5 ms·

Film vs. Digital

11 points by aycangulez 16y ago

aycangulez 16y ago
"A glass plate from 1880 still has more resolution than a Canon 1Ds-MkII" says it all.
- sp332 16y ago
  Yeah, can you imaging hauling around 2,000 glass plates on your next vacation? Or a professional photographer lugging 5,000+ plates and trying to get some candid shots at a wedding? Digital helps people take better shots. Resolution isn't everything!
  - joshfinnie 16y ago
    This applies even to film. The fact that you had to switch film when going from inside the church to outside receiving line to inside reception is lost on most photographers today. Not only were glass plates inconvient, but so was film!
  - jnovek 16y ago
    Not to mention that most glass plates are hand coated and very slow. However, the media and the camera that shoots it is a tool. Large format glass plates are not the right tool for a wedding. They are better suited to portraiture or landscapes.
- famousactress 16y ago
  Sure, but the megapixel war is pretty silly... Even when applied to analog. I believe the minimum resolution for digital cameras used by nat-geo photographers stands at 6mp.
- lurkinggrue 16y ago
  Just look at how much detail there is in all that film grain.
antidaily 16y ago
"Extremely skilled photographers can get better results on film". Not just skilled. Extremely skilled. Doesn't sounds like me. But I love that old tech still works in the right hands.
- Tamerlin 16y ago
  I can't do with digital what I do with film... the technology in its current state is simply too limiting.
grk 16y ago
Keep in mind that this is a pretty old article (2006), so things could've changed a lot.
jnovek 16y ago
Some context for those unfamiliar -- Ken Rockwell is considered to be a bit of an agitator in some photography circles and this particular post is comparable to Zed Shaw's "Rails is a Ghetto" in infamy. At the time there was a lot of sensationalist noise that film was "dead", and I think that's why he spends so much time focusing on the virtues of film photography.
- famousactress 16y ago
  I'm not sure that's a very fair assessment. The article was an even-handed reminder that both tools are useful and can serve different purposes. We lost Kodachrome, we lost Polaroid (for a while).. I think there's a handful of folks trying to make sure that with the influx of interest in digital photography that people are aware that film still exists and does a few things that your digital camera doesn't.
  - jnovek 16y ago
    I didn't claim that film was inferior or superior to digital -- in fact, I shoot mostly film and run a color darkroom in my home. You may not recall, but at the time, 2006, there were many articles declaring the death of film. The film market was rapidly contracting, Agfa had recently gone bankrupt and Kodak was cancelling lines left and right. The popular opinion was that film would be gone "in 10 years" and Ken Rockwell -- love him or hate him -- was QUITE the agitator for suggesting otherwise. Happily for those of us who enjoy shooting film, he was correct. Film is the right tool for some jobs and digital is the right tool for others. Film markets stopped contracting and now we're even seeing some new and interesting lines (new Maco/Rollei emulsions new Polaroid integral films, etc).
- lurkinggrue 16y ago
  > - Ken Rockwell is considered to be a bit of an agitator in some photography circles. That's putting it lightly, most in those circles say "Ken Rockwell is a douche."
stan_rogers 16y ago
Hmmm. Apparently he has never shot a grey card (or a Photodisk) or used a densitometer. Or he left it behind as "kid stuff" when he became an expert. One card per day per film lot ought to be enough to make consistent, repeatable prints. The grey card is also the key to getting professional negative printing done as well. (And there were several entire industries dependent on professional labs. Portraiture, weddings and forensic photography were almost always done on negs, usually Kodak Vericolor 160 shot at 100 or 125, later split between Portra 160 and Fujicolor Reala; the prints from transparencies were too garish for skin tones.) Think of it as "white balance" for film. One standard 18%-grey exposure with push/pull instructions would do for both souping the negs and printing. Get the grey right, and all of the qualities of the light, including filtration, come in the package (modulo reciprocity failure if you print murals from small or medium format). [Okay, I'll admit it -- as a photographer, I was an immaculate technician but no sort of an artist. It still bugs me that guys like this guy and David Brooks can make a living at the game without knowing any of the voodoo behind what they do. In our world, it's as if Larry Wall really did create Perl accidentally by falling asleep face-first on his keyboard. It ain't right.]
jdietrich 16y ago
The article is completely and utterly obsolete. 35mm digital would out-resolve medium format film circa 2002, with the Canon 1Ds[1]. A 39 megapixel medium format digital back will come within spitting distance of 4x5 film[2]. Hasselblad now have a 60 megapixel medium format camera. Being able to use a smaller sensor format at the same or better quality is of critical importance, because it allows the photographer to use smaller, lighter, brighter lenses. A digital MF system can happily be used handheld, whereas a 4x5 camera demands a very large and heavy tripod to work at all. Large format lenses are so slow and the cameras so bulky that a mere gust of wind can ruin an image. That's at low ISO. Start cranking up the sensitivity and digital is in a world of it's own. A Nikon D3s will produce useful images at 12800 ISO and very clean images at 6400 ISO[3]. For any serious use, film is absolutely stone dead. It still has a place for hobbyists and students, for whom the much cheaper equipment makes up for the inconvenience and poorer quality. For any serious use, digital is vastly, incomparably better than film. [1] http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shootout.shtml http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shootout.shtml [2] http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Cramer.shtml http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Cramer.shtml [3] http://imaging.nikon.com/products/imaging/lineup/digitalcamera/slr/d3s/sample.htm http://imaging.nikon.com/products/imaging/lineup/digitalcame...
