"Francis A. Miniter" wrote in message ...
Hi Knack,

Unless you are ready to spend substantially more for a digital camera
than a film camera, you will get a better quality image from the film
than from the digital taking of the scene.

It depends on the light levels, from what I've seen of sports photos
under dim light, I'd say digital looks pretty good. Otherwise, I'd
agree with you.

For those who never get more
than 4x6 prints, this may not be relevant. For those who care about the
quality of the final print and may make enlargements, this is very
relevant. For those who enter images in juried competitions, digital
still does not come close.


If, as some of us, you use medium format film (2 1/4 inches by 2 1/4
inches or more) or large format cameras (4 inch x 5 inch negatives or
even 5x7 or 8x10 or 11x14), there is no comparison whatsoever, and no
competition even unless you want to spend $20,000 on a digital
Hasselblad back for your Hasselblad system.


Archivability is better with film. Anyone anytime can make a print from
a negative. As digital formats change and the digital media on which
they are stored change, data can become irretrievable. It was not all
that long ago that people used 8 inch floppy disks. If you were given
one now and told to recover the data, could you? Could you, if it were
a 5 1/4 inch disk? If you had the hardware, would you have the right
software? Does anyone remember Leading Edge Word Processing program?


Digital cameras only work when the batteries are working. There are
those of us who prefer old fully manual cameras with no electronics,
because they never fail. They do not depend on batteries to function.
Many of my cameras are 50 years old. Will your digital camera still
work in 50 years?


Peripheral equipment to try to achieve "photographic" quality prints
from digital data is expensive. The deposition of ink jet dots still is
not as fine as a print from film image.


Many film cameras allow special effects such as double imaging. I am
not aware of this capability with digital cameras.


If you are intending to take many, many shots in the field, film is
easier and cheaper to handle than having multiple, expensive additional
memory chips. I have taken a couple hundred shots in a day when touring.


Francis A. Miniter




Knack wrote:

I found a really nice Olympus Accura Zoom 105 point and shoot 35mm film
camera at a web store. It has a zoom lens range of 38-105mm (3x), but the
reasons for instead buying a digital camera seem compelling enough.

What are the advantages, if any, of a film camera over a digital camera when
comparing two cameras of the same zoom range?