digital vs 35mm - status now

It seems many people now find that the newest generation of
digital cameras perform as well as their typical 35mm setup.
So the question becomes what is the role of 35mm?
I think film still has a use in the following areas, but
I'm sure some of these issues will change as digital continues
to evolve.

1. Ability to use lenses not available for digital. The only
one that comes to mind right now is the 12mm Heliar in Leica
screw mount. I don't think there is any other rectilinear lens
of this focal length. However lens makers could make one with
a similar angle of view for the new smaller sensor arrays if they
wished. Perhaps there are other unique optics as well.

2. Ability to shoot at very high ISO. I believe digital still has
a problem with 800+ ISO settings.

3. Ability to take long exposures. I think film's ability to
integrate the light over seconds to hours in not yet met by digital.
4. Dynamic range. I think the latest generation of color negative
films still exceed the dynamic range of digital. Modern scanners
can extract this info which wasn't practical with conventional
color enlarging.

5. Media security. The physical film still has better viewing and
preservation properties than digital. Perhaps new standards that
are being discussed will temper the obsolescence factor that has
dogged digital so far. The latest generation of film should last
50+ years. Longer if kept cold.

6. Ultimate quality. I'm posting this in the 35mm group, but film
probably still has an advantage over digital in larger sizes except
for some very expensive, special purpose digital sensors for medium
format and view cameras. There is still an edge in resolution in
35mm vs digital, but apparently most people don't notice it for
much of their work.

So it seems that the gap continues to close...

--
Robert D Feinman
Landscapes, Cityscapes and Panoramic Photographs
http://robertdfeinman.com
mail:

You forgot the greatest advantage : slides projection 3 meters base !
That is the reason why it gonna be a while before i switch to digital

Robert Feinman wrote:

It seems many people now find that the newest generation of
digital cameras perform as well as their typical 35mm setup.
So the question becomes what is the role of 35mm?
I think film still has a use in the following areas, but
I'm sure some of these issues will change as digital continues
to evolve.

1. Ability to use lenses not available for digital. The only
one that comes to mind right now is the 12mm Heliar in Leica
screw mount. I don't think there is any other rectilinear lens
of this focal length. However lens makers could make one with
a similar angle of view for the new smaller sensor arrays if they
wished. Perhaps there are other unique optics as well.

2. Ability to shoot at very high ISO. I believe digital still has
a problem with 800+ ISO settings.

3. Ability to take long exposures. I think film's ability to
integrate the light over seconds to hours in not yet met by digital.
4. Dynamic range. I think the latest generation of color negative
films still exceed the dynamic range of digital. Modern scanners
can extract this info which wasn't practical with conventional
color enlarging.

5. Media security. The physical film still has better viewing and
preservation properties than digital. Perhaps new standards that
are being discussed will temper the obsolescence factor that has
dogged digital so far. The latest generation of film should last
50+ years. Longer if kept cold.

6. Ultimate quality. I'm posting this in the 35mm group, but film
probably still has an advantage over digital in larger sizes except
for some very expensive, special purpose digital sensors for medium
format and view cameras. There is still an edge in resolution in
35mm vs digital, but apparently most people don't notice it for
much of their work.

So it seems that the gap continues to close...

--
Robert D Feinman
Landscapes, Cityscapes and Panoramic Photographs
http://robertdfeinman.com
mail:

In article ,
Robert Feinman wrote:

I shoot with a 6MP DSLR, 35mm rangefinder stuff, and various different
medium format cameras, so, at the risk of enflaming the various axe-grinders
of the world, I might be able to provide some useful input here.

1. Ability to use lenses not available for digital. The only
one that comes to mind right now is the 12mm Heliar in Leica
screw mount.

....or the 12mm Voigtlander/Cosina lens, in M mount. You can mount that lens
on an Epson RD-1, but it won't have the same field of view. At the moment,
if you want extreme wide-angle with digital, you either need an expensive
"full-frame" DSLR, or a fisheye lens (using post-processing to convert to a
rectilinear projection, if you desire).

It's getting better though. I think Nikon do a zoom for their 1.5x DSLRs
that goes down to 10mm, however. Won't work on a 35mm body, as it doesn't
provide a big enough image circle, but it gets you the same field of view as
15mm does on a 35mm body.

