Film vs. Digital
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I personally buy from ,
and . I can't vouch for
vs. Digital Cameras
INTRODUCTION
use both digital and film cameras all the time. They each serve a different
Film and digital
capture are completely different media. They are used for similar
purposes, but they themselves are completely unrelated to each other.
I'd have an easier time and get in less trouble comparing my mom
to a maid or my wife to something else than attempting a comparison
of film to digital cameras. That said, here goes.
Most people
get better results with digital cameras. I prefer the look of film.
Film takes much more work. Extremely skilled photographers can get
better results on film if they can complete the many more steps from
shot to print all perfectly. Because there are so many ways things
can go wrong with making prints from film, especially from print
(negative) film, beginning photographers and hobbyists usually get
better prints from digital because there are fewer variables to control.
I get my digital
prints made at Costco and they look stunning. Mark the Costco bag &Print
as-is. No corrections& and your prints will look like your screen,
so long as you've left your camera in its
sRGB mode.
usually make awful prints from film, which is why people who don't
print their work personally get better results
from digital. I've never been
happy with prints from negatives made for me by any lab regardless
of cost. This is because prints from negatives are at the mercy of
the eye of the person making the print. If you're not making the
prints yourself you usually get something completely different than
you wanted, which means junk. That's why most photographers shoot
slide (transparency) film, since the printer can see exactly what
the photographer intended.
format film still rules for serious landscape photography.
use digital for people, fun shots and convenience. Digital replaced
film in 1999 for big-city newspapers.
The biggest
reason the results look different is the highlights. We're used to
the way film looks. It overloads gracefully when things get too light
or wash out. This mimics our eye far better than digital. Digital's
weak point is that highlights abruptly clip and look horrible as
soon as anything hits white. Unlike film there is no gradual overload
to white. Digital cameras' characteristic curve heads straight to
255 white and just crashes into the wall. it's the same with video
versus motion picture film. If any broad area like a forehead is
overexposed your image looks like crap on digital. This effect is
similar on cheap pocket cameras, my expensive Nikon D200 and $250,000
professional digital cinema cameras.
A smaller reason
is that film,
especially larger format film used in landscape
photography, has more resolution. This becomes important as
print size increases to wall size but invisible in 5 x 7& prints.
Which is Better?
is better on an absolute basis. The choice depends on your application.
Once you know your application the debate goes away. The debate only
exists when people presume erroneously that someone else's needs mirror
their own.
can get great 12 x 18& glossy prints for $2.99 at Costco every
day from my digital camera, and we all can get fuzzy results on film.
It's the artist, not the medium, which defines quality.
and only if you're an accomplished artist who can extract every last
drop from film's quality then film, meaning large format film, technically
is better than digital in every way. Few people have the skill to work
film out to this level, thus the debate.
people get better results from digital. Artists print their own work,
but if you use a lab for prints you'll have more control and get better
results from digital.
Convenience
has always won out over ultimate quality throughout the history of
photography. Huge home-made wet glass plates led to store-bought
dry plates which led to 8 x 10& sheet film which led to 4 x 5& sheet film which
led to 2-1/4& roll film which led to 35mm which led to digital.
As the years roll on the ultimate quality obtained in each smaller medium
drops, while the average results obtained by everyone climbs. In 1860
only a few skilled artisans like my great-great-great grandfather in
Scotland could coax any sort of an image at all from a plate camera
while normal people couldn't even take photos at all. In 1940 normal
people got fuzzy snaps from their Brownies and flashbulbs while artists
got incredible results on 8 x 10& film. Today artists still mess
with 4 x 5& cameras and normal people are getting the best photos
they ever have on 3 MP digital cameras printed at the local photo lab.
why the debate? I suspect the debate is among amateurs who've really
only shot 35mm since it's been the only popular amateur film format
for the past 25 years. Pros never say &film,& they say a format
like &120,& &4x5,& &6x17,& &8x20&
or &35& since &film& could mean so many things.
Amateurs say &film& since they only use one format and presume
35mm. Therein lies the potential for debate when people don't first
define their terminology. Today's digital SLRs replace 35mm, no big
deal. Most people will get far better prints from a 6MP DSLR like the
than they will paying someone else
to print their 35mm film.
a little crazy: I shoot &
film for serious gallery work and large prints. Most film shooters shoot
the smaller 35mm size film and use print film, not transparencies. Digital
cameras give much better results than 35mm print film unless you are
custom printing your own film because the colors from digital are not
subject to the whims of the lab doing the printing.
cameras give me much better and more accurate colors than I've ever
gotten with print film. If I can spend all day making a custom print
from a large transparency I'll use film, and if all I need is a 12
x 18& print (small for me but big to most people) then a print
is better and faster.
is far more convenient and offers great quality for photojournalism
and portraits, and film is king for large prints and reproduction where
textures in nature and landscapes are important. The violent film vs.
digital WWF death match smackdown articles are just to sell magazines
and digital cameras. I'll get to the detailed differences below, but
first let me put the whole issue in perspective. It's really too bad
that many hobbyists and photo magazines present this as a warlike win/lose
issue with film somehow involved in a death struggle against digital
and waste their time arguing amongst themselves in vacuous
instead of just going out and trying it for themselves.
first needs to define just what one is going to do with the photographs.
