3. What Are Some Of The Differences Between Film And Digital Cameras?

Film vs. Digital Cameras en Español
© 2006 KenRockwell.com

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see likewise Why Motion-picture show Isn't Going Away

run across also my D200 compared to 4 x 5" picture

INTRODUCTION

I employ both digital and film cameras all the time. They each serve a different purpose.

Pic 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 become in less trouble comparison my mom to a maid or my wife to something else than attempting a comparison of film to digital cameras. That said, hither goes.

Nigh people go amend results with digital cameras. I prefer the look of film. Movie takes much more than 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 in that location are and then many means things tin can go wrong with making prints from film, particularly from print (negative) picture show, beginning photographers and hobbyists normally get better prints from digital because there are fewer variables to control.

I go my digital prints made at Costco and they await stunning. Mark the Costco handbag "Impress as-is. No corrections" and your prints will wait like your screen, so long as you've left your camera in its default sRGB mode.

Labs usually make awful prints from motion picture, which is why people who don't impress their work personally become meliorate results from digital. I've never been happy with prints from negatives made for me past whatsoever 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 lot're not making the prints yourself you lot usually get something completely different than you wanted, which means junk. That'southward why about photographers shoot slide (transparency) film, since the printer tin can see exactly what the photographer intended.

Large format motion picture all the same rules for serious mural 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 lite or wash out. This mimics our eye far better than digital. Digital's weak signal is that highlights abruptly clip and expect horrible as soon as anything hits white. Dissimilar picture show there is no gradual overload to white. Digital cameras' characteristic curve heads direct to 255 white and just crashes into the wall. information technology's the aforementioned with video versus flick moving-picture show. If whatever broad area similar a forehead is overexposed your paradigm looks like crap on digital. This effect is like on cheap pocket cameras, my expensive Nikon D200 and $250,000 professional digital cinema cameras.

A smaller reason is that movie, especially larger format film used in mural photography, has more than resolution. This becomes important as impress size increases to wall size just invisible in five ten 7" prints.

Which is Better?

Neither is better on an accented basis. The choice depends on your awarding. Once you know your application the debate goes away. The debate just exists when people presume erroneously that someone else's needs mirror their own.

I can go neat 12 ten 18" glossy prints for $ii.99 at Costco every day from my digital photographic camera, and we all can get fuzzy results on film. It's the artist, non the medium, which defines quality.

If and only if you're an accomplished creative person who can excerpt every final drib from film'southward quality and so motion-picture show, meaning large format pic, technically is better than digital in every way. Few people have the skill to piece of work film out to this level, thus the fence.

Most people become better results from digital. Artists print their own work, but if you lot use a lab for prints you'll have more control and become better results from digital.

Convenience has ever won out over ultimate quality throughout the history of photography. Huge home-made wet glass plates led to shop-bought dry plates which led to eight x x" sheet film which led to 4 10 five" 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 simply a few skilled artisans like my cracking-smashing-peachy grandfather in Scotland could coax any sort of an image at all from a plate photographic camera while normal people couldn't fifty-fifty 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" moving picture. Today artists withal mess with 4 x 5" cameras and normal people are getting the best photos they ever have on iii 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'south 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 "motion picture" could mean so many things. Amateurs say "film" since they merely apply i format and assume 35mm. Therein lies the potential for debate when people don't beginning define their terminology. Today's digital SLRs supervene upon 35mm, no big deal. About people will become far amend prints from a 6MP DSLR similar the D70 than they volition paying someone else to print their 35mm film.

I'grand a little crazy: I shoot 4 ten 5" transparency motion-picture show for serious gallery piece of work and large prints. Most film shooters shoot the smaller 35mm size motion-picture show and use print flick, not transparencies. Digital cameras give much better results than 35mm print film unless y'all are custom press your own picture show because the colors from digital are not subject to the whims of the lab doing the printing.

Digital cameras requite me much better and more accurate colors than I've e'er gotten with impress 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 eighteen" print (minor for me but big to most people) and so a print from my D70 is better and faster.

Digital is far more convenient and offers bully quality for photojournalism and portraits, and picture is king for large prints and reproduction where textures in nature and landscapes are important. The fierce film vs. digital WWF death match smackdown manufactures are just to sell magazines and digital cameras. I'll get to the detailed differences below, but first let me put the whole effect in perspective. It'south really as well bad that many hobbyists and photograph magazines present this equally a warlike win/lose issue with film somehow involved in a death struggle against digital and waste their fourth dimension arguing amongst themselves in vacuous chat rooms instead of just going out and trying it for themselves.