2. Ability to shoot at very high ISO. I believe digital still has
a problem with 800+ ISO settings.

Other way round. 800 and 1600 ISO images from a modern DSLR, such as an EOS
20D, show similar speed 35mm film to be a very poor relation. Even at 400
ISO, the DSLRs have a pretty significant advantage. I've made A4 1600 ISO
prints from a DSLR that show less obvious "graininess" than 400 ISO 35mm
prints of half the size.

3. Ability to take long exposures. I think film's ability to
integrate the light over seconds to hours in not yet met by digital.

It might be closer than you think. Have a look at this:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/narcissus/30mins.jpg

That's a half-hour exposure that I did this summer with an EOS 10D. The
magnified section is 1:1, to show the lack of noise. I tried to do the same
shot on 120 slide film, but was screwed by reciprocity failure.

4. Dynamic range. I think the latest generation of color negative
films still exceed the dynamic range of digital.

Roger Clark has been doing some work on this recently, and has found that
current DSLR sensors posess greater dymanic range than print film by quite a
margin. He's written a webpage about his findings:

http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/dynamicrange2/

5. Media security. The physical film still has better viewing and
preservation properties than digital. Perhaps new standards that
are being discussed will temper the obsolescence factor that has
dogged digital so far. The latest generation of film should last
50+ years. Longer if kept cold.

This is a topic that seems to be the subject of long flame wars (there have
been a couple here recently). All I'll say is that both have differentg
problems here. Digital media fails in such a way that it's an all-or-nothing
situation, wheras film tends to degrade slowly and greacefully with age. On
the other hand, you can't ever make a perfect duplicate of a slide or
negative. The original is unique, and always will be. Digital files can,
however, be copied as many times as you like with no loss, so in theory they
could live forever, if you are prepared to go to the trouble of maintaining
backups and copying them to new media occasionally.

6. Ultimate quality. I'm posting this in the 35mm group, but film
probably still has an advantage over digital in larger sizes except
for some very expensive, special purpose digital sensors for medium
format and view cameras.

Agreed - with film, it's relatively easy to scale the image area you use to
record the image to get better quality. A second hand 6*6 TLR (I have a
couple and use them quite a lot) with an old Tessar lens will produce images
that contain vastly more detail than one of the 35mm-body DSLRs, and, of
course, there's always large format. Scaling silicon in the same way is
ludicrously expensive.

There are scanning backs, which provide digital output with amazing
resolution, but they are unsuitable for many types of photography, due to
the requirement that the image remains still for a long time.

There is still an edge in resolution in
35mm vs digital, but apparently most people don't notice it for
much of their work.

With the 6/8 MP DSLRs, most seem to find this true only for slow slide film,
assuming we're talking about real world images. You can show a much bigger
gap with high contrast lens test targets, but film doesn't deliver the same
sort of advantage for lower contrast real world images, wheras digital is
much closer to being limited by resolution, rather than contrast and grain.

To be honest, both 35mm and 6/8 MP DSLRs are capable of producing decent
prints at a similar size (say, A4), and "adequate" A3 prints. If you want to
demonstrate a clear advantage, you really need to be looking at medium
format.

If you're looking at print film, or anything faster than 100 ISO, there's
not much of a contest these days.

Robert Feinman writes:

It seems many people now find that the newest generation of
digital cameras perform as well as their typical 35mm setup.
So the question becomes what is the role of 35mm?
I think film still has a use in the following areas, but
I'm sure some of these issues will change as digital continues
to evolve.

1. Ability to use lenses not available for digital. The only
one that comes to mind right now is the 12mm Heliar in Leica
screw mount. I don't think there is any other rectilinear lens
of this focal length. However lens makers could make one with
a similar angle of view for the new smaller sensor arrays if they
wished. Perhaps there are other unique optics as well.

Actually, the Sigma 12-24mm zoom covers 35mm!

I haven't tried the Heliar, but it would NOT shock me to discover that
it's a considerably better lens than the 12mm end of the Sigma zoom
(which I have tried, a friend loaned me one for about 24 hours; I
liked it quite well, and it didn't suck badly in some quick tests, but
the tests were on a 1.5x crop factor digital (my main interest in
12mm)).

