Film vs. Digital Cameras en Español
© 2006 KenRockwell.com
skip
directly to painfully obvious examples
see also Why Film Isn't Going Away
see also my D200 compared to 4 x 5" film
INTRODUCTION
I use both digital and
film cameras all the time. They each serve a different purpose.
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 default sRGB mode.
Labs 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.
Large format film still
rules for serious landscape photography.
I 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?
Neither 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.
I 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.
If 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.
Most 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.
So 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 D70 than they will paying someone else to print
their 35mm film.
I'm a little crazy: I
shoot 4 x 5" transparency 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.
Digital 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 from my D70 is better and
faster.
Digital 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 chat rooms instead of just going out and trying it for
themselves.
One 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.
Ignore me. Just look here for why a magazine like Arizona Highways 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 rarely medium format film; they
usually only print from 4 x 5" large format film. Here's a 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 here that 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."
Film 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 newspaper 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.
Film
is not going away
I have a whole
article on this here
WHY YOU HAVE TO GO LOOK FOR YOURSELF back to top
Other 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!
Artists 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 back to
top
Debating 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.
I shoot about 1,000
images every week on my D1H or D70 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.
Let's 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.
One 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.
For "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 Velvia.
Most other film looks boring to me. When I speak of "film" I mean Velvia; others
of course may mean something else. Black and white again is even more
different.
For "digital" we have
many fixed-lens digital point-and-shoot cameras with
smaller, noisier CCDs and lots of JPG compression, and DSLR cameras with huge, clean CCDs and mild or no JPG
compression.
HOW TO GET THE BEST DIGITAL IMAGE back to top
The best way to get a
digital image is by shooting film and having it scanned. I'm not comparing that
here; this is a camera discussion.
CAUTION: 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 Arri
Laser 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.
When doing any
comparisons you need to pay attention to the medium in which the comparison is
made.
Every 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 $1,500
Nikon scanner and my $3,000 Minolta scanner
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.
Worse yet, one
comparison in American Photo magazine did this in the March/April 2002 issue,
and the same thing happened here. 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 scan.
If 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.
By 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 (72 DPI).
Another 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.
Let's
begin!
FILM:
IMAGE
QUALITY
RESOLUTION: A glass plate
from 1880 still has more resolution than a Canon
1Ds-MkII. Film always wins here when used by a skilled photographer. One
source of confusion is here, which 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 do.
Forget 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 here. You also can see
that in the March/April 2004 edition of Photo Techniques magazine 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 here. 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.
If 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.
Of 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.
The 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:
OK, I've had it with this idiocy. back
to top of article 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.
These 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
Crop from
Digital Camera Image
The 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 Outdoor
Photographer's August 2005 annual landscape issue where they profile
prominent shooters.
The 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,
not that you even can see them in the digital image.
For the film image I
used the cheapest landscape camera there is, a $700 4 x 5" Tachihara
and my 50 year old Schneider Symmar 150 mm f/5.6
Convertible lens with a huge dent in the lens barrel and ordinary Fuji
Velvia 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 EPSON 4990, 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.
The 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.
Here are
examples of what's actually on film compared to how little scanners can see
today.
Some ask why don't I
compare to a 35mm film camera or to a 4 x 5" digital system?
Simple: 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 4 x 5"
system like I use, including a lens and digital scanner making fabulous 100
MB images, for under $2,000!
People 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.
Digital systems still
aren't players in 4 x 5" for outdoor photography because they scan an area
smaller than 4 x 5." This means 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 75 mm wide angle
lens. I wouldn't be able to make these fine adjustments if I needed a 47 mm
lens to cover the same area.
More Comparisons
Here you can
see a comparison between a Nikon D100 and a 4x5.
Here's 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 Braille crowd, remember the under $10,000 digital cameras are
only producing interpolated pixels at best, usually Bayer (info here and for you Ph.D.s here and here), which means that each pixel isn't a full-resolution RGB
pixel anyway, as they are in film scans.
Scanners 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 Microtek
1800f scanner, the best $1,500 scanner of 2003. In 2005 I got a $500 EPSON 4990 scanner and made a much better scan from
the same piece of now two-year-old film.
Enlarged 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.)
Digital 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 The
Wizard of Oz shot on film in 1939. They simply went to the vault and
rescanned the film with modern technology.
DYNAMIC
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.)
COLOR:
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.
In other words, what I
see on computer screens (and as you see on my site here) may be seductive, but is nothing compared to a
transparency on a light table or projected.
LONG
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.
DOUBLE
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.
COST:
FILM: 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.
CAMERAS 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
You 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.
WORKFLOW
SPEED
Because 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.
IMMEDIACY
We 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.
SLIDE
SHOWS
These 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.
DIGITAL: back to top
IMAGE QUALITY:
Digital 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 have
very little grain; far less than any ASA 1,600 film. The colors are the same
with a digital camera as you change the speed; not so with film. Therefore, if I
need speed I get better results shooting on digital then shooting
film.
Digital 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 film.
Long 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.
One cannot make double
or multiple exposures with digital cameras except for maybe one model of Pentax.
WORKFLOW SPEED:
If 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:
With 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.
FUN
Come 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.
PHYSICAL STORAGE SPACE:
Hard drives and CDs can
store bazillions of images in far less space than binders and files full of
film.
INDEXING
Since 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.
SPEED
With 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
If you get a DSLR 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? I use iView on my Mac.
Windows people have to use BreezeBrowser. The newspaper photographers use Photo Mechanic. iView is a program
that lets you sort through all your images, either as big thumbnails or full
screen, really fast.
COST
Shoot as much as you
like, it costs you nothing. On the other hand the cameras cost four times as
much as film cameras.
SLIDE
SHOWS
If 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 Gallery pages. If you want to project them on a screen
you're in big trouble, see the section under disadvantages below.
DISADVANTAGES: back to
top
FILM:
IMAGE
QUALLITY
High speed (ASA 1,600)
film is poor. Prints from color negatives usually have poor colors unless
printed yourself.
PERMANENCE
Color film fades.
Digital files don't.
STORAGE SPACE
I 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
You 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.
COST
you pay as you
go.
DIGITAL: back to top
The 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 AE-1 Program is
about the same as a 25 megapixel camera, presuming you are using Canon brand
lenses.
Image
Quality:
Highlight
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 Velvia
I love.
On 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 zone V.
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.
The $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 back to top
This 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 here.
I suggest trying
deliberate underexposure and pulling up the curve's midpoint to create a
shoulder above zone VII.
Digital 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 curves.
Depth 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 of field.
Exposure: 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 subtle; on a D1H it's blatantly
obvious.
Permanence: I
have lost days of work when memory cards became unreadable.
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.
Cost. 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 The Salvation Army or Goodwill 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.)
Think of that D100 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.
Slide 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 details:
DIGITAL
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.
Likewise, 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.
I'm 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.
MAKING SLIDES
FROM DIGITAL FILES: This is easy. I use my local lab, Chrome, or you can use Slides.com. 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.
Thus, if you want a
slide show, just shoot slide film!
RECOMMENDATIONS back to top
As you see, film and
digital all excel and stink at different aspects of the same things!
Digital 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 Nikon D1H digital.
Since 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.
Film 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.
My 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:
1.) 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.
2.) 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.
You can read similar
info from the US FBI here.
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