A footnote. Control. With a manual film camera, you don't even have
to take the image in focus, if you so not wish to do so. You can also
use a slow shutter speed to blur motion. Certainly auto everything
(film or digital) does not offer this level of artistic control. I
cannot say how well digital cameras allow you to blur focus or blur
speed. But manual controls put the decision in the hands of the
photographer, not the computer.


Francis A. Miniter


Francis A. Miniter wrote:

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. 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?