Doesn't at least the top-end Canon have mirror lockup? So potentially
lenses that stick back in could be designed or adapted for it.

2. Ability to shoot at very high ISO. I believe digital still has
a problem with 800+ ISO settings.

Actually, my experience is that at high ISOs digital surpasses film
very quickly. Maybe it's different using high-speed film in bright
light, like for sports; but I use it in low light levels, and nearly
always tungsten, and I get *MUCH* better pictures from my Fuji S2 at
800 or 1600 than I ever culd with film.

3. Ability to take long exposures. I think film's ability to
integrate the light over seconds to hours in not yet met by digital.

Probably true, but for seconds to minutes I like the digital results.

4. Dynamic range. I think the latest generation of color negative
films still exceed the dynamic range of digital. Modern scanners
can extract this info which wasn't practical with conventional
color enlarging.

In commercial photographic equipment this is probably so; but the
astronomers went to digital a decade or so ago, and handling the range
of brighness levels was one of their primary reasons. So the
potential is there. (Although the astronomers are using cryonically
cooled *really* expensive sensors, so the potential may never be
realizable in cheap portable equipment.)

5. Media security. The physical film still has better viewing and
preservation properties than digital. Perhaps new standards that
are being discussed will temper the obsolescence factor that has
dogged digital so far. The latest generation of film should last
50+ years. Longer if kept cold.

I certainly wouldn't count on color film to last 50 years, unless
stored in careful archival conditions including low temperatures.
Digital is much easier to archive, actually. And there will *never*,
*ever*, be a replacement for the camera-original piece of film;
whereas in digital you can make multiple copies *each of which is just
like the original*. And spread them around, for use or for safety or
both.

You say this problem has "dogged digital", but I don't see that it has
at all. Image formats have been stable since we first started doing
digital imaging, for example, and show no signs of changing
significantly any time soon. TIFF and JPEG will be with us for the
forseeable future.

6. Ultimate quality. I'm posting this in the 35mm group, but film
probably still has an advantage over digital in larger sizes except
for some very expensive, special purpose digital sensors for medium
format and view cameras. There is still an edge in resolution in
35mm vs digital, but apparently most people don't notice it for
much of their work.

I'd say that ultimate quality *clearly* goes to digital. But that
*low cost* is a big win for film, and you can come remarkably close to
the full digital quality for 1% of the price using film.

Clearly the astronomers get their ultimate quality from digital.

If you compare stuff you can do at a particular price level, say $5000
for equipment, I think film clearly wins (4x5 view camera and a good
lens, say).

So it seems that the gap continues to close...

Widen. Digital is ahead, and is forging rapidly further ahead.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: http://noguns-nomoney.com/ http://www.dd-b.net/carry/
Pics: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/

Robert Feinman writes:

It seems many people now find that the newest generation of
digital cameras perform as well as their typical 35mm setup.
So the question becomes what is the role of 35mm?
I think film still has a use in the following areas, but
I'm sure some of these issues will change as digital continues
to evolve.

1. Ability to use lenses not available for digital. The only
one that comes to mind right now is the 12mm Heliar in Leica
screw mount. I don't think there is any other rectilinear lens
of this focal length. However lens makers could make one with
a similar angle of view for the new smaller sensor arrays if they
wished. Perhaps there are other unique optics as well.

Actually, the Sigma 12-24mm zoom covers 35mm!

I haven't tried the Heliar, but it would NOT shock me to discover that
it's a considerably better lens than the 12mm end of the Sigma zoom
(which I have tried, a friend loaned me one for about 24 hours; I
liked it quite well, and it didn't suck badly in some quick tests, but
the tests were on a 1.5x crop factor digital (my main interest in
12mm)).

Doesn't at least the top-end Canon have mirror lockup? So potentially
lenses that stick back in could be designed or adapted for it.

2. Ability to shoot at very high ISO. I believe digital still has
a problem with 800+ ISO settings.

Actually, my experience is that at high ISOs digital surpasses film
very quickly. Maybe it's different using high-speed film in bright
light, like for sports; but I use it in low light levels, and nearly
always tungsten, and I get *MUCH* better pictures from my Fuji S2 at
800 or 1600 than I ever culd with film.