For most things digital is far more convenient if you're shooting hundreds
of images, making prints smaller than a few feet on a side and posting
on websites and email, and for other things like landscape photography
for reproduction and large fine prints film is better.
me. Just look
for why a magazine like
simply does not accept images from digital cameras for
publication since the quality is not good enough, even from 16 megapixel
cameras, to print at 12 x 18.& Arizona highways doesn't even accept
35mm film, and rarel they usually only print
4 x 5& large format film.
comment from Arizona Highways after they got a lot of hate mail from
amateurs on the previous link. As of November 2005 Arizona
Highways admits
it will take digital, but only for smaller images. To quote
from Peter Ensengerger,
Arizona Highways Director of Photography, in that most recent article:
&digital still can&t touch
large-format film for the full-page reproductions that have made Arizona
Highways famous& and &The 4x5 view camera remains unsurpassed
for landscape photography.&
and digital do different things better and complement each other.
Neither is going away, although film will decline in areas where
digital excels, like news. Film has already disappeared from professional
use a year or so ago, although small town papers may still
use it, and
likewise, no digital capture system has come anywhere
near replacing
8x10& large format film for huge exhibition prints
that need to
be hellaciously detailed.
is not going away
have a whole article on this
YOU HAVE TO GO LOOK FOR YOURSELF
people's abstract technical analysis or magazine articles or websites
can't tell you which looks better. You have to look for yourself. If
you want to do a technical analysis the things you should be investigating
instead of resolution and bit depth are the far more important issues
of color gamut, highlight rendition, convolved spectral response curves,
sharpening algorithms and overall transfer functions, although only
the math Ph.Ds. understand these. Honestly, if you don't trust your
own vision then you should give up photography right now, since vision
and power of observation are the most important aspects of photography!
just look at the images and realize each does different things better
and each has a very different look for different subjects.
which is better is as silly as debating girls vs. boys or apples vs.
oranges or oils vs. Prismacolor. It all depends on what you want done.
Ignore people who insist that one is better than the other without stating
their end purpose. It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
shoot about 1,000 images every week on my
and I'll go out and shoot $1,000
worth of film on another week. It all depends on the subject. Sometimes
I shoot on both formats if I need film for quality and am too lazy to
want to wait and scan my chromes for immediate distribution.
explore the advantages and disadvantages of each. If you're in a rush
you'll find the &disadvantages& section of digital particularly
enlightening, since there are very good reasons digital looks as
it does unknown to newcomers (people who have only been in this ten
or fifteen years). I've been studying digital imaging since I was
a kid and making my living at it full time since the 1980s.
also needs to define what sort of digital and what sort of film one
is comparing. There are at least two different classes for each.
&film& we have slide film (used by most professionals and
I) and negative (print) film (used by amateurs). As you know, all film
looks different, and in my case, I love the look I get from .
Most other film looks boring to me. When I speak of &film&
I mean V others of course may mean something else. Black and
white again is even more different.
&digital& we have many
with smaller, noisier CCDs and lots of JPG
compression, and
cameras with huge,
clean CCDs and mild or no JPG compression.
TO GET THE BEST DIGITAL IMAGE
best way to get a digital image is by shooting film and having it scanned.
I'm not this is a camera discussion.
In Hollywood movie production we have a phrase called &finishing.&
&Finishing on film& means the end product is film. &Finishing
on video& means the end product is video. One can start and capture
images on any medium and we have ways to convert anything to anything.
In other words, we can shoot either on film or video, and convert either
to the other if we need it. Yes, some major motion pictures today, like
&Panic Room,& were scanned from film, color corrected, edited
and color timed in a computer, and written back out to film on the
film recorder for duplication and release. We also can take
video and write it onto film, too, and you as a still photographer also
have these options. I have taken digital camera files and had them written
onto slides. That costs about $5.00 - 2.50 a slide.
doing any comparisons you need to pay attention to the medium in which
the comparison is made.
other film vs. digital comparison I've seen finished in digital, and
unfortunately they were always using a cheap consumer scanner to convert
the film to digital. A
scanner and my
are both cheap consumer scanners, as is the $10,000 Imacon,
all intended for use by end user-owners. A professional scanner costs
about $50,000 and takes years of experience to learn to get great results.