One first needs to define only what one is going to do with the photographs. For virtually things digital is far more convenient if you're shooting hundreds of images, making prints smaller than a few anxiety on a side and posting on websites and email, and for other things like mural photography for reproduction and large fine prints picture is improve.

Ignore me. Just look here for why a magazine similar Arizona Highways simply does not have images from digital cameras for publication since the quality is not practiced enough, even from xvi megapixel cameras, to impress at 12 x 18." Arizona highways doesn't fifty-fifty accept 35mm motion-picture show, and rarely medium format motion-picture show; they usually but impress from 4 10 5" large format film. Here's a comment from Arizona Highways subsequently they got a lot of hate mail from amateurs on the previous link. Equally of Nov 2005 Arizona Highways admits here that information technology will take digital, but only for smaller images. To quote from Peter Ensengerger, Arizona Highways Manager of Photography, in that most recent article: "digital still can't touch big-format film for the full-page reproductions that have made Arizona Highways famous" and "The 4x5 view camera remains unsurpassed for landscape photography."

Movie and digital do dissimilar things ameliorate and complement each other. Neither is going abroad, although film volition decline in areas where digital excels, like news. Film has already disappeared from professional newspaper utilise 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 demand to exist hellaciously detailed.

Film is not going away

I take a whole article on this hither

WHY Y'all HAVE TO Get Expect FOR YOURSELF back to top

Other people'southward abstract technical analysis or magazine articles or websites can't tell you which looks better. Y'all have to wait for yourself. If yous want to do a technical assay the things yous should be investigating instead of resolution and bit depth are the far more important issues of colour gamut, highlight rendition, convolved spectral response curves, sharpening algorithms and overall transfer functions, although only the math Ph.Ds. empathize these. Honestly, if y'all don't trust your ain vision then you should give up photography correct now, since vision and power of observation are the about important aspects of photography!

Artists just look at the images and realize each does different things better and each has a very different expect for different subjects.

WHICH IS Meliorate back to top

Debating which is ameliorate is as silly equally debating girls vs. boys or apples vs. oranges or oils vs. Prismacolor. It all depends on what y'all 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 moving picture for quality and am too lazy to want to wait and browse my chromes for immediate distribution.

Permit's explore the advantages and disadvantages of each. If you're in a rush you'll observe the "disadvantages" section of digital specially enlightening, since at that place are very good reasons digital looks as information technology does unknown to newcomers (people who have only been in this x or fifteen years). I've been studying digital imaging since I was a kid and making my living at it full fourth dimension since the 1980s.

One also needs to define what sort of digital and what sort of picture show 1 is comparing. There are at least two unlike classes for each.

For "film" we take slide film (used past most professionals and I) and negative (print) motion picture (used by amateurs). Equally you lot know, all film looks different, and in my instance, I love the look I go from Velvia. Almost other picture looks boring to me. When I speak of "film" I mean Velvia; others of grade may hateful something else. Black and white again is even more unlike.

For "digital" nosotros 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 Epitome back to top

The best way to get a digital image is by shooting picture and having it scanned. I'one thousand non comparing that here; this is a camera discussion.

Circumspection : In Hollywood picture show production we have a phrase called "finishing." "Finishing on motion picture" means the terminate product is picture show. "Finishing on video" means the end product is video. One can start and capture images on any medium and nosotros have ways to catechumen annihilation to anything. In other words, we tin shoot either on moving-picture show or video, and catechumen either to the other if we need it. Yes, some major motion pictures today, like "Panic Room," were scanned from film, colour corrected, edited and colour timed in a computer, and written dorsum out to motion-picture show on the Arri Laser film recorder for duplication and release. Nosotros as well can take video and write it onto flick, also, and yous as a still lensman too take these options. I have taken digital camera files and had them written onto slides. That costs virtually $5.00 - two.50 a slide.

When doing any comparisons you need to pay attention to the medium in which the comparison is made.

Every other motion-picture show vs. digital comparison I've seen finished in digital, and unfortunately they were always using a inexpensive consumer scanner to catechumen the film to digital. A $ane,500 Nikon scanner and my $3,000 Minolta scanner are both cheap consumer scanners, as is the $ten,000 Imacon, all intended for apply by end user-owners. A professional scanner costs about $50,000 and takes years of experience to learn to get slap-up results. The $three,000 scanners yet lose information from the motion picture when trying to make a comparison, and even a $50,000 scanner'south images still take to be displayed on the limited color range of a figurer monitor. These typical comparisons of grade put the film at a huge disadvantage since they are eliminating all of film's advantages and reducing the comparison to the trivial resolution bug the newbies argue about.