- jacobolus 16y ago
  In that shootout link you post (Charles Cramer’s essay), the detail blowups of the 4x5 scan have clearly better resolution than the P45 blowups. (Though obviously the digital back has many other advantages, like turn-around time, marginal image cost, ease of handling, etc.) > For any serious use, film is absolutely stone dead. There are plenty of fabulous artists still shooting film with view cameras and getting great images. For example, are you going to tell me that Burtynsky isn’t serious? (Note, he’s also taken some pictures w/ a Hasselblad w/ a digital back in the last few years, where setting up a view camera is not feasible. But as far as I know the bulk of his pictures are still taken on film.)
  - jdietrich 16y ago
    Film is an artistic eccentricity, like a writer using a manual typewriter or a guitarist using a beaten-up '58 Strat. It's an indulgence you can only afford if you don't have deadlines to meet or a client paying by the hour.
teilo 16y ago
Ken Rockwell is largely regarded as a crank in the Pro-Am photographic community. He is well known for making blanket statements like: "A Nikon D40 is all the camera you will ever need" and "6MP is enough resolution for anybody." and "all higher MP gets you is more noise". All wrong. The biggest problem with this article is that he assumes that film has infinite resolution. This was just as ridiculous in 2006 as it is today. Anyone who knows a thing about analog encoding techniques will instantly spot the fallacy in this argument. The resolution of film is certainly more "organic" in nature, but it is not even remotely infinite. Film has grain, and while it is difficult to pin a precise equivalent PPI on film grain, it is nevertheless the case that you cannot exceed the resolution of the grain. Since 2006 the resolution of full-frame digital sensors has vastly surpassed film, and with Canon's announcement of a 120MP sensor, and the mainstreaming of 4K digital video, there seems to be no end in sight. As it is, the biggest bottleneck to resolution is now the glass. It is becoming increasingly difficult and more expensive to create glass with enough clarity, and low enough distortion to take advantage of the higher MP sensors.
- jacobolus 16y ago
  I’m not the biggest fan of Rockwell, but come on, > The biggest problem with this article is that he assumes that film has infinite resolution. No he doesn’t. > Since 2006 the resolution ... If you look, this article is from before that. So what’s your point? > As it is, the biggest bottleneck to resolution is now the glass. The glass has always been one of the biggest bottlenecks. Which is why bigger and bigger megapixel counts aren’t always so useful.
  - teilo 16y ago
    I'm sorry, this wasn't the precise article that I thought it was. Here are the exact quotes: "20 years from now we can re-scan our film and get 2029-level image quality." ... "You can't go back to a raw file and get more resolution. With film, you don't have to make a resolution decision until you scan it. With film, you can scan at any resolution. With film, you can scan it again in 30 years with whatever technology we have then, because you still have your original raw image captured alive and well." ... "Real Raw needs no noise reduction. Details and textures are always crisp and clear on film." From: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm
burningion 16y ago
Photography has been a big hobby of mine. You can see some of my film photography over at http://www.zothcorp.com/photos/ http://www.zothcorp.com/photos/. That being said, I recommend everyone who's serious about learning photography start shooting with a digital camera, then switch over to a film camera. Digital is a great to learn exposure, because you get results so quickly. You can see immediately the effects of over or under exposure. But film has a much greater latitude than digital. That is, it's very easy to blow out your highlights on a digital camera. Have whites that are completely white and ugly. With film you get a nice curve on your highlights, and so you can preserve more detail. You also get that thing called grain, and a physical product. Shooting film costs more, but you can get great results with less computer editing. But really, there is no great battle. There's a place for both. My own personal preference has been film for black and white, digital for color.
CWuestefeld 16y ago
He's speaking mostly from a theoretical perspective. For me, and everyone I know, the investment necessary for the super-pro equipment just isn't going to happen. That those things exist aren't really relevant to me. Then he says that digicams are more expensive, and that film cams and their lenses last forever. The thing is that, in general, the lenses for 35mm cams are generally usable for DSLRs as well. My Pentax DSLR can accept any lens ever made for any Pentax 35mm. While he does mention workflow as an advantage for digital, I think it deserves greater emphasis. That's not just because there's no need to send out to a lab (or go in your own darkroom with all the chemicals). It's also because of the availability of tools like PhotoShop, allowing us to do all kinds of post-production. Basic editing like exposure correction you could do in the darkroom. But color balance pretty much requires that you shift to digital. And of course there's really fancy editing like removing unwanted objects, changing sharpness and contrast, etc. The extreme flexibility of digital images is a killer feature.

