Is 110 film being phased out?

I'm surprised that you still process 110. The minilab I used to work at stopped processing it in the spring of '99 (this also happends to be when we started processing APS film). I can process 110 where I'm at now, though I discourage it, as it is very precariously clipped to a 120 rack.

They've been phasing out 110 for a decade now, yet people still buy the danged cameras. Don't they know they are better off with even a 1MP digital camera?

Mike ( Lab Monkey) stated, "Don't they know they are better off with even a 1MP digital camera?"
Funny, using my Coolscan 5000, I have scanned hundreds of frames of this film that I had taken with my cheap Kodak Instamatic from two decades ago and they put to shame the latest crop of digiscams from this past Christmas. Sony, Oly, Nikon - all had a minimum of 4MP, I think one was a 7MP.

FWIW, 110 film isn't 110 millimeters wide!

Still, if you had one of those Pentax 110 SLR systems, I can imagine being pretty disappointed. I don't have one, but I've seen them in display cabinets, and the thought of having such a kit, complete with an array of interchangeable lenses in such a microscopic form factor sure has its appeal, despite the lousy film format.

You can still get it at 7dayshop.com. They introduced it in 2001 and still have plenty of stock.

We still are capable of developing it in our lab, but we tell them to send it out for better results now. On our machine it prints them manually- no corrections- so it looks even worse then normal.

Les, I more or less agree with you, except that some my old Kodacolor negatives are horribly grainy. Many are OK, though and making an accepatble A4 print isn't too difficult. I used a Minolta camera with what seems to have been pretty good optics. I recently gave it away as I had not been using it since I bought an Olympus XA, which uses 35mm film and actually is smaller. 110 film and development is next to impossible to find here anyway. But I still have a ton of 110 negatives waiting to go through the scanner. I use an Epson 4990 for most of the scans, then the most intersting go on the Scanmate 5000.

110 ceased to have any purpose nearly 20 years ago when the compact 35mm autofocus point-and-shoot cameras hit the market. Those cameras weren't much larger than 110 cameras, but provided much more versatility and significantly better image quality.

Remember that 110 was a very successful format, with millions of cameras sold during the 1970s and 1980s. Many of those cameras still work and produce adequate snapshot memories, so their owners feel no incentive (or don't know any better) to go out and buy a 35mm or digital point-and-shoot. So there's still a small market for film and processing that will probably persist for a while before shrinking to uneconomical impracticality. There are also hundreds of millions of 110 negatives squirreled away in shoeboxes and drawers, some of which are precious memories that will remain worthy of reprinting for quite a while.

The real limitation of the 110 format was (and is) grainy color negative film. The original Kodacolor II wasn't good for enlargement beyond 5x7, and even the standard 3.5x5 prints too often showed visible grain. Newer films have much better image quality, but the most of the cameras still in use are the cheap meterless fixed-focus variety that produce the "blurry, out of focus, or washed out" negatives you noted. The only widely-available film is Kodak Gold 400, which is probably grainier than such a small format really needs.

There were some rather good 110 cameras in the 1970s when Kodak executives still had enough vision to promote the format as a serious "system." I took thousands of Kodachrome slides with a Pocket Instamatic 60, a rangefinder camera with a fine lens at the top of Kodak's 1972 line of 110 cameras. The quality was good enough to project on a 50x50-inch matte screen, and I have some 8x10 enlargements on my wall that I would defy anyone to tell that they came from 110 slides (the only reason I can't make bigger enlargements is the limited number of pixels my 4000dpi scanner can get from a 13x17mm frame). Since so few 110 users shot slides, the 110 format ended up permanently condemned to grainy shapshots. I retired my Pocket Instamatic 60 in 1982, when Kodak discontinued Kodachrome in 110.

Scanning 110 film is a challenge. Slides are easy enough if you can find an adapter to fit the unique 30x30mm mounts into a standard 50x50mm holder (they're still made, believe it or not). But negatives are a big problem since only the very expensive Nikon Coolscan 9000 even has a 16mm film holder available. Given the large number of 110 negatives, the demand for 16mm film holders would seem much greater than scanner manufacturers realize. An article on my Web site about scanning 110 film is probably the most frequently-accessed page on my site. I also have a collection of pictures I took in Europe with my Pocket Instamatic 60 on Kodachrome-X and Kodachrome 64.

Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen, I haven't shot any 110 for a long time, but from the resultsI am getting, a little grain is a lot better then the mottled noise on, incorrect color, bad focus even with "Holographic focusing" anyday. ;-)
Ted Marcus, I don't think you need to resort to Kodachrome to match the latest crop of digiscams. Heck, Kodak Max Versatility is probably good enough. ;-) I've been using my CS5K to scan my strips of 110 film by using the film holder. It's very clumsy but gets the job done and scanning those tiny frames, with ICE, only takes a few seconds each. Fumbling the film in the holder takes longer.
BTW, took a look at your site, very cool. Do you have any full res samples in there?