, has also put out several innovative products to try and boost its film sales. One of these, riding the "print club" sticker boom, was the i-zone camera which enables users to take miniature Polaroids. This hit the market in 1999 and sold almost 2 million units in its first year. Then, earlier this year, the company introduced its DIY Pinhole Camera Kit for just 9,800 yen. The product shipped 1,000 units in its first month -- double the maker's expectations.

"As far as Polaroid film being used for photographs, we have no future," explains official Yoshihiro Ando. "But if we promote it as a form of fine art, our future is bright. That's why our strategy for next year is to publicize our film as a fine-art medium." Also, next year, he says the company aims to release a new product along these lines which will target young women studying or working in the fashion industry.

However, for the many digital-camera users who simply store images on their PCs or CD-ROMs, the pixels-vs.- silver-hallide crystals argument is as pointless as arguing the merits of CDs over vinyl records.

Still others believe that since the introduction of digital cameras, makers, consumers and professional photographers alike have become too narrow-minded in the way they view pictures. "It's unusual, but with prints produced from a film camera, we tend to view them from a certain distance," says Nikon's Tetsuro Goto. "This is not so with digitally printed images. We're too busy checking whether the finest points of resolution have come out or not . . . We don't view them as pictures, but as pieces of technology."

Yet there are those who are willing to take a wider view, and foresee a use for analog and digital technologies combined. According to Toshiyuki Shinohara of the Tokyo Photographic Cultural Center, advertising photographers are rapidly converting to digital, or mixing the two mediums, to make use of the broader possibilities presented.

One such photographer is Dekobokomanji, 38, who has made full use of digital technology in his photography, which includes album covers for popular Japanese bands and digitally enhanced portraits of top TV personalities. He explains: "Even when I was working entirely with analog cameras, I would often need to play around with images in the darkroom. So I'm doing nothing different now, only I choose the computer instead of the darkroom to manipulate those [analog] images.

"It's a question of what you want to make. For anyone, that's simple -- it's the picture you want. So instead of tearing my hair out trying to decide something as mundane as 'analog or digital,' I just took the shortcut in order to achieve the image I wanted. It's not that big a deal after all, is it?"