Worse yet, one comparison in American Photograph magazine did this in the March/Apr 2002 event, and the same matter happened here. They simply compared prints made on an Epson! The folly is that they were not comparing film to digital, merely film scanned and printed at the consumer level to digital. In this case digital is at its very best, and the film is of class at the limit of the cheap consumer scanners and printer. They didn't bother to have their color house employ the $fifty,000 scanner everything else gets scanned on for reproduction in the magazine, and of grade they are express by the limited colour range of the Epson printer and whatever colour space they used. A legitimate comparison would exist to compare an Epson impress from the digital photographic camera to a Fuji Supergloss print directly from the slide motion-picture show or a Heidelberg browse.

If your concluding product is printed on an Epson then this is a valid way to compare. If you desire to see how good film actually looks y'all have to look at the slides directly or printed properly on Cibachrome or Supergloss.

By definition, anything yous see on the Internet is obviously express by this result. The flaw here is that one is not comparing to film but comparing to a cheap scan of the film and so presented at screen resolution (72 DPI).

Another way to make a real comparison is to write the digital file back out to film and expect at the 2 under a loupe. I've done this. The original film always looks then much better this way due to the greater color range and more brilliant reds and greens.

Let'south begin!

ADVANTAGES : back to elevation

FILM :

IMAGE QUALITY

RESOLUTION: A glass plate from 1880 still has more resolution than a Canon 1Ds-MkII. Picture show always wins here when used past a skilled photographer. One source of confusion is here, which uses bad scientific discipline using prints too pocket-size (xiii x 19") to show the difference. Also notation that you're non even seeing the actual prints, but screen resolution images (most 72 - 100DPI) at that site. He throws abroad most of the resolution of the motion-picture show. (It doesn't matter that his pic was scanned at 3,200 DPI and it'southward completely irrelevant that the printer was set to 2880 DPI, since all that resolution was downward-converted for your screen.) As I keep trying to say, if all y'all want is 13 10 19" inkjet prints made on a $700 Epson past all means go an $8,000 1Ds. If you desire to feel the texture of every grain of sand on a forty x 60" impress, stick with iv x 5" as photographers do.

Forget the naive debate over pixel counts. There are far more of import aspects to picture show quality. If y'all do fret this, moving picture has far more equivalent pixels, at that place'due south no question about that. I show this further down hither. You likewise can see that in the March/April 2004 edition of Photo Techniques magazine where a guy really shot USAF resolution targets with both 35mm film and a digital SLR and immediately discovered that fifty-fifty 35mm film has 3 times the resolution, duh. A great page past one of those people who really has the time to post all this is here. This is much less important than "the look." Here is the biggest difference betwixt film and digital. Just as 1 film looks unlike from another, digital looks very different from any flick. Either you like it or you don't. Flick is the result of over 100 years of refinement. Digital is just starting out. Pixel count is just a secondary upshot.

If you lot practise fret the pixel counts, I notice that it takes about 25 megapixels to simulate 35mm film's practical resolution, which is still far more than any applied digital camera. At the vi megapixel level digital gives about the same sharpness as a duplicate slide, which is plenty for almost things.

Of class I use much bigger film than 35mm for all the pretty pictures yous see at my website, so digital would need well-nigh 100 megapixels to simulate medium format, or 500 megapixels to simulate 4x5," fifty-fifty if the highlight issue was resolved which it isn't. This resolution issue is invisible at Net resolutions or 13 x xix" Epson prints, but obvious in gallery size prints. 35mm is mostly used past amateurs at this time, since the news guys all went digital 2 years ago. 35 chromes' concluding vestige every bit of 2004 is monthly sports and journalism magazines. The travel mags usually are shot on 120.

The cardinal to resolution debates is to ask yourself how big you will ever need to print an image. If you are happy with small sizes similar thirteen x xix" so past all means digital cameras are all you'd demand if you can piece of work effectually their highlight issues. Some people want to ensure that we will be able to offer prints of any size to future clients, and big pic provides this safety. And with that:

OK, I've had information technology with this idiocy. back to top of commodity Here are the examples I've been besides decorated shooting to waste my time scanning and posting. We all know the other websites showing a large name digital SLR looking as proficient as picture 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 skillful results on movie. He then only compares them at such low resolution that yous tin can't see what picture show's resolution is all near. Information technology 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 moving picture camera with a 50 year-former lens:

Total frame showing crop enlarged below

Crop from Film Prototype

Ingather from Digital Camera Image

The digital camera photograph looks like crud! How tin this exist? This is why professional mural shooters shoot 4 x five" film, even in 2005. Just read Outdoor Photographer'south August 2005 annual landscape issue where they profile prominent shooters.