The $3,000 scanners still lose information from the film when trying
to make a comparison, and even a $50,000 scanner's images still have
to be displayed on the limited color range of a computer monitor. These
typical comparisons of course put the film at a huge disadvantage since
they are eliminating all of film's advantages and reducing the comparison
to the trivial resolution issues the newbies argue about.
yet, one comparison in American Photo magazine did this in the March/April
2002 issue, and the same thing happened .
They only compared prints made on an Epson! The folly is that they were
not comparing film to digital, but film scanned and printed
at the consumer level to digital. In this case digital is at
its very best, and the film is of course at the limit of the cheap consumer
scanners and printer. They didn't bother to have their color house use
the $50,000 scanner everything else gets scanned on for reproduction
in the magazine, and of course they are limited by the limited color
range of the Epson printer and whatever color space they used. A legitimate
comparison would be to compare an Epson print from the digital camera
to a Fuji Supergloss print directly from the slide film or a Heidelberg
your final product is printed on an Epson then this is a valid way to
compare. If you want to see how good film really looks you have to look
at the slides directly or printed properly on Cibachrome or Supergloss.
definition, anything you see on the Internet is obviously limited by
this issue. The flaw here is that one is not comparing to film but comparing
to a cheap scan of the film and then presented at screen resolution
way to make a real comparison is to write the digital file back out
to film and look at the two under a loupe. I've done this. The
original film always looks so much better this way due to the greater
color range and more vivid reds and greens.
ADVANTAGES:
RESOLUTION:
A glass plate from 1880 still has more resolution than a . Film always wins here when used by a skilled photographer.
One source of confusion is
uses bad science using prints too small (13 x 19&) to show
the difference. Also note that you're not even seeing the actual prints,
but screen resolution images (about 72 - 100DPI) at that site. He throws
away most of the resolution of the film. (It
doesn't matter that his film was scanned at 3,200 DPI and it's completely
irrelevant that the printer was set to 2880 DPI, since all that resolution
was down-converted for your screen.) As I keep trying to say, if all
you want is 13 x 19& inkjet prints made on a $700 Epson by all
means get an $8,000 1Ds. If you want to feel the texture of every grain
of sand on a 40 x 60& print, stick with 4 x 5& as photographers
the naive debate over pixel counts. There are far more important aspects
to picture quality. If you do fret this, film has far more equivalent
pixels, there's no question about that. I show this further down .
You also can see that in the March/April 2004 edition of
where a guy actually shot USAF resolution targets
with both 35mm film and a digital SLR and immediately discovered that
even 35mm film has three times the resolution, duh. A great page by
one of those people who actually has the time to post all this is .
This is much less important than &the look.& Here is the
biggest difference between film and digital. Just as one film looks
different from another, digital looks very different from any film.
Either you like it or you don't. Film is the result of over 100 years
of refinement. Digital is just starting out. Pixel count is just a
secondary issue.
you do fret the pixel counts, I find that it takes about 25 megapixels
to simulate 35mm film's practical resolution, which is still far more
than any practical digital camera. At the 6 megapixel level digital
gives about the same sharpness as a duplicate slide, which is plenty
for most things.
course I use much bigger film than 35mm for all the pretty pictures
you see at my website, so digital would need about 100 megapixels
to simulate medium format, or 500 megapixels to simulate 4x5,& even
if the highlight issue was resolved which it isn't. This resolution
issue is invisible at Internet resolutions or 13 x 19& Epson prints,
but obvious in gallery size prints. 35mm is mostly used by amateurs
at this time, since the news guys all went digital two years ago. 35
chromes' last vestige as of 2004 is monthly sports and journalism magazines.
The travel mags usually are shot on 120.
key to resolution debates is to ask yourself how big you will ever need
to print an image. If you are happy with small sizes like
13 x 19& then by all means digital cameras are all you'd need
if you can work around their highlight issues. Some people want to
ensure that we will be able to offer prints of any size to future clients,
and big film provides this safety. And with that:
I've had it with this idiocy.
Here are the examples I've
been too busy shooting to waste my time scanning and posting. We all
know the other websites showing a big name digital SLR looking as good
as film resolution. Baloney. You may not realize that those sites are
actually sponsored by those camera companies and the guy running them
doesn't really know how to get good results on film. He then only compares
them at such low resolution that you can't see what film's resolution
is all about. It takes skill to get optimum resolution on film.
are two crops out of this image, one shot on a brand new digital camera
and the other on a cheap film camera with a 50 year-old lens:
Full frame showing crop enlarged below
Crop from Film Image
from Digital Camera Image
digital camera photo looks like crud! How can this be? This
is why professional landscape shooters shoot 4 x 5& film, even
in 2005. Just read
August 2005 annual landscape issue where they profile
prominent shooters.