3. Ability to take long exposures. I think film's ability to
integrate the light over seconds to hours in not yet met by digital.

Probably true, but for seconds to minutes I like the digital results.

4. Dynamic range. I think the latest generation of color negative
films still exceed the dynamic range of digital. Modern scanners
can extract this info which wasn't practical with conventional
color enlarging.

In commercial photographic equipment this is probably so; but the
astronomers went to digital a decade or so ago, and handling the range
of brighness levels was one of their primary reasons. So the
potential is there. (Although the astronomers are using cryonically
cooled *really* expensive sensors, so the potential may never be
realizable in cheap portable equipment.)

5. Media security. The physical film still has better viewing and
preservation properties than digital. Perhaps new standards that
are being discussed will temper the obsolescence factor that has
dogged digital so far. The latest generation of film should last
50+ years. Longer if kept cold.

I certainly wouldn't count on color film to last 50 years, unless
stored in careful archival conditions including low temperatures.
Digital is much easier to archive, actually. And there will *never*,
*ever*, be a replacement for the camera-original piece of film;
whereas in digital you can make multiple copies *each of which is just
like the original*. And spread them around, for use or for safety or
both.

You say this problem has "dogged digital", but I don't see that it has
at all. Image formats have been stable since we first started doing
digital imaging, for example, and show no signs of changing
significantly any time soon. TIFF and JPEG will be with us for the
forseeable future.

6. Ultimate quality. I'm posting this in the 35mm group, but film
probably still has an advantage over digital in larger sizes except
for some very expensive, special purpose digital sensors for medium
format and view cameras. There is still an edge in resolution in
35mm vs digital, but apparently most people don't notice it for
much of their work.

I'd say that ultimate quality *clearly* goes to digital. But that
*low cost* is a big win for film, and you can come remarkably close to
the full digital quality for 1% of the price using film.

Clearly the astronomers get their ultimate quality from digital.

If you compare stuff you can do at a particular price level, say $5000
for equipment, I think film clearly wins (4x5 view camera and a good
lens, say).

So it seems that the gap continues to close...

Widen. Digital is ahead, and is forging rapidly further ahead.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: http://noguns-nomoney.com/ http://www.dd-b.net/carry/
Pics: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 13:27:01 -0600, David Dyer-Bennet
wrote:

Robert Feinman writes:

2. Ability to shoot at very high ISO. I believe digital still has
a problem with 800+ ISO settings.

Actually, my experience is that at high ISOs digital surpasses film
very quickly. Maybe it's different using high-speed film in bright
light, like for sports; but I use it in low light levels, and nearly
always tungsten, and I get *MUCH* better pictures from my Fuji S2 at
800 or 1600 than I ever culd with film.

I've noticed this too.

5. Media security. The physical film still has better viewing and
preservation properties than digital. Perhaps new standards that
are being discussed will temper the obsolescence factor that has
dogged digital so far. The latest generation of film should last
50+ years. Longer if kept cold.

I certainly wouldn't count on color film to last 50 years, unless
stored in careful archival conditions including low temperatures.
Digital is much easier to archive, actually. And there will *never*,
*ever*, be a replacement for the camera-original piece of film;
whereas in digital you can make multiple copies *each of which is just
like the original*.

With digital, each copy is actually better than the original, for it
it usually made to a newer/fresher media.

Each print of a digital is better than last years, as printer
technology continues to improve.

So it seems that the gap continues to close...

Widen. Digital is ahead, and is forging rapidly further ahead.

Indeed.

--
Owamanga!

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 13:27:01 -0600, David Dyer-Bennet
wrote:

Robert Feinman writes:

2. Ability to shoot at very high ISO. I believe digital still has
a problem with 800+ ISO settings.

Actually, my experience is that at high ISOs digital surpasses film
very quickly. Maybe it's different using high-speed film in bright
light, like for sports; but I use it in low light levels, and nearly
always tungsten, and I get *MUCH* better pictures from my Fuji S2 at
800 or 1600 than I ever culd with film.

I've noticed this too.

