There has been much discussion on this forum for Digital vs. film. Below is a l ink to a very reputable site which compares the new Canon D30 digital camera wit h Provia F film.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/d30_vs_film.htm

I was amazed at what I read, and now am re thinking how digital my impac t our future. The part of this review, (and others on the same product) is the file size comparison. For example, a Canon shot taken with the D30 produced a 9 MB file, however the same shot taken with Provia F and scanned at 4000 dpi on a Imacon scanner produced a file size of 34 MB. Conventional wisdom would tell u s the scanned file with almost 4x more data would be noticeably sharper. Howeve r, all the test I read so far revealed the same thing, both prints were equally as sharp!! Or if anything the one taken with the digital camera were even sharp er?

So the looming question on everyones mind now is... does larger files nec essarily equate to more useful information for producing higher quality prints? Why do these film scanned files contain so much extra data - but does not seem to translate this data to the actual printed photograph?

Considering the price of this technology, about $3k usa for the D30 cam era, it may not be long till digital moves faster than we all thought into large r formats. This assumes the relationship between file size (or image capture si ze) is not the benchmark of quality we all once thought. Any ideas of why the s canned film files are so much larger but do not provide a superior end product t hat one would suspect?

In this test, the smaller D30 file was ressed up using software (G Fracto ls I think) to match the size of scanned file...however, I am doubting that is t he missing link, if so, who needs LF files to begin with if we can just ress up smaller digital files.