film was scanned at just 1800 DPI and the digital image rescaled
to match exactly for a fair and balanced comparison. As enlarged
here on your computer's 100 DPI screen the full images would both
print at 60 x 80.&
They'd print at 20 x 24& at print's usual 300 DPI. The
wind was blowing so some of the leaves are in different positions,
that you even can see them in the digital image.
the film image I used the cheapest landscape camera there is, a $700
and my 50 year old
with a huge dent in the lens barrel and
film. This camera is very popular with landscape photographers
due to its low cost, light weight and flexibility. The 150mm lens is
normal for a 4 x 5& camera. This image was scanned on a cheap
consumer $500 flatbed scanner, the ,
at 1,800 DPI, which doesn't even give you all the film's detail. If
I really wanted to reproduce the film's sharpness I'd have it scanned
at 5,000 DPI on a professional $100,000 Heidelberg. There's more detail
on the film than you can see here. It would be a fairer test to have
a real drum scan made, but I'm too cheap to send it out for scanning
since the point is pretty obvious even at 1,800 DPI.
digital camera image is the same crop from a brand-new multi-megapixel
digital camera made by the same company that keeps paying some bad-science
photography websites to pimp it as being better than film.
examples of what's actually on film compared to how little
scanners can see today.
Comparisons to Other Formats
ask why don't I compare to a 35mm film camera or to a 4 x 5& digital
landscapes as I shoot are shot most commonly in 4 x 5.& Others shoot
them in 8x10& or larger film formats. Using the smallest serious
4 x 5& format is probably handing film a disadvantage in this
comparison for landscapes. 35mm is an
amateur format when it comes to landscapes. You can get
a complete
like I use, including a lens and digital
scanner making fabulous 100 MB images, for under $2,000!
shooting landscapes with digital are using small, under-$10,000 cameras
exactly like I used for this practical and equitable comparison.
4x5& digital systems cost $25,000, and those backs are scanning backs,
not area sensors. There are no 4 x 5& CCDs! You have to wait around
for the back to scan across the image just like a film scanner. If
you used them for a shot of the tree, motion between passes for the
three colors would turn the entire live tree into all sorts of whacky
color outlines! 4x5& digital systems are for still lifes in
the studio, not nature. They also need huge batteries and tethered
computer systems. They are for the studio, not nature.
systems still aren't
players in 4 x 5& for outdoor photography
because they scan an area smaller than 4 x 5.& This
that 1.) you can't get the wide angles I need, and 2.) they require
even more precision in their adjustments. 4x5& cameras are adjusted
by hand while looking at the ground glass. it's enough of
a pain to do this well with a . I wouldn't be
able to make these fine adjustments if I needed a 47 mm lens to cover
the same area.
More Comparisons
you can see a comparison between a Nikon
another comparison which shows if you're concerned about resolution
that even medium format film, scanned even on an amateur scanner like
the Nikon 8000, still is in a completely better class than anything
digital. Note like most of these comparisons there are no explanations
of the scales used, and most importantly that the film is shown at a
disadvantage because amateur CCD scanners are used, not PMT drum scanners.
Even with the cheap ($2,000) scanners film is clearly better when blown
up enough to see, unlike in the example in the last paragraph.
My crummy medium-resolution
1,800 DPI scan of the 4x5 film gives me over 8,500 x 6,500 clean,
complete RGB pixels. Heck, even scanning a small 6x7 transparency
at 4,800 DPI at home I get over 12,000 x 9,000 complete RGB pixels
(108 MP in a 324 MB file). Today's digital cameras only produce images
between 3,000 and 5,000 Bayer-interpolated pixels wide at best. This
difference should now be obvious, even to the blind. And if mere
numerical comparisons are not obvious enough to the
crowd, remember the under $10,000 digital cameras are only producing
interpolated pixels at best, usually Bayer (info
and for you Ph.D.s
which means that each pixel isn't a full-resolution RGB pixel anyway,
as they are in film scans.
is Future Proof
always get better. Film shot today will be scanned better tomorrow.
I first wrote this page two years ago and made the scan in 2003 on a
scanner, the best $1,500 scanner
of 2003. In 2005 I got a $500
scanner and made a much better scan from the same piece of now two-year-old
Crop from Film Image scanned in 2003
Enlarged Crop from Film Image rescanned in 2005 (OK,
I grabbed another shot made at the same time. I gave up trying to find
the same exact frame.)
is always stuck in whatever quality you shot it. Digital or video has
nothing to rescan. What you got it is all you're every going to get.
This is why Hollywood shoots movies, and even the better TV series,
on film. 10 or 50 years from now they can still get better and better
images by rescanning them. Go watch the latest DVD of
shot on film in 1939. They simply went to the vault
and rescanned the film with modern technology.