The film was scanned at merely 1800 DPI and the digital image rescaled to match exactly for a off-white and balanced comparison. As enlarged hither on your computer's 100 DPI screen the full images would both impress at sixty x lxxx." They'd print at xx x 24" at impress'due south usual 300 DPI. The air current was blowing so some of the leaves are in unlike positions, not that you lot even can encounter them in the digital image.

For the moving picture image I used the cheapest landscape camera at that place is, a $700 4 x 5" Tachihara and my l year old Schneider Symmar 150 mm f/5.6 Convertible lens with a huge dent in the lens butt and ordinary Fuji Velvia film. This camera is very pop with landscape photographers due to its low cost, light weight and flexibility. The 150mm lens is normal for a 4 ten 5" camera. This prototype was scanned on a cheap consumer $500 flatbed scanner, the EPSON 4990, at i,800 DPI, which doesn't fifty-fifty requite you lot all the motion-picture show's detail. If I really wanted to reproduce the film's sharpness I'd have it scanned at 5,000 DPI on a professional person $100,000 Heidelberg. In that location's more detail on the flick than you can run across hither. Information technology would be a fairer test to take a real drum scan made, just I'g too cheap to transport information technology out for scanning since the point is pretty obvious even at one,800 DPI.

The digital photographic camera image is the aforementioned crop from a brand-new multi-megapixel digital camera made by the aforementioned visitor that keeps paying some bad-scientific discipline photography websites to pimp it as being improve than flick.

Here are examples of what's actually on flick compared to how footling scanners can see today.

Comparisons to Other Formats

Some ask why don't I compare to a 35mm movie camera or to a iv x five" digital organization?

Simple: landscapes every bit I shoot are shot most commonly in iv x 5." Others shoot them in 8x10" or larger pic formats. Using the smallest serious iv 10 5" format is probably handing film a disadvantage in this comparing for landscapes. 35mm is an apprentice format when information technology comes to landscapes. Yous tin can get a consummate four 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 pocket-sized, nether-$10,000 cameras exactly similar I used for this practical and equitable comparing. 4x5" digital systems cost $25,000, and those backs are scanning backs, non surface area sensors. There are no iv x 5" CCDs! You have to wait around for the back to browse across the image just similar a film scanner. If y'all used them for a shot of the tree, motion betwixt passes for the 3 colors would turn the unabridged 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 all the same aren't players in 4 ten 5" for outdoor photography because they browse an area smaller than iv x 5." This means that ane.) you can't go the wide angles I need, and ii.) they require even more precision in their adjustments. 4x5" cameras are adjusted by hand while looking at the ground glass. information technology'south enough of a pain to do this well with a 75 mm broad angle lens. I wouldn't exist able to make these fine adjustments if I needed a 47 mm lens to encompass the same area.

More Comparisons

Here you tin encounter a comparison betwixt 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 apprentice scanner like the Nikon 8000, all the same is in a completely meliorate class than anything digital. Note similar most of these comparisons there are no explanations of the scales used, and nigh importantly that the film is shown at a disadvantage because amateur CCD scanners are used, not PMT drum scanners. Fifty-fifty with the cheap ($2,000) scanners motion-picture show is clearly better when blown upwards plenty to see, unlike in the case in the last paragraph.

My crummy medium-resolution i,800 DPI scan of the 4x5 moving-picture show gives me over 8,500 x 6,500 clean, consummate 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 five,000 Bayer-interpolated pixels wide at all-time. This divergence should now be obvious, even to the bullheaded. And if mere numerical comparisons are not obvious plenty to the Braille oversupply, remember the under $10,000 digital cameras are simply producing interpolated pixels at best, usually Bayer (info here and for you Ph.D.south here and hither), which means that each pixel isn't a full-resolution RGB pixel anyway, as they are in film scans.

Film is Future Proof

Scanners always become better. Flick shot today will be scanned better tomorrow. I first wrote this page two years agone and fabricated 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 amend browse from the same slice of now two-twelvemonth-erstwhile film.

Enlarged Crop from Motion picture Image scanned in 2003

Enlarged Crop from Movie Image rescanned in 2005 (OK, I grabbed another shot made at the aforementioned time. I gave up trying to notice the same exact frame.)

Digital is always stuck in whatsoever quality yous shot it. Digital or video has nothing to rescan. What you got it is all you're every going to become. This is why Hollywood shoots movies, and even the ameliorate TV series, on film. 10 or 50 years from now they can all the same become better and improve images by rescanning them. Go sentinel the latest DVD of The Wizard of Oz shot on film in 1939. They only went to the vault and rescanned the film with modernistic technology.