Film vs. Digital

11 points by aycangulez 16y ago

aycangulez 16y ago

"A glass plate from 1880 still has more resolution than a Canon 1Ds-MkII" says it all.

sp332 16y ago
Yeah, can you imaging hauling around 2,000 glass plates on your next vacation? Or a professional photographer lugging 5,000+ plates and trying to get some candid shots at a wedding? Digital helps people take better shots. Resolution isn't everything!
- joshfinnie 16y ago
  This applies even to film. The fact that you had to switch film when going from inside the church to outside receiving line to inside reception is lost on most photographers today. Not only were glass plates inconvient, but so was film!
- jnovek 16y ago
  Not to mention that most glass plates are hand coated and very slow. However, the media and the camera that shoots it is a tool. Large format glass plates are not the right tool for a wedding. They are better suited to portraiture or landscapes.
famousactress 16y ago
Sure, but the megapixel war is pretty silly... Even when applied to analog. I believe the minimum resolution for digital cameras used by nat-geo photographers stands at 6mp.
lurkinggrue 16y ago
Just look at how much detail there is in all that film grain.

antidaily 16y ago

"Extremely skilled photographers can get better results on film". Not just skilled. Extremely skilled. Doesn't sounds like me. But I love that old tech still works in the right hands.

Tamerlin 16y ago
I can't do with digital what I do with film... the technology in its current state is simply too limiting.

grk 16y ago

Keep in mind that this is a pretty old article (2006), so things could've changed a lot.

jnovek 16y ago

Some context for those unfamiliar -- Ken Rockwell is considered to be a bit of an agitator in some photography circles and this particular post is comparable to Zed Shaw's "Rails is a Ghetto" in infamy. At the time there was a lot of sensationalist noise that film was "dead", and I think that's why he spends so much time focusing on the virtues of film photography.