RANGE: Film has a huge advantage in recording highlights. We
take for granted the fact that specular highlights and bright sunsets
look the way they do in painting and on film. Digital has a huge problem
with this (see disadvantages under digital below.)
Film records and reproduces a broader range of color. This is important
for wild landscapes, deep red cars and flowers. It's not at all important
for photos of skin. The deepest red one gets on a computer screen or
inkjet print is really just a reddish-orange! Computer greens aren't
all that vivid either. Your screen cannot make a deep red like the red
you get on a red LED, as you see on the new traffic signals. Your screen
can make a dark red-orange, but it's nothing like the red you get from
Velvia on a light table or even a Kodachrome red. Of course artists
can make great looking images on computer screens. You don't appreciate
what you are missing until you look at a Velvia transparency on a light
table after staring at scans on a CRT for a while. Likewise, Cibachrome
and Fuji Supergloss prints made from transparencies can hit these deeper
reds and greens that your inkjet printer or monitor can't. Both the
artists and engineers agree on this one. Just look for yourself if you're
an artist, and look at where the primary colors plot on the CIE diagram
if you're an engineer.
other words, what I see on computer screens (and as you see on my site
) may be seductive, but is nothing
compared to a transparency on a light table or projected.
EXPOSURES: Film works great for long exposures running into
the minutes. You may have some color shift or loss of speed due to reciprocity
issues, and otherwise the image quality is the same as for normal short
exposures.
EXPOSURES: No problem. Almost no digital camera can do this.
PERMANENCE:
Film does not erase itself. Film does not become unreadable for no reason.
It doesn't have file compatibility problems. Traditional black and white
film and prints will outlast any of us.
A processed 120 format frame of film costs less than a buck and has
more resolution and dynamic range and color gamut than any digital system
available to anyone. Even military satellite reconnaissance uses sensors
with lower resolution. Those satellites just make a lot of smaller images
which are pasted together later.
AND LENSES: These are effectively free. I try to buy my film
cameras and lenses used. I often sell them for more than I paid for
them years later. Therefore film hardware is essentially free. A good
lens today is still a good lens in 20 years. The most exotic film cameras
cost the same or less than middle-of-the-road digital cameras which
will need to be thrown away in two years, and the film cameras will
still be making great images in ten years. Likewise, a new $100 film
camera can whup any digital camera for color and resolution.
CONVENIANCE:
LEGIBILITY
always can see film by looking at it, even 100 years from today. You
can file and catalog everything quickly just by looking at it or contact
sheets. 200 years from now anyone can look at a black-and-white print.
People may or may not have the ability to play back JPG files, and probably
no ability to play back any of today's proprietary RAW digital formats
in 20 years.
of its direct legibility you can lay out a few hundred transparencies
on a light table and edit them all immediately. With digital you need
special software and it's much more cumbersome to manage a few hundred
images at the same time. There are no 5 foot wide computer monitors
with enough resolution to do this. We make do with what we have and
it's slower in digital.
take it for granted, but when you turn on a camera or push the shutter
it just works as it should with no waiting around.
are easy and excellent. Shoot slide film and any $100 projector gives
better results than the $200,000 digital cinema projectors I've been
around, unless of course you have an 80' screen.
SLR cameras like the Nikon D70 have no grain. I get cleaner results
at ASA 200 on my D70 than I get with scanned ASA 50 Velvia film. I can
shoot at ASA 1,600 and still ha far less than any
ASA 1,600 film. The colors are the same with a digital camera as you
not so with film. Therefore, if I need speed I get
better results shooting on digital then shooting film.
has no &negative& stage. Because of this, digital usually
looks much better than most prints made from negatives. This is because
most negatives are usually is printed poorly by automated photo finishing
equipment. Digital gives me better and more consistent color
than I get with regular print film. I prefer digital quality to print
exposures are a problem. The image sensors have leakage which add random
white dots into your image with long exposures. Some cameras try to
compensate for this. This is never an issue with film.
cannot make double or multiple exposures with digital cameras except
for maybe one model of Pentax.
you are publishing in print or Internet or email you already know how
great it is to have your files ready to go right from the camera. It's
wonderful not to have to process and then scan each of your film images.
With digital I post web galleries with hundreds of images the same morning
I shoot them. With film it takes me months to get around to scanning
all the images the hard way. With my digital camera I have shot a thousand
images at a wedding and handed the groom a CD with all the original
images on it before he left. Simple! I left it to him to print them
as he sees fit. Of course consumer digital camera don't work fast enough
to get off that many images.