DYNAMIC RANGE: Flick has a huge advantage in recording highlights. We take for granted the fact that specular highlights and bright sunsets look the way they exercise in painting and on film. Digital has a huge problem with this (see disadvantages under digital beneath.)

Colour: Film records and reproduces a broader range of colour. This is important for wild landscapes, deep red cars and flowers. It's not at all of import for photos of peel. The deepest red one gets on a reckoner screen or inkjet impress is really just a reddish-orange! Computer greens aren't all that brilliant either. Your screen cannot make a deep ruddy similar the cherry-red you get on a reddish LED, as you lot see on the new traffic signals. Your screen can make a dark red-orange, but information technology'south nothing like the red y'all get from Velvia on a calorie-free table or fifty-fifty a Kodachrome red. Of course artists can make cracking looking images on computer screens. You don't appreciate what y'all are missing until you lot wait at a Velvia transparency on a light tabular array afterwards staring at scans on a CRT for a while. Also, Cibachrome and Fuji Supergloss prints made from transparencies tin hit these deeper reds and greens that your inkjet printer or monitor can't. Both the artists and engineers concord on this 1. Just expect for yourself if y'all're an artist, and look at where the main colors plot on the CIE diagram if y'all're an engineer.

In other words, what I see on computer screens (and every bit you encounter on my site here) may be seductive, but is naught compared to a transparency on a low-cal table or projected.

LONG EXPOSURES: Moving-picture show works smashing for long exposures running into the minutes. You may have some color shift or loss of speed due to reciprocity problems, and otherwise the epitome quality is the same every bit for normal short exposures.

DOUBLE EXPOSURES: No problem. Almost no digital photographic camera can exercise this.

PERMANENCE: Film does not erase itself. Film does non get unreadable for no reason. It doesn't have file compatibility problems. Traditional blackness and white picture and prints will outlive whatsoever of united states of america.

Cost :

Motion-picture show: A candy 120 format frame of film costs less than a buck and has more resolution and dynamic range and color gamut than any digital organization available to anyone. Fifty-fifty military machine 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 attempt to buy my film cameras and lenses used. I often sell them for more than I paid for them years afterwards. Therefore pic hardware is essentially gratis. A good lens today is nonetheless a good lens in 20 years. The near 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 exist making great images in ten years. Besides, a new $100 picture photographic camera can whup any digital camera for color and resolution.

CONVENIANCE :

LEGIBILITY

You always can come across film past looking at it, even 100 years from today. Yous tin file and itemize everything quickly just by looking at it or contact sheets. 200 years from now anyone tin look at a blackness-and-white print. People may or may not have the ability to play back JPG files, and probably no power to play back whatever of today's proprietary RAW digital formats in 20 years.

WORKFLOW SPEED

Because of its straight legibility you can lay out a few hundred transparencies on a light table and edit them all immediately. With digital you lot need special software and it's much more cumbersome to manage a few hundred images at the same time. There are no five pes wide computer monitors with enough resolution to do this. Nosotros make practice with what we have and it's slower in digital.

IMMEDIACY

We take information technology for granted, only when yous turn on a photographic camera or push the shutter it simply works as it should with no waiting effectually.

SLIDE SHOWS

These are easy and fantabulous. Shoot slide pic and whatever $100 projector gives better results than the $200,000 digital movie house projectors I've been around, unless of grade you lot have an 80' screen.

DIGITAL : dorsum 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 become with scanned ASA fifty Velvia film. I tin can shoot at ASA one,600 and still accept very fiddling grain; far less than whatsoever ASA 1,600 film. The colors are the aforementioned with a digital camera as you change the speed; not so with film. Therefore, if I need speed I get improve results shooting on digital and then shooting film.

Digital has no "negative" stage. Because of this, digital usually looks much improve than nearly prints made from negatives. This is because well-nigh negatives are usually is printed poorly by automated photo finishing equipment. Digital gives me better and more consequent colour than I get with regular print flick. I prefer digital quality to print picture.

Long exposures are a problem. The image sensors take leakage which add together random white dots into your image with long exposures. Some cameras try to compensate for this. This is never an result with picture show.

One cannot make double or multiple exposures with digital cameras except for maybe one model of Pentax.

WORKFLOW SPEED :

If you lot are publishing in print or Cyberspace or e-mail you already know how dandy information technology is to have your files ready to go right from the camera. It's wonderful not to have to process and then browse each of your flick images. With digital I post web galleries with hundreds of images the same morning I shoot them. With film it takes me months to go around to scanning all the images the hard style. With my digital photographic camera I have shot a thou images at a nuptials and handed the groom a CD with all the original images on it before he left. Elementary! I left it to him to print them as he sees fit. Of course consumer digital photographic camera don't work fast enough to become off that many images.

