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Digital Camera Quality Passing Film?
smartbit writes "Luminous Landscape writes in their Preliminary Field Report of the Canon 1Ds 11 Megapixel camera: 'the 1Ds produces the best combination of resolution, colour accuracy and low noise that I've yet seen in a digital camera.
What about a comparison with both 35mm film and medium format? I'm afraid that film has definitively lost the battle. The 1Ds's full-frame 11MP CMOS sensor produces a 32MB file -- as big as a typical scan. But this file is sharper and more noise free than any scan I have ever seen, including drum scans. There simply isn't a contest any longer.'
Kodak's Pro 14n list price is $5000 lower and uses a similar CMOS sensor supplied by Fillfactory "
IANAP (I am not a photographer)
There are so many issues and artificats using a digital camera, even the ~ $1,000 models.
One big quirk I have is the delay. Traditional photography is INSTANT, and at least with all digital cameras I've used, there's a noticeable delay between when I click before it shoots.
Don't even get me started on shiny objects in the sun with a digital camera.
Digital cameras still have incredible value and usefulness if you're a budding eBay auctioneer, or when you take a lot of pictures to put on the computer, and quality isn't the #1 issue.
... is like vinyl vs CD
Okay, so if I want a picture inside my computer, I should use a camera rather than a scanner to scan a real picture. That's hardly "film losing the battle" as the post states. That's scanners losing the battle on film's behalf. It's still going to be quite a while before a digital camera can truly reproduce film's quality away from the computer.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
"film has definitively lost the battle..."
Pardon me, but the battle won't be "lost" until the local supermarket starts selling disposable 3M-pixel digital cameras.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
- film resolution is on the scale of large clumps of molecules, not individual atoms
- crime scene investigators do not need high resolution. this is evidenced by their regular use of ASA400 film instead of less grainy ASA24
- you are gay
This is slightly off topic, but...
For average, everyday people, digital cameras have completely and utterly displaced film. The previous "idiots cameras" the 110's, are pretty much extinct - I haven't seen one in years. This is due to the rise in quality of the 35mm point+shoots.
Now those same 35 point+shoots are being displaced (in mass quanitity) by point+shoot digital cameras. You can get a decent 2MP digital for $200 now, and 128meg of SmartMedia for under $50.
For the average joe-bag-a-donuts, 2MP is PLENTY of resolution.
What I predict you'll see is the continued dropping in price (and increase in capability) of consumer level digital cameras and the eventual exinction and/or price increase (due to lack of demand) of 35mm film, processing and equipment.
Poloroids - I'm surprised they're still in business today.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
National Geographic had an article a while back about the different kinds of film and photography methods used in the magazine over the years. In it they describe the limits of each technology. Much of the film today produces images that can be enlarged to an amazing degree, well past the point where digital images can be sized before pixelization sets in.
The person who posted the article confused the resolution of scanners with that of cameras. The article had the wrong title. It should have been "Digital Camera Quality Passing Scanners?"
The film still has better "resolution" than the scanned images or the digital cameras, it's just that lots of that resolution is being lost in the scanning process.
It is comparable to saying that CDs are of a low quality media because the MP3 your ripped from it is full of noise and pops. You're judging the source based on the merits of a lossy extraction of data from that source.
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Sorry for the offtopic post, but this is important.
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"Of course not being an artist, I think digital kicks A$$."
I paid $375 for my Nikon Coolpix 775 with 3.1 megapixel. I paid $250 for my Cannon Rebel G. Other than being able to upload pictures quickly and documenting things, I really haven't figured out where digital kicks ass.
From am amature perspective, I have a 3megapixel Minolta D-Image5 with a 80 MB card.
I routined fly through 100+ photo's in the time I would still be on the first 24 on a role of normal film. Since the card can be rewritten for free, I am not concerned about the costs involved with wasting "bits", as opposed to wasting frames of film, which are of a limited quantity.
Out of a given space of time, I will catch many things on digital I would not have caught on an normal SLR, since film in unlimited and essentially free.
For printing, my Epson 785EXP can print out good enough 8x10 images to be hung. 5x7's come out just as good, if not better than 35mm film from a lower end camera with wallmart printing. It even costs less, since I only print the good ones.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
If film was dead, They would stop making new SLR's.