PERMANANCE:
digital you can use standard computer methods to backup and store exact
copies of your original images in multiple physical locations. When
on the road I mail CDs back to myself each day just in case my car is
hit by an asteroid. This way I have all the original images both in
my laptop computer and in a second location, the mail. Duplicates of
film images on the other hand are worse than the originals. You can
send your digital images to your clients and never have to trust your
original to leave your possession. Of course since digital is only starting
to become popular, ordinary people who don't back up their computers
will soon be discovering that they will lose years of work and family
memories when their computer dies or if they forget to copy everything
to a new computer.
on, there is nothing more fun than shooting away and seeing what you
just shot, and then emailing it to everyone you know. You can experiment
and fool around and learn a ton, which then you can apply to your
film shooting, too. I sometimes fool around with my digicam and when
I get a winner I then whip out the 4x5& camera to make the same
shot. The digicam is not only a great composition tool, but also
can preview exposure for your film camera.
STORAGE SPACE:
drives and CDs can store bazillions of images in far less space than
binders and files full of film.
you're already in the computer, file indexing and organization is easy.
Film needs to be tagged physically by hand. Personally I love it that
my digital camera tags every image with the date and time, as well as
all the technical data.
film I'm too shy to shoot 100 images of nothing just for the hell of
it. With digital it's common for me to shoot 900 images in an hour-long
hockey game just because I can.
FRUITFULNESS
you'll make so many images
that you'll be constipated in your ability to sort through them as fast
as you make them! You'll have to buy software to allow you to sort through
what you have. How else are you going to sort through 1,000 images?
on my Mac. Windows people have to use .
The newspaper photographers use .
is a program that lets you sort through all your images, either as big
thumbnails or full screen, really fast.
as much as you like, it costs you nothing. On the other hand the cameras
cost four times as much as film cameras.
you want to see the images on your screen it's trivial to show them,
and with the internet you can show them to anyone anywhere anytime,
as I do on my
pages. If you want
to project them on a screen you're in big trouble, see the section under
disadvantages below.
DISADVANTAGES:
speed (ASA 1,600) film is poor. Prints from color negatives usually
have poor colors unless printed yourself.
PERMANENCE
film fades. Digital files don't.
have shelves and shelves of images I've made over the years. Digital
stored on CDs or hard drives can take much less space. Every time a
separate a special image for some purpose I usually forget to put it
away, and because of this I can't find some of my favorite images. I
have to index every image by hand, and I hate that.
TRANSMISSION
have to send the original image everywhere. If you lose it, you've lost
it. Backup copies are always a little worse than the original.
pay as you go.
question &have you gone digital yet?& is a presumptuous fallacy
is pushed by camera stores and camera makers, since they make big bucks
when you buy a digital camera that you'll want to replace in a few years.
&Going digital& is by no means inevitable or even desirable.
Digital does not replace your film camera for many kinds of fine art.
Even today your dad's 20 year old Canon AE-1 can make technically better
images than any digital camera. The Canon AE-1 is about the same as
a 20 megapixel camera. The
is about the same as a 25 megapixel
camera, presuming you are using Canon brand lenses.
Rendition: Digital still has a huge problem with highlight reproduction,
presuming you, like me, shoot into the sun or other sources of light.
Film for hundreds of years has naturally had &shoulders& in
its characteristic curve. This means that even with severe overexposure
in places that the highlights are rendered naturally on film, even
contrasty slide film like the
the other hand, at the dawn of the 21st century digital capture is more
linear than logarithmic as film is. This means that digital cameras
often have better shadow detail than my Velvia, but can have horrid,
unnatural highlights if overexposed even a third of a stop.
Specifically,
digital clips hard as soon as you are a few stops over . This could be OK, however unfortunately in color one of the three
color channels (red, green or blue) usually clips first, throwing the
hue (color) into all sorts of weird shifts in the areas the image transitions
from bright to pure white. This is why digital camera images may show
all sorts of nasty, unnatural hue (color) shifts in the brightest areas.
Unfortunately
this highlight issue is a basic characteristic of CCD sensors, amplifiers
and sampling and quantization electronics and won't be fixed soon. To
simulate film's shoulder one needs to add several more stops of highlight
capture in the digital camera so the image processing electronics can
use this information to simulate a decent shoulder curve. CCDs and the
related capture electronics will need about ten times more dynamic range
(three stops) than they have today to be able to simulate film's shoulder.
Of course negative film has more range still, but that's not really
relevant to good photography since the dynamic range of negative film
already exceeds what you ought to be photographing. For instance, a
negative can be way overexposed and still retain detail in otherwise
blown out highlights, if you custom print and burn in those areas. Heck,
you can scan a negative from a $6 disposable camera and have more highlight
dynamic range than any digital capture system.
$100,000 three-CCD studio high-definition television cameras around
which I work today still have problems with this, and so our cheap $5,000
single-striped CCD digital SLRs will, too. Everyone is working on solving
this. This is the biggest image defect in digital cameras today.