PERMANANCE :

With digital you can utilize standard computer methods to backup and store verbal copies of your original images in multiple physical locations. When on the road I post CDs back to myself each day just in case my motorcar is hit past an asteroid. This mode 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 paw are worse than the originals. You lot tin can send your digital images to your clients and never accept to trust your original to get out your possession. Of grade since digital is just starting to get popular, ordinary people who don't dorsum up their computers will presently 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 zip more fun than shooting away and seeing what you only shot, and then emailing it to anybody y'all know. You can experiment and fool around and learn a ton, which so you lot 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 non only a great limerick tool, merely 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 pic.

INDEXING

Since y'all're already in the computer, file indexing and organization is easy. Motion picture needs to be tagged physically past mitt. Personally I love it that my digital camera tags every paradigm with the date and time, as well equally all the technical data.

SPEED

With film I'm too shy to shoot 100 images of zip just for the hell of information technology. With digital information technology'due south common for me to shoot 900 images in an hr-long hockey game just because I can.

FRUITFULNESS

If you become a DSLR you lot'll brand and so many images that you'll be constipated in your power to sort through them every bit fast as yous brand them! Y'all'll accept to purchase software to allow you to sort through what yous have. How else are you going to sort through 1,000 images? I utilize iView on my Mac. Windows people accept to employ BreezeBrowser. The newspaper photographers use Photo Mechanic. iView is a program that lets you sort through all your images, either every bit large thumbnails or full screen, really fast.

COST

Shoot as much every bit y'all like, information technology costs you lot nothing. On the other paw the cameras cost four times as much as film cameras.

SLIDE SHOWS

If you want to meet the images on your screen it'south lilliputian to bear witness them, and with the internet yous tin bear witness them to anyone anywhere anytime, as I practise on my Gallery pages. If you want to projection them on a screen you lot're in large trouble, see the section under disadvantages below.

DISADVANTAGES : back to top

FILM:

Prototype QUALLITY

High speed (ASA one,600) film is poor. Prints from color negatives usually have poor colors unless printed yourself.

PERMANENCE

Colour moving-picture show 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 tin can take much less infinite. Every time a divide a special image for some purpose I usually forget to put it away, and considering of this I can't find some of my favorite images. I take to index every paradigm by hand, and I hate that.

TRANSMISSION

You lot have to transport the original image everywhere. If y'all lose information technology, you've lost it. Backup copies are always a lilliputian worse than the original.

COST

y'all pay as yous get.

DIGITAL: back to peak

The question "take you gone digital yet?" is a presumptuous fallacy is pushed by camera stores and photographic camera makers, since they make large bucks when you lot buy a digital photographic camera that y'all'll want to supervene upon in a few years. "Going digital" is by no means inevitable or even desirable. Digital does not replace your film photographic camera for many kinds of fine art. Even today your dad's 20 year old Canon AE-1 can make technically meliorate images than any digital camera. The Catechism AE-i is about the same equally a 20 megapixel photographic camera. The AE-one Programme is about the same as a 25 megapixel camera, presuming y'all are using Catechism brand lenses.

Epitome Quality:

Highlight Rendition: Digital still has a huge trouble with highlight reproduction, presuming you lot, like me, shoot into the sun or other sources of calorie-free. Film for hundreds of years has naturally had "shoulders" in its characteristic curve. This means that fifty-fifty with severe overexposure in places that the highlights are rendered naturally on film, even contrasty slide moving-picture show like the Velvia I love.

On the other manus, at the dawn of the 21st century digital capture is more linear than logarithmic every bit flick is. This means that digital cameras often take better shadow item than my Velvia, but can take horrid, unnatural highlights if overexposed even a 3rd of a stop.

Specifically, digital clips hard equally shortly every bit you are a few stops over zone Five. This could be OK, however unfortunately in colour 1 of the three color channels (red, green or blue) usually clips kickoff, throwing the hue (color) into all sorts of weird shifts in the areas the prototype transitions from bright to pure white. This is why digital photographic 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 exist fixed soon. To simulate film's shoulder 1 needs to add several more than stops of highlight capture in the digital camera so the image processing electronics can employ this information to simulate a decent shoulder curve. CCDs and the related capture electronics will demand about ten times more than dynamic range (iii stops) than they have today to be able to simulate film's shoulder. Of course negative film has more than range still, but that'due south not really relevant to expert photography since the dynamic range of negative film already exceeds what you ought to be photographing. For case, a negative can exist way overexposed and still retain detail in otherwise diddled out highlights, if y'all custom print and fire in those areas. Heck, you can scan a negative from a $6 disposable camera and have more than highlight dynamic range than any digital capture arrangement.