Digitial is a different tool. Film is most certainly not dead, nor is it ever going to die.
I, for one, am just getting into photography and have no plans on going digital. I want to cut my teeth with film and with darkroom technique. I want to be just as comfortable in the darkroom as I feel in Photoshop.
Tools is tools.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Why not?! Digital beats analog on the "artistic manipulation" front by miles and miles, specifically because of Photoshop. What other kind of "artistic manipulation" would you allow, other than software? We are talking about a digital medium here.
Yes, it's true you can do many analog darkroom tricks with chemicals and cardboard circles. But Photoshop does all of those, and many many more, more quickly, more easily, more repeatably and flexibly and cheaply and undo-ably . . . There are some legitimate reasons to argue analog over digital, but image manipulation is not one of them.
But I played one in the highschool darkroom. :-)
We're all talking 35 mm film here, comparing it with specialized, super-expensive cameras.
Wouldn't someone that worried about resolution be using large format film like 8"x10"?
I doubt digital is within overtaking that. I would venture a guess of another 50 years before it can do that.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Try and get shallow depth of field in a digital camera that costs less than $2,000. You can't. And if the image quality from a $2,000 Canon digital SLR is the same as a $200 Canon film SLR, I think I'll stick with the $200 camera, thanks.
Digital WILL NOT be better until image quality, features and price ARE ALL better than their film equivalents.
One thing that I usually think is usually overlooked with digital cameras is the fact that when you pick up a 5,6 even 10 megapixel digial body, that's the max resolution that THAT BODY WILL EVER DO. If you need higher quality, you'll need to buy another camera body. Ouch :)
:)
Film SLR cameras are interesting in that the resolution of your photos is determined by the film you put in (which is usually toted as a bad thing(tm) with respect to film photography). So I think that film photography is a bit more flexible in this respect... just my 2cents.
Chris
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
The question of where all these bits will be in a century or so has not really been answered. Even though many filmstocks (as well as print and art paper) are not designed to last "forever", you can choose to put your important stuff on better stock.
Digital data has a lot of advantages, but I wonder how well today's images/words/sounds will be preserved for future generations.
Note that I'm not saying this data will disappear in 50 years or longer, but that the deliberate and accidental archiving of "analog" data is reasonably well-known. I don't think anyone really knows the full long-term effects of aging on digital archival media. Well, IBM did a big study of magtape in the 70's and determined that it would last far less than they initially expected.
I'm primarily talking about the "accidental" archiving of media. A family photograph is not necessarily considered important historical documentation but, decades later, that is exactly what some family snaps are. The same goes for early film and print. Archaeologists have seen cases where examples of a culture's art and technology are much harder to come by than another culture simply because the media they used (e.g., unfired clay, papyrus &etc.) didn't stand the "test of time". This may not exactly be the same, but it is part of the same problem. The accidental storage of digital pictures and journals are the future's historical documents. How well will these media fare?
None of the media we currently use (magnetic or optical) is perfect, and the various subtrates used to create them are known to degrade with age. The trick might be how well we can recover data off of such media. Extracting the data of a flaky CD is a lot different than the well-known ways to get information off of an LP or 1/4 inch tape.
Of course, I haven't even mentioned the fact that many digital formats exists only to make the distribution of the data convenient. All those lossy MP3's, MPEGs and JPEGs out there imply that we may be losing data right now. Then again, no media is perfect. Analog media are lossy as hell, but we've had a lot of time to improve upon them, and we are so used to the distortion by now that it isn't as obvious (to me, anyway). Some media problems have even turned into artistic technique, such as over- or under-exposing film. Maybe I'm an old-timer, but I can't see compression artefacts in JPEGs being a useful artistic technique! Same with AM distortion in MP3's (shudder).
On a positive note, there is a lot of room for clever engineers in the future to figure this stuff out.
-- clvrmnky
If you don't look at it in terms of numbers, for most practical purposes, in terms of image quality, digital has become comparable to 35mm with the advent of high quality 5 Mpixel cameras. There are still some areas where 35mm is better, but there are already many areas where even a 5 Mpixel camera exceeds a 35 mm film camera in terms of image quality.
Apart from issues of image quality, the immediate feedback of digital, the lighter and faster lenses, greater DOF, and better performance at low light levels mean that you can get many shots with digital that were very hard to get with film.