BLACK-AND-WHITE
is simple: digital cameras usually only go to zone VII, after which
they are completely devoid of texture and tone. You have to shoot your
zone tests and work accordingly. If you aren't familiar with the zone
system for B/W you need to be, since knowing it will simplify everything
you do since for the first time you'll really understand what's going
on. You can learn a little .
suggest trying deliberate underexposure and pulling up the curve's midpoint
to create a shoulder above zone VII.
does have more shadow detail than film. What camera makers have done
is traded off important highlight detail for lower noise so their cameras
look better in lab test reports. Today's digicams have great shadow
detail but clipped highlights. As I said, you can fix that by underexposing
a stop or two (which looks awful in camera) and then messing with the
of Field: Digital SLRs have about the same depth of field as 35mm
film cameras. Compact digital cameras have almost infinite depth of
field, meaning you can't deliberately blur backgrounds. Why is this?
Simple: the tiny image sensors of compact digital cameras (meaning everyone
selling for less than $2,000) use much shorter focal length lenses to
get the same angle of view. These shorter lenses have much greater depth
Digital has the advantage of immediate feedback, but also the disadvantage
that exposure is more critical than film. Even 1/3 of a stop makes a
big difference on my D1H. Underexposure is easy to correct in post,
but overexposure renders an image useless. 1/3 of a stop on Velvia is
on a D1H it's blatantly obvious.
Permanence:
I have lost days of work when .
In just the first month I had my D1H I lost hundreds of images. In all
my decades of shooting film I have only lost one half of one roll of
film, and that was my fault for forgetting to check the rewind crank
for proper film advance. With the D1H I knew what I was doing, and one
part of the system (I think the Microtech CF card I was using) destroyed
hundreds of images which could not be replaced.
Sluggishness:
Unless you drop four grand on a Nikon D1 series you are going to have
to wait for the camera to turn on, and then wait when you press the
shutter for the camera to get around to focusing and setting itself
and eventually making a photo, and then wait around for it to finish
writing the file to your storage medium until you can take the next
photo. Because of this most digital cameras cannot be used efficiently
for photos of people or anything that moves. Worse, if you have a digital
viewfinder then the image in that viewfinder is also delayed for a fraction
of a second, ensuring you'll always miss the right moment for a powerful
image. If you splurge for a D1 then by all means you are in the drivers'
seat (it's faster than any film camera I own), but today's 2003 cameras
priced below $2,000 still have a long way to go. This means that in
2007 you'll think back to any consumer digicam you've used today and
laugh about how anyone could have put up with such sluggish foolishness.
Digital cameras are very, very expensive for what they do. They become
obsolete in a year, unlike film cameras which, in the case of 4x5,
even 50 year old cameras and lenses are in use daily. DO NOT buy
a digital camera as an &investment.& I bought my $4,000
D1H knowing it is a disposable camera, which just like a $4,000 computer
will be worth nothing in a few years. You pay this for the work you
can beat out of it today and next month, not because you'll have
any use for it in a year or two. Digital cameras pay for themselves
if you use them a lot as I do, they are far more expensive than any
film camera if you only shoot a few hundred shots every month. Go
spend $1,500 on a film camera and you have a fine machine you'll
be using to create great images 20 years from now. Spend that same
$1,500 on a digital camera and you will have given it to
in three years. (Hint: check out their thrift stores as I do for buys
on cameras. You may find my D1H there in 2005 since I donate to these
great people.)
you want as a $1,700 batch
of Polaroid film. It's a lot of fun, but not usually as good as real
film. If you don't use it all up in a year or two you have to throw
it away. Likewise, I know you want a digital SLR, but it's a DISPOSABLE
camera. Get one as I did if you will use it a lot in the next couple
of years and have money to burn. Don't expect me to bless it as some
sort of an investment: it's not: it's an expenditure just like a car.
Shows: These, along with big paper prints, are poor for digital.
You have two options: 1.) the obvious, a digital projector, and the
less obvious, 2.) just having regular slides made from your digital
files. Unfortunately digital projectors are still poor for still images,
and writing files to slides still costs $4 to $5 a slide. Here are the
PROJECTORS: Unfortunately digital projector technology as of
2003 is still too crude for serious still photographic images. I have
worked with $200,000 digital cinema projectors and these give swell
color and dynamics, but unfortunately don't have enough resolution for
still images. The top digital cinema projectors today are still limited
to 1,280 x 960 resolution which is great for moving images, but still
too low for a good still image. Your eye sees far more detail when the
subject is not moving. As of November 2003 TI is introducing the M25-based
digital cinema 2,048 x 1,024 which sells for around $100,000.