The $100,000 three-CCD studio loftier-definition television cameras around which I piece of work today all the same have problems with this, and and so our cheap $5,000 single-striped CCD digital SLRs will, too. Anybody is working on solving this. This is the biggest image defect in digital cameras today.

Blackness-AND-WHITE dorsum to summit

This is simple: digital cameras usually merely 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 information technology will simplify everything you do since for the first time y'all'll really understand what'southward going on. You can larn a little hither.

I suggest trying deliberate underexposure and pulling up the bend's midpoint to create a shoulder higher up zone Seven.

Digital does have more than shadow particular than flick. What camera makers have done is traded off of import highlight detail for lower noise so their cameras look better in lab test reports. Today'south digicams accept great shadow detail only clipped highlights. As I said, you tin fix that by underexposing a stop or 2 (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 movie cameras. Compact digital cameras have nigh infinite depth of field, meaning you lot can't deliberately blur backgrounds. Why is this? Uncomplicated: the tiny paradigm sensors of compact digital cameras (meaning everyone selling for less than $two,000) utilize 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 too the disadvantage that exposure is more than critical than moving-picture show. Fifty-fifty 1/three of a stop makes a big departure on my D1H. Underexposure is easy to correct in post, simply overexposure renders an image useless. 1/3 of a stop on Velvia is subtle; on a D1H information technology's blatantly obvious.

Permanence: I have lost days of work when memory cards became unreadable. In just the commencement month I had my D1H I lost hundreds of images. In all my decades of shooting motion-picture show I accept only lost one half of one roll of film, and that was my error for forgetting to check the rewind crank for proper motion-picture show advance. With the D1H I knew what I was doing, and one office of the system (I think the Microtech CF menu I was using) destroyed hundreds of images which could not exist replaced.

Sluggishness: Unless you drop iv m on a Nikon D1 serial you are going to have to await for the camera to turn on, and then wait when you lot press the shutter for the camera to get around to focusing and setting itself and eventually making a photo, then wait around for it to finish writing the file to your storage medium until you lot can take the adjacent photo. Because of this well-nigh digital cameras cannot be used efficiently for photos of people or annihilation that moves. Worse, if you lot have a digital viewfinder and then the paradigm in that viewfinder is likewise delayed for a fraction of a 2nd, ensuring yous'll always miss the right moment for a powerful epitome. If you splurge for a D1 and then by all means you are in the drivers' seat (it's faster than any film camera I own), merely today's 2003 cameras priced beneath $two,000 withal have a long fashion to go. This means that in 2007 you lot'll think back to any consumer digicam you've used today and laugh about how anyone could have put upwardly with such sluggish foolishness.

Cost. Digital cameras are very, very expensive for what they do. They go obsolete in a year, dissimilar film cameras which, in the example of 4x5, fifty-fifty l 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 dispensable camera, which just similar a $4,000 computer will be worth naught in a few years. You pay this for the work you tin shell of information technology 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 every bit I do, they are far more expensive than whatever film camera if y'all simply shoot a few hundred shots every calendar month. Go spend $1,500 on a flick camera and you have a fine motorcar you'll be using to create not bad images 20 years from now. Spend that same $1,500 on a digital camera and you volition take 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 lot may notice my D1H there in 2005 since I donate to these great people.)

Think of that D100 you want as a $one,700 batch of Polaroid motion picture. It'due south a lot of fun, but not commonly as good as real film. If you don't employ it all up in a yr or two yous have to throw it away. Likewise, I know you lot want a digital SLR, simply it's a DISPOSABLE photographic camera. Get one every bit I did if you lot will use it a lot in the side by side couple of years and have money to burn down. Don't expect me to bless it as some sort of an investment: it'southward not: it's an expenditure just like a car.

