Digital or Film?

[JBJackaon]

"You can't compare a D70 to a medium format neg. Ever. Even the 1ds - current king of dslr's doesn't really hold up to a well made medium format neg IMO."

Try convincing the many wedding photogs who have dumped their 120/220 gear in favor 0f digital cameras. At all the PPA events the digital camera makers are doing direct comparisons of prints from their cameras & Hasselblad, Rollei, Mamiya and the other medium format offerings. No shortage of takers for the digital products once they have looked at the prints made from these cameras & printers.

[Enrico]

yeah, did anyone watch the Formula 1?

[Frank Bagbey]

Percy, after spending the afternoon shooting 5x7 black and white and 4x5 Velvia, I thought long and hard about this very topic while driving back home. It is with delight I find someone expressing what I know to be the truth. I deal with this everyday, hearing how portrait and wedding photographers just can't make it work compared to the quality of work they used to do when they were competing for state portrait and wedding portrait competitions and shooting film. Now they shoot 500 digitial exposures or more at various levels just to come up with photos that appear to me to be plastic people, people laying in their coffins. The average digitial quality level is so low I will not recommend anyone who does not shoot film for portraits or weddings. The real joke to me is some of these photographers who cannot print two or more photos that are duplicates of each other. I recently observed 7 8x10 identical portraits of a subject, none of which matched.

Please note I am not knocking high quality digitial printing from negatives, although I have real reservations about that also. Just looking at a 4x6 digitial perfect touch print through a 4X magnifier tells the sad story. Compare it to any old print from 10 or 50 or 100 years ago.

[Neal Shields]

Film captures more information for a given sensor size then digital. Big film is almost free compaired to big chips.

All scientific testing confirms this as does logic and math.

http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/fsc/backissu/april2002/swgitfield1.htm

http://www.zeiss.de/C12567A8003B58B9/Inhalt-Frame/C848A011BACB8FF0C1256B1A002DBD21

However, many people LIKE the look of digital better, which is fine. However, if you capture the information you can always simulate the look, but if you leave the information behind, it is lost forever.

If you want digital and information go here:

Betterlight.com

I think that the reason that people think that this is a troll is that once you understand the concepts of MTF, lp/mm and that it logically takes at least two rows of pixels to reproduce a line pair, the data is all over the web.

[Bill_1856]

Enrico, it's hardly worth watching any more. When Enzo was alive they frequently "fixed" the rules in Ferrari's favor. Now they fix them so Michael doesn't have a chance. Boring! (PS, the new Mercedes engine must have 50 HP more than anyone else.)

[Enrico]

Bill, I must also add that the current rules are a return to the time of Nigel Mansell's days at Williams. Shame they change last years rules...

[Jorge Gasteazoro]

Now they fix them so Michael doesn't have a chance

Yeah, the problem was that Shumi is so good it was boring then too....you knew he was going to win..

[Brian Ellis]

It's just you if you think one medium is inherently superior to the other regardless of the ability and talent of the people using the equipment.

[John Flavell]

As a person who has shot film professionally for 2o years, and digitally for five years, I still don't get why we have this debate. Each medium has it's qualities and downfalls. Many of us shoot digital because when we're at a basketball game 100 miles away, we need a fast way to meet a deadline. Also, many editors and publishers made the commitment to do away with nasty darkrooms. Not to mention the burden of carrying portable darkrooms around to meet the demand for one photo on deadline from a remote assignment. These days we can provide five or six images on deadline without the nasty clean up.

But few of the answers above address the economic advantages to digital. When we shot film, the staff of my newspaper spent an excess of $1,500 per month in film, paper and chemistry. Each day we dumped a tanker load of hazards down the drain. We wore gloves to keep our skin from being eaten away. All of that costs money. A lot of money. Being environmentally correct is damned expensive. Digital made our lives faster, safer and less expensive.

Still, we haven't given up film and we can do that anytime we like (we'd still have to scan prints because the production cameras are gone). The reason portrait and wedding photographers have switched is for the economics. It's less expensive and clients want to see it now. Anyone thinking they can compete with film over digital in the those worlds will lose. Clients don't see the difference, even if photographers do.

The problem with this debate is that we are comparing apples and oranges, but picking one over the other instead of admiting that both are good. You need to make a daily deadline, go digital. You want it to look like Tri-X, then shoot Tri-X. It's that simple.

[Bill_1856]

I was watching a film of Monaco in the '50s. Fangio would come around in the lead, then Moss, or maybe Hawthorne or Ascari, and it changed throughout the race. The course hasn't changed all that much, but the attitude has. Only Michael and Montoya are willing to take chances, pitting their skills against the possibility of failing. Otherwise it (F1 in general) has become like an overgrown Go-Kart event, both the courses, the cars, and the rules.