The biggest advantage that film does have - it will continue to enjoy for some time to come - is dynamic range.
I don't buy that: how many stops of dynamic range does slide film have? Not to mention that with digital you can do really interesting things like taking multiple exposures of the same scene and combining them for some really impossible-to-repro-with-film results.
this out for example (check these 5 composite images)
let alone that in an Ansel Adams or Weston print.
you're talking apples & oranges here: those prints have been hand-developed, dodged, burned and so on, you can do the same (increasing apparent film dynamic range) in photoshop and print the results if you so choose.
A master with the film camera, will probably produce masterful digital pics very quickly, if you look at the pictures of the week on photo.net, you'll probably see some stunning digital shots, which would have been just as stunning in shots on film, and sometimes even more so due to the possibilities inherent in a digital imaging workflow.
-- the cake is a lie
I'm shocked - shocked - that I'd actually say this to a response on /., but I couldn't agree more with you on that. I know, as a practical matter, that once you have enough pixels, you can't distinguish between a digital image and an analog one. And sometimes I can't even tell the difference between some 1-hour prints and some prints from my graphic-designer GF's inkjet. But I agree that film "feels" different.
OTOH, that's what vinyl-lovers said about CDs too, and damned if they aren't a niche market now. I give film a good 30 years still, but I have seen the future, and it's all 1s and 0s... Sometimes, I regret that, myself.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
The replies to this article are astonishing! I seriously can't believe the heresay and outright wrong information can come from a bunch of supposidly smart people. Man, if you don't know your facts, please don't make yourself look stupid.
1. The discussion about how many "pixels" in a 35mm frame are meaningless without context. Do you mean for similar noise levels, the same resolution?
2. Digital images are absolutely archival with proper data management. You wouldn't stick slides in a dusty moldy basement, and you shouldn't leave your images in a 50 year old format on 40 year old CD-Rs. Some film and paper photographic processes are very archival but the majority are not.
3. The contrast range of digital is generally higher than that of slide or negative film.
4. Consumer digital cameras are not the state of the art and you cannot judge the state of the art with them.
5. You cannnot say what someone else needs in a camera. Pros don't necesarily need 6MP or full frame CCDs.
6. If you write, IANAP (I am not a photographer) then stop right there. If someone wrote IANAP (I am not a programmer) in a discussion about the best algorithm for adding two binary coded decimals you would stop reading.
7. Digital SLR bodies handle much like film SLR bodies. No delays, similar ruggedness, etc.
My photography studio recently made the switch to Electronic Imaging (the new term for high end digital photography). We use the Kodak DCS760, the little brother to the 14n, and we love it.
Most of the flame responses in here point out the fact that film cameras are remarkably cheap compared to digital, which is of course, understandable considering the newer field of DP.
Both sides have benefits and drawbacks, but I would say for the overall _professional studio photographer_ (NOTE the professional studio photographer), a correctly managed digital imaging system is by far superior to film. Film is great for certain projects, and digital is great for others. One thing most people don't understand is that while film quality may have many benefits over raw digital photography, every one of those benefits can be negated in some fashion by software/hardware for digital printing (by this I mean the extreme CCD sharpness, T-bluring, color quality, etc).
I've read some people saying that digital photography lacks the color quality of film photography? Lies. CONSUMER digital photography might, perhaps. However, you can't make that comparison. Sure, you shot your film yourself, but some expensive high quality lab printer actually printed it for you. We own a Gretag Netprinter 812, a very beautiful printer. This isn't your favorite Canon or Epson inkjet. This is a lab quality printer, designed for hard workloads of high quality digital prints. We spent two months refining our local lab's print quality, making them get closer and better at matching color we wanted. When we finally got our printer up and running, we've been beating our labs (film AND digital) at every turn. There is no such thing as better color than your own, and digital is just as good as film. For those of you that don't know, this printer is a hefty beast, weighing in at our purchase around $70K.
Some of you might argue that you don't have $70 to spend on a digital printer. That's nice. You didn't spend $70K on the local Wolf Camera's lab printer either. And just like them, we can (and do, occasionally) print consumer prints for comparable to film costs.