famousactress 16y ago
I'm not sure that's a very fair assessment. The article was an even-handed reminder that both tools are useful and can serve different purposes. We lost Kodachrome, we lost Polaroid (for a while).. I think there's a handful of folks trying to make sure that with the influx of interest in digital photography that people are aware that film still exists and does a few things that your digital camera doesn't.
- jnovek 16y ago
  I didn't claim that film was inferior or superior to digital -- in fact, I shoot mostly film and run a color darkroom in my home. You may not recall, but at the time, 2006, there were many articles declaring the death of film. The film market was rapidly contracting, Agfa had recently gone bankrupt and Kodak was cancelling lines left and right. The popular opinion was that film would be gone "in 10 years" and Ken Rockwell -- love him or hate him -- was QUITE the agitator for suggesting otherwise. Happily for those of us who enjoy shooting film, he was correct. Film is the right tool for some jobs and digital is the right tool for others. Film markets stopped contracting and now we're even seeing some new and interesting lines (new Maco/Rollei emulsions new Polaroid integral films, etc).
lurkinggrue 16y ago
> - Ken Rockwell is considered to be a bit of an agitator in some photography circles. That's putting it lightly, most in those circles say "Ken Rockwell is a douche."

stan_rogers 16y ago

Hmmm. Apparently he has never shot a grey card (or a Photodisk) or used a densitometer. Or he left it behind as "kid stuff" when he became an expert. One card per day per film lot ought to be enough to make consistent, repeatable prints. The grey card is also the key to getting professional negative printing done as well. (And there were several entire industries dependent on professional labs. Portraiture, weddings and forensic photography were almost always done on negs, usually Kodak Vericolor 160 shot at 100 or 125, later split between Portra 160 and Fujicolor Reala; the prints from transparencies were too garish for skin tones.) Think of it as "white balance" for film. One standard 18%-grey exposure with push/pull instructions would do for both souping the negs and printing. Get the grey right, and all of the qualities of the light, including filtration, come in the package (modulo reciprocity failure if you print murals from small or medium format). [Okay, I'll admit it -- as a photographer, I was an immaculate technician but no sort of an artist. It still bugs me that guys like this guy and David Brooks can make a living at the game without knowing any of the voodoo behind what they do. In our world, it's as if Larry Wall really did create Perl accidentally by falling asleep face-first on his keyboard. It ain't right.]

jdietrich 16y ago

The article is completely and utterly obsolete. 35mm digital would out-resolve medium format film circa 2002, with the Canon 1Ds[1]. A 39 megapixel medium format digital back will come within spitting distance of 4x5 film[2]. Hasselblad now have a 60 megapixel medium format camera. Being able to use a smaller sensor format at the same or better quality is of critical importance, because it allows the photographer to use smaller, lighter, brighter lenses. A digital MF system can happily be used handheld, whereas a 4x5 camera demands a very large and heavy tripod to work at all. Large format lenses are so slow and the cameras so bulky that a mere gust of wind can ruin an image. That's at low ISO. Start cranking up the sensitivity and digital is in a world of it's own. A Nikon D3s will produce useful images at 12800 ISO and very clean images at 6400 ISO[3]. For any serious use, film is absolutely stone dead. It still has a place for hobbyists and students, for whom the much cheaper equipment makes up for the inconvenience and poorer quality. For any serious use, digital is vastly, incomparably better than film. [1] http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shootout.shtml http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shootout.shtml [2] http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Cramer.shtml http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Cramer.shtml [3] http://imaging.nikon.com/products/imaging/lineup/digitalcamera/slr/d3s/sample.htm http://imaging.nikon.com/products/imaging/lineup/digitalcame...

jacobolus 16y ago
In that shootout link you post (Charles Cramer’s essay), the detail blowups of the 4x5 scan have clearly better resolution than the P45 blowups. (Though obviously the digital back has many other advantages, like turn-around time, marginal image cost, ease of handling, etc.) > For any serious use, film is absolutely stone dead. There are plenty of fabulous artists still shooting film with view cameras and getting great images. For example, are you going to tell me that Burtynsky isn’t serious? (Note, he’s also taken some pictures w/ a Hasselblad w/ a digital back in the last few years, where setting up a view camera is not feasible. But as far as I know the bulk of his pictures are still taken on film.)
- jdietrich 16y ago
  Film is an artistic eccentricity, like a writer using a manual typewriter or a guitarist using a beaten-up '58 Strat. It's an indulgence you can only afford if you don't have deadlines to meet or a client paying by the hour.