5. Media security. The physical film still has better viewing and
preservation properties than digital. Perhaps new standards that
are being discussed will temper the obsolescence factor that has
dogged digital so far. The latest generation of film should last
50+ years. Longer if kept cold.

I certainly wouldn't count on color film to last 50 years, unless
stored in careful archival conditions including low temperatures.
Digital is much easier to archive, actually. And there will *never*,
*ever*, be a replacement for the camera-original piece of film;
whereas in digital you can make multiple copies *each of which is just
like the original*.

With digital, each copy is actually better than the original, for it
it usually made to a newer/fresher media.

Each print of a digital is better than last years, as printer
technology continues to improve.

So it seems that the gap continues to close...

Widen. Digital is ahead, and is forging rapidly further ahead.

Indeed.

--
Owamanga!

6. Ultimate quality. I'm posting this in the 35mm group, but film
probably still has an advantage over digital in larger sizes except
for some very expensive, special purpose digital sensors for medium
format and view cameras.

Agreed - with film, it's relatively easy to scale the image area you use to
record the image to get better quality. A second hand 6*6 TLR (I have a
couple and use them quite a lot) with an old Tessar lens will produce images
that contain vastly more detail than one of the 35mm-body DSLRs, and, of
course, there's always large format. Scaling silicon in the same way is
ludicrously expensive.


Actually the ability to easily stitch multiple digital images together
to make a larger, higher resolution image makes this a non issue in
most, though not all, cases. You could stitch multiple film based
images together but that is a much more time consuming process,
requiring a conversion to digital, and you will not likely wind up
with an image that's as clean as a pure digital stitch.

Stitching is not appropriate for all types of images (sports, action,
weddings, etc.) but in those cases, where elements of the scene are
moving relative to other elements of the scene ultimate resolution is
ruled out anyway. For still images like landscape or studio still
life stitching can be relatively easy. That isn't to say there can be
no problems as wind could change the position of foreground elements
between images of the stitch.

There are scanning backs, which provide digital output with amazing
resolution, but they are unsuitable for many types of photography, due to
the requirement that the image remains still for a long time.

There is still an edge in resolution in
35mm vs digital, but apparently most people don't notice it for
much of their work.

With the 6/8 MP DSLRs, most seem to find this true only for slow slide film,
assuming we're talking about real world images. You can show a much bigger
gap with high contrast lens test targets, but film doesn't deliver the same
sort of advantage for lower contrast real world images, wheras digital is
much closer to being limited by resolution, rather than contrast and grain.

Actually there is good test data that indicate the high end DSLR's
(Canon 1DS and Kodak 14n/c) produce images of higher quality than ANY
35mm film and is pushing into medium format. Newer high end DSLR's
(Canon 1DS Mark II), with higher resolution and lower noise will only
expand the digital advantage.

Face it, film is to horse-and-buggy as digital is to motor-car!



To be honest, both 35mm and 6/8 MP DSLRs are capable of producing decent
prints at a similar size (say, A4), and "adequate" A3 prints. If you want to
demonstrate a clear advantage, you really need to be looking at medium
format.

If you're looking at print film, or anything faster than 100 ISO, there's
not much of a contest these days.


I believe the current crop of 6MP and for sure 8MP DSLR's are equal
to or better than 35mm film.


Later,

Brian

Film and digital are different media with different image qualities. The
aesthetic merits of either can be debated infinitely as "better" is entirely
subjective.

However for the practical uses of photographic image making, reproducing and
viewing there is no point in pretending that digital has not already
surpassed film and will entirely supplant film in the near future for most
picture making endeavors, including highly technical, scientific uses.

This does not mean digital is "better" than film: digital is more than
adequate technically for its intended uses and simply faster and more
efficient than chemical based processes.

Film and digital are different media with different image qualities. The
aesthetic merits of either can be debated infinitely as "better" is entirely
subjective.

However for the practical uses of photographic image making, reproducing and
viewing there is no point in pretending that digital has not already
surpassed film and will entirely supplant film in the near future for most
picture making endeavors, including highly technical, scientific uses.

This does not mean digital is "better" than film: digital is more than
adequate technically for its intended uses and simply faster and more
efficient than chemical based processes.