Not mentioned in the executive summary of the article is that these large files (the 32mb raw files) are simply master files. You create any other file format from these files that you choose. So you don't wanna buy a new hard drive for every image? Fine. Make them 8mb JPG files instead. Make them 4mb if you want. Use the built in cropping software and reduce the quality to make them 1mb if you so please.
The sheer flexibility of DP is it's chief benefit. An average film photography session at our studio will go like this...
Client comes in, photographs are taken. We send the negatigves off to the lab for previews a day or so later. A week or so goes by, they come back. We process them for a day or so, and deliver them. They take them home, look at them, come back and order. We send back off to the lab, they send them back a few weeks later. We process and deliver them a week or so more. Figure about 25 days total, at the low end.
For digital photography, you have many many more options. Our current system works like this:
Client comes in, shots are taken. Client goes to the waiting room, and 5 minutes later they're shown a small slide-show of their shots on our wall projector, allowed to view each image individually, and then select their favorites. We print them off a quick set of 4x5 previews, they take them home. They bring them back with their order. We process the order in-house with our lovely Gretag Netprinter, spit out anything up to an 11x14 within 3 days, deliver in 2 weeks, tops.
Not only that, but business clients needing immediate prints can pay extra to have instant-prints delivered, and if they wish it, can pay a smaller extra fee for quick retouching, which they can watch us do in our demonstration lab. People love this feature. We do school sports teams, events(prom,etc), and senior portraits. We offer a Dynamic Senior package, which allows them to select different poses to create custom template pictures and wallets to order from. Extra package features might include color replacement, where we can mix and match colors (hair, skin, clothing) to whatever they may choose. This same ability might be present to a small extent in film photography, but there is NO viable option like Digital for the same effects.
Any photography studio lab person can attest to the fact that retouching an image at the studio(post-lab) end is an absolute beast, and Photoshop is a gift from the camera gods for this matter. The "fun" old fashioned way of doing dyes and markers is just useless now.
Camera delay is another issue lots of people gripe about. It's all dependant on your storage media, guys. The 760 has an internal memory cache which allows us to just fire off frames as we please, up to (I believe, I don't recall offhand) 30 shots before a two second delay is required to process them. Are you using a floppy disk to store images on? It's just as slow as writing to it from a computer, what else would you expect?
I see qurob complaining about shiny spots in the image. Just to let you know, qurob, there's no such thing as "bright shiny objects" in digital photography that don't exist in film, unless YOU mess the lighting up to create them. An overexposed area is just as good or bad in film as digital.
Copying from 'ergo98' I have this:
"Image fidelity is far more than simply "number of pixels": Even amongst the best digital cameras there are some concerns about their colour reproduction. With a roll of Kodak film a cheapo 35mm has damn close to perfect colour and linearity."
It does indeed. Because some poor guy stuck in a very dark room somewhere in a building, or some automatically tuned lab system in your local Wolf Camera is SET THAT WAY. You obviously either don't feel like mentioning ICC profiling to show the counter-arguement, or don't know of it. Just like a lab printer requires for film, there is a system for making color ring true for digital. it's just different, and you as a home consumer are uninitiated in the methods of doing such a thing. Also, again you're comparing apples and oranges. Unless you actually own a fifty thousand dollar lab printer to make your own home prints from film, a PROFESSIONAL LAB is doing it for you. Your Epson Photo printer is NOT a lab printer.
To Frothy Walrus, who's considering film and digital futures. Digital, my friend. Are you a certified professional photographer? Talk to some folks at PMA or some of the other major conventions, they basically recommend digital now if you wanna avoid lab costs. Find yourself a nice, small digital printing lab if you can't afford a printing solution yourself.
To bitrate, who seems to be expecting a horrific flame for an idiotic comment. You're 100% right, my friend. It's all a simple matter of timing of the industry right now. Time passes, prices change.
To avandesande, who can't find a memory card printer. Wolf Camera. Go.
To xyloplax, who needs to see things his way or the highway. The 14n has a 35mm CCD. For the price, you shall wait. Just like any other person.
To all of those who noted the misinformation comparing digital scans to digital cameras, and then made the judgement that film exceeded digital, please note the difference between consumer and professional digital cameras.
Just my, uh, well, 400 sets of 2 cents, combined with experience.
Keiran.
Good general purpose film properly developed will resolve about 100 lp/mm (line-pairs per millimetre). That's about four orders of magnitude larger than atomic dimensions.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.