teilo 16y ago

Ken Rockwell is largely regarded as a crank in the Pro-Am photographic community. He is well known for making blanket statements like: "A Nikon D40 is all the camera you will ever need" and "6MP is enough resolution for anybody." and "all higher MP gets you is more noise". All wrong. The biggest problem with this article is that he assumes that film has infinite resolution. This was just as ridiculous in 2006 as it is today. Anyone who knows a thing about analog encoding techniques will instantly spot the fallacy in this argument. The resolution of film is certainly more "organic" in nature, but it is not even remotely infinite. Film has grain, and while it is difficult to pin a precise equivalent PPI on film grain, it is nevertheless the case that you cannot exceed the resolution of the grain. Since 2006 the resolution of full-frame digital sensors has vastly surpassed film, and with Canon's announcement of a 120MP sensor, and the mainstreaming of 4K digital video, there seems to be no end in sight. As it is, the biggest bottleneck to resolution is now the glass. It is becoming increasingly difficult and more expensive to create glass with enough clarity, and low enough distortion to take advantage of the higher MP sensors.

jacobolus 16y ago
I’m not the biggest fan of Rockwell, but come on, > The biggest problem with this article is that he assumes that film has infinite resolution. No he doesn’t. > Since 2006 the resolution ... If you look, this article is from before that. So what’s your point? > As it is, the biggest bottleneck to resolution is now the glass. The glass has always been one of the biggest bottlenecks. Which is why bigger and bigger megapixel counts aren’t always so useful.
- teilo 16y ago
  I'm sorry, this wasn't the precise article that I thought it was. Here are the exact quotes: "20 years from now we can re-scan our film and get 2029-level image quality." ... "You can't go back to a raw file and get more resolution. With film, you don't have to make a resolution decision until you scan it. With film, you can scan at any resolution. With film, you can scan it again in 30 years with whatever technology we have then, because you still have your original raw image captured alive and well." ... "Real Raw needs no noise reduction. Details and textures are always crisp and clear on film." From: http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/real-raw.htm

burningion 16y ago

Photography has been a big hobby of mine. You can see some of my film photography over at http://www.zothcorp.com/photos/ http://www.zothcorp.com/photos/. That being said, I recommend everyone who's serious about learning photography start shooting with a digital camera, then switch over to a film camera. Digital is a great to learn exposure, because you get results so quickly. You can see immediately the effects of over or under exposure. But film has a much greater latitude than digital. That is, it's very easy to blow out your highlights on a digital camera. Have whites that are completely white and ugly. With film you get a nice curve on your highlights, and so you can preserve more detail. You also get that thing called grain, and a physical product. Shooting film costs more, but you can get great results with less computer editing. But really, there is no great battle. There's a place for both. My own personal preference has been film for black and white, digital for color.

CWuestefeld 16y ago

He's speaking mostly from a theoretical perspective. For me, and everyone I know, the investment necessary for the super-pro equipment just isn't going to happen. That those things exist aren't really relevant to me. Then he says that digicams are more expensive, and that film cams and their lenses last forever. The thing is that, in general, the lenses for 35mm cams are generally usable for DSLRs as well. My Pentax DSLR can accept any lens ever made for any Pentax 35mm. While he does mention workflow as an advantage for digital, I think it deserves greater emphasis. That's not just because there's no need to send out to a lab (or go in your own darkroom with all the chemicals). It's also because of the availability of tools like PhotoShop, allowing us to do all kinds of post-production. Basic editing like exposure correction you could do in the darkroom. But color balance pretty much requires that you shift to digital. And of course there's really fancy editing like removing unwanted objects, changing sharpness and contrast, etc. The extreme flexibility of digital images is a killer feature.