Slide Shows: These, along with large paper prints, are poor for digital. You lot have two options: ane.) the obvious, a digital projector, and the less obvious, 2.) but 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 applied science equally of 2003 is still likewise rough for serious still photographic images. I have worked with $200,000 digital cinema projectors and these requite great color and dynamics, but unfortunately don't have plenty resolution for however images. The top digital cinema projectors today are all the same limited to one,280 x 960 resolution which is great for moving images, but however besides low for a good all the same image. Your eye sees far more item when the subject field is not moving. As of November 2003 TI is introducing the M25-based digital picture palace 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, just unfortunately are also limited to the same resolution and, dissimilar the digital cinema projectors, accept atrocious color. The business projectors you are likely to borrow from your function 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 actress bright and impressive for tedious bar charts of sales figures, merely make your reds wait deadening and dark. If you borrow ane of these I'd try putting a pinkish gel over the lens to try to add back in some of the deficiency in reddish. If y'all're a real hacker you could try to contour it. Of course the older dim LCD projectors are all obsolete today and the DLP ones are the style to go. Watch out: I know these look great for business presentations because I use them for this all the time. When I realized earlier doing a business talk that I could fire up Photoshop and run across my work on the big screen I realized what is only obvious after you endeavour it: there are not enough pixels for real pictures. You can see the private 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 movement moving-picture show xenon arc or halogen light source y'all'll be OK for color except that you'll still besides depression for resolution. Avoid the vast majority of projectors with HMI lights, which are all the ones I've seen for business concern use.

I'thousand warning you: I've had access to some pretty exotic projectors as function of my real chore in Hollywood and they look bad for still photos, fifty-fifty if movies and business organisation charts await spectacular.

MAKING SLIDES FROM DIGITAL FILES: This is like shooting fish in a barrel. I utilize my local lab, Chrome, or yous can utilise Slides.com. In either case, you lot have to pay several dollars a slide. Projecting this slide will look better than using i of the projectors above, unfortunately you may take to beat out $400 for a tray of 80 slides. Price is the simply real disadvantage, and its a big i. You also realize that you lot need a lot more pixels than you lot thought to return a slide every bit sharp as a camera original piece of film. I've written files 2,000 x iii,000 pixels out to film and they are but as sharp equally a gull slide. They look OK, but if you lot wait close you'll realize why I offering that 1 needs more than like iv,000 ten 6,000 pixels, or 24 Megapixel files, to expect like film. Y'all simply get this resolution by scanning film, bringing the states dorsum 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 dear the way people's skin looks on my D1H. For any sort of activeness I shoot Nikon D1H digital.

Since the but legitimate professional awarding of 35mm movie has been for news, action and sports, 35mm film for professional person apply is becoming obsolete equally more and more than people and organizations move to the Nikon D1 series digital cameras. For instance, the big paper here in San Diego got rid of their darkrooms in 1999. Fifty-fifty printing presses have forgone plates and now many take merely digital inputs. Flick is only a hurting to have to use for publication. The only high-end pro employ of 35mm today is for sports on posters and magazines, since larger format cameras are not fast enough.

Moving-picture show will remain king for landscapes and annihilation that holds yet and requires big prints. I even adopt its color rendition for Internet utilise. Information technology's also the king for anything yous intend to desire to print years from at present. In 5 years anything shot on today's digital cameras will look atrocious compared to what was shot on film today, past the standards of the future. Retrieve, digital already has replaced 35mm motion-picture show, only the economies of the market place and scale will non take it approach larger film format quality any decade soon, since the need is not there to justify development at any price you'll desire to afford.

My real task is in Hollywood. The reason virtually of what yous see on Tv is shot at huge expense on 35mm moving-picture show film so transferred to video (too at neat expense) instead of being shot digitally (video) in the first place is for two simple reasons:

1.) The future. Years from at present we'll use the latest telecine machines (scanners) to get fifty-fifty better results from the moving-picture show we shot today. On the other manus, years from now we may non even be able to play back the tapes if we shot on video. Ever seen "Gone with the Air current" on video? It looks pretty adept for something shot in 1934 on film. Ever seen "Welcome Dorsum Kotter?" It looks awful since information technology was shot on video in 1974 and is stuck in that quality level forever.

ii.) Quality. Motion picture just looks better than things shot on video, mostly considering we take enormous control in telecine (movie-to-video transfer) after the fact. If we got everything technically perfect in the original shoot there's not that much deviation in the concluding video. However in real life it's not that elementary. We can accept whatever part of the huge dynamic range film has and utilize it in telecine in postal service production. On video you lot either got it right when yous shot it, or yous missed it. There is much more than room for correcting screw-ups and fine-tuning in mail product with moving picture than video, and we are e'er fine-tuning in postal service. Video simply has dynamic range suitable for release, it does non accept whatsoever extra headroom or footroom to allow decent tweaking in mail production. Call up too that in Hollywood nosotros roll upward three trucks of lighting and generators and make any light we need, then nosotros tin go effectually the highlight issues that I can't in my available light shooting. Fifty-fifty with this we however prefer pic because it's still easier to light.

You can read like info from the US FBI here.

Farther Reading

For more detailed research by Roger Clark, who has put a lot more of this into writing than I accept, try these links:

http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summary1.html
http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/dynamicrange2/
http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/digital.bespeak.to.racket/

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Source: https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/filmdig.htm

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