the $2,000 projectors used by businessmen for presentations look great
for graphics, but unfortunately are also limited to the same resolution
and, unlike the digital cinema projectors, have awful color. The business
projectors you are likely to borrow from your office or buy today at
best have a mercury or metal halide or HMI lamp, which are seriously
deficient in red. This gives them a brilliant bluish white color that
makes them look extra bright and impressive for boring bar charts of
sales figures, but make your reds look dull and dark. If you borrow
one of these I'd try putting a pinkish gel over the lens to try to add
back in some of the deficiency in red. If you're a real hacker you could
try to profile it. Of course the older dim LCD projectors are all obsolete
today and the DLP ones are the way to go. Watch out: I know these look
great for business presentations because I use them for this all the
time. When I realized before doing a business talk that I could fire
up Photoshop and see my work on the big screen I realized what is only
obvious after you try it: there are not enough pixels for real pictures.
You can see the individual pixels on many of these which looks fine
for graphics, but looks hideous for real pictures. The problem with
the under $100,000 projectors is the light source. If you can find a
projector with a commercial motion picture xenon arc or halogen light
source you'll be OK for color except that you'll still too low for resolution.
Avoid the vast majority of projectors with HMI lights, which are all
the ones I've seen for business use.
warning you: I've had access to some pretty exotic projectors as part
of my real job in Hollywood and they look bad for still photos, even
if movies and business charts look spectacular.
SLIDES FROM DIGITAL FILES: This is easy. I use my local lab,
you can use .
In either case, you have to pay several dollars a slide. Projecting
this slide will look better than using one of the projectors above,
unfortunately you may have to shell out $400 for a tray of 80 slides.
Cost is the only real disadvantage, and its a big one. You also realize
that you need a lot more pixels than you thought to render a slide as
sharp as a camera original piece of film. I've written files 2,000 x
3,000 pixels out to film and they are only as sharp as a dupe slide.
They look OK, but if you look close you'll realize why I offer that
one needs more like 4,000 x 6,000 pixels, or 24 Megapixel files, to
look like film. You only get this resolution by scanning film, bringing
us back to where we started.
if you want a slide show, just shoot slide film!
RECOMMENDATIONS
you see, film and digital all excel and stink at different aspects of
the same things!
has already replaced film in sports and news coverage for a couple of
years. I love the way people's skin looks on my D1H. For any sort of
action I shoot .
the only legitimate professional application of 35mm film has been for
news, action and sports, 35mm film for professional use is becoming
obsolete as more and more people and organizations move to the Nikon
D1 series digital cameras. For instance, the big newspaper here in San
Diego got rid of their darkrooms in 1999. Even printing presses have
forgone plates and now many take just digital inputs. Film is just a
pain to have to use for publication. The only high-end pro use of 35mm
today is for sports on posters and magazines, since larger format cameras
are not fast enough.
will remain king for landscapes and anything that holds still and requires
big prints. I even prefer its color rendition for Internet use. It's
also the king for anything you intend to want to print years from now.
In 5 years anything shot on today's digital cameras will look awful
compared to what was shot on film today, by the standards of the future.
Remember, digital already has replaced 35mm film, but the economies
of the market and scale will not have it approach larger film format
quality any decade soon, since the demand is not there to justify development
at any price you'll want to afford.
real job is in Hollywood. The reason most of what you see on TV is shot
at huge expense on 35mm movie film and then transferred to video (also
at great expense) instead of being shot digitally (video) in the first
place is for two simple reasons:
The future. Years from now we'll use the latest telecine machines (scanners)
to get even better results from the film we shot today. On the other
hand, years from now we may not even be able to play back the tapes
if we shot on video. Ever seen &Gone with the Wind& on video?
It looks pretty good for something shot in 1934 on film. Ever seen &Welcome
Back Kotter?& It looks awful since it was shot on video in 1974
and is stuck in that quality level forever.
Quality. Film just looks better than things shot on video, mostly because
we have enormous control in telecine (film-to-video transfer) after
the fact. If we got everything technically perfect in the original shoot
there's not that much difference in the final video. However in real
life it's not that simple. We can take whatever part of the huge dynamic
range film has and use it in telecine in post production. On video you
either got it right when you shot it, or you missed it. There is much
more room for correcting screw-ups and fine-tuning in post production
with film than video, and we are always fine-tuning in post. Video only
has dynamic range suitable for release, it does not have any extra headroom
or footroom to allow decent tweaking in post production. Remember too
that in Hollywood we roll up three trucks of lighting and generators
and make whatever light we need, so we can get around the highlight
issues that I can't in my available light shooting. Even with this we
still prefer film because it's still easier to light.
can read similar info from the US FBI .
more detailed research by Roger Clark, who has put a lot more of this
into writing than I have, try these links:
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