Will Digital Make LF obsolete?

[E.L.]

Everyone has missed the most important aspect of traditional vs. digital: Image stability. Film offers the chance to reprint the image in the future, and it can look just as good. Digital cannot do that. It probably never will. There is no such thing as an "archival" digital file. It is not only up to a cd or similar type of media. File formats change, especially in the fast moving software market. Press and magazine photographers are alerady realizing they need the image on film, regardless of how it gets used later. It is not print quality or editing that will keep film around, it is the need for images that last, and the knowledge that people in the future can access those same images. Digital is the ultimate form of throw-away photography. Don't bother to question print stability, think about the source of the image.

[Wayne]

No. Digital will die.

[john costo]

I agree with Wayne: I believe that "digital", in terms of image capture, is a fad. It might well replace the point-and-shoot for people who care only for snapshots, but will never supplant ANY format used by "serious" amateur photographers.

On the other hand, digital output (the Lightjet, e.g.) is here to stay......

[Fender]

After almost 30 years in the darkroom I am moving to digital. This is due mainly to an allergic reaction to the chemicals involved with creating fine prints. This has not been an easy decision and my solution is a compromise at best, I will continue to shoot LF on film, but that film will be scanned, manipulated, and then digitally printed. The selling point for me was seeing an 11x14 B&W print done on an Epson 1200 with a "quad-tone" ink set. It truly did rival much of the work I have done. If you then look at the output from the Epson 1270 or 2000P for color work you can see that we are at the doorstep to being able to produce fine art prints at home digitally.

I would like to address two of the statements above, 1) I work in computers for a financial institution for a living and as far as long term storage, I have files that are older then some of the people posting here, yes they had to be translated from 8mm tape to CD, but the fact is they are still usable today. Compare that with some of the early Ektachrome slides I have which will now require hours of Photoshop work to restore. 2)The second point would involve the deficincies of CD's compared to records. The truth is that in the early days of CDs the sampling rates were low enough that you did loose some of the warmth of a recording. That has long since been resolved and the fact is that prices have gone down enough that my 18 year old son can now afford a multitrack digital recording studio based on his home computer! In my youth the equivalant tape studio would have cost 10s of thousands of dollars and the tapes would have been full of hiss and static.

Digital will continue to evolve at breakneck speed, those who ignore it will be passed by it, for some that is a totally acceptable inevitability. However, just as digital instruments never completely replaced traditional drums and guitars, digital capture devices will never totally replace film. However the output device will change and change fast!

Just my .02 worth!

[David_892]

Probably not, at least not until a digital system can povide the following : Image resolution meeting film quality, the scanning backs themselves are self-contained - what I mean is that you take a picture, and then an image is projected/viewable from the ground glass, without the need for a PC to be on hand, as for the storage side, we are reaching that capacity, however the capture side of things is still lower quality than film. However one thing that will not be bad for LF is the post capture digital side. As this gives you the ability to produce digital 'contact seets' mixing col neg, B+W, and slides.

[Joe Buechler]

Its my belief that film will be around as long as the mass consumer market continues to buy it. If consumers were going to abandon film soon, they would have done it already. Image quality isn't really an issue for them. Image storage, convenience of obtaining prints, and battery drain continue to be the major impediments. As long as the industry continues to expend all of its efforts on image quality, film will remain available, including LF film, IMO.

[Ellis Vener]

Film will always have the edge in that, once it is developed, the first generation image will be easily viewed without an intervening layer or layers of technology. But make no mistake digital is coming. Right now it is fiendishly expensive and any specific piece of equipment or software is technically (but not necessarily functionally) obsolete almost by the time it arrives on the market.

[Ellis Vener]

Film will always have the edge in that, once it is developed, the first generation image will be easily viewed without an intervening layer or layers of technology. But make no mistake digital is coming. Right now it is fiendishly expensive and any specific piece of equipment or software is technically (but not necessarily functionally) obsolete almost by the time it arrives on the market.

Also try making a long exposure on a digital camera sometime.

[Lloyd Chamber]

Are some of you guys for real, saying digital is a fad or will die? Or just totally clueless?

I'm laughing either way. Digitally-acquired photographs already surpass medium format quality. The equipment is grossly expensive now, but prices are dropping by about 1/2 each year.

In the not-too-distant future, I'll be able to: - shoot a 4 X 5 or 6 X 9 camera with a digital back capable of hundreds or thousands of pictures - shoot with no grain and achieve resolution limited by the lens only. - shoot with 14 stop dynamic range - preview and bracket shots instantaneously - achieve greater color accuracy, and defer color/white balance until later - surpass 4 X 5 quality

That being said, all these things together may take 5-10 years to be reasonably priced. But it's only a matter of time.

[Joshua L. Slocum]

Lloyd: The question is, rather, whether *you* are thinking straight. You will be able to shoot images with resolution limited by the lens only, huh? Well, you better patent that technology, my friend, because you've obviously discovered an imaging system based on infinitely small picture elements, even smaller than the atom! Get real, Lloyd, interpolation and up-scaling is not resolution, it's just scaling. Oh, and another thing. Don't make blanket statements like "digital already captures better images than 4x5 and 6x9." What digital? What film? Yeah, scanning backs are great, but despite marketing hype, I doubt that there is any scanning system that actually has quanitfiably more resolution than a 4x5 negative. A 4x5 neg has at least 10 -12 times the resolution of 35mm, which has been estimated at 12 million pixels. Therefore, your scanning back would have to have an imager capable of 144 megapixels. NOT FILE SIZE, my friend, but actual "at capture" (read: like film) resolution of 144 megapixels. Name one. As for the "no grain" issue- Ever notice that no one complained about the grain of 4x5 (pretty much a misnomer) until people started talking about the grainless qualities of digital? Wonder why? I'll tell you. . .because you have to blow up 4x5 to extreme degrees to see grain. I mean, you'd have to scrutinizing an 8 foot by 10 foot print at a viewing distance of a few inches to see objectionable grain from a 4x5 neg. I mean, come on. . . do you really call that "grainy image quality?" Sure, digital doesn't have grain. .but guess what? It has pixels and color banding/noise problems. You don't get something for nothing. I'd rather see a slightly grainy but highly detailed film print over a "smooth and grainless" digital image that made up detail by using computer algorithms to add pixels to enlarge the image. If the detail isn't there in the capture, regardless of the medium, it ain't there. I will concede that there is no reason why digital can't be made to capture more contrast range over more stops. . but this at the cost of long exposures right now. Moreover, the only advantage to this is having more information to work with in a file. Given the physical and optical properties of projection and print viewing. .it's not actually possible to represent more than 4-7 stops of contrast. That's not an "analog" (ugh) limit, it's the immutable laws of light and reflection.

I suppose this post is going to strike some as overly zealous and reactionary. . and frankly, that's not the point, but I don't care. The reason I get so incensed by this kind of nonsense is that digital enthusiasts are given to making all sorts of wild, crystal ball predictions about a techno-utopia of digital photography-all the while neglecting the fact that beatiful, technically perfect film photographs have been made for more than a century, and it's not breaking anyone's back. There is nothing subpar about well executed film images-maybe that's the reason for many digiphiles' hyperbolic claims that film is so crappy-they've got to justify why they're so obsessed with catching up to it. Apparently all the hassles of digital image making- expensive, computerized processing work, having to be familiar with all manner of expensive, complicated, jargon-ridden and constantly "upgraded" software is so much easier than clicking my 4x5 shutter at 1/125 of a sec, processing and printing it. Yeah, right.