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 "

Comments

Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[qurob]

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.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[ergo98]

Film is dead. As a semi-pro photographer, and someone who has been doing it for a VERY long time, I can say: film is dead.

What a foolish extremist assertion. There is no doubt that digitals have some benefits, but they have some downsides as well:

• It is not a myth: Most digital cameras have a very slow reaction time, including fairly higher end cameras.
  
• Most digital cameras spend a hefty amount of time writing each image to memory. My amateur 35MM shoots 4 frames per second if I want, whereas most digitals can at best shoot a frame every 6 seconds or so.
  
• 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.
• Most digitals aren't SLR. This absolutely kills them for anything but play.
• Most digitals have fixed lenses. This absolutely kills them for anything but play.

I'm hoping to find a digital camera that convinces me to dump my film habit, but so far it hasn't happened, at least not until looking in the $2000+ range.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[KelsoLundeen]

First, the D30 is not exactly a high-end camera. It might have been two years ago, but now the D30 is decidedly mid-level. It's a prosumer camera, at best.

But that brings up an interesting point -- one that I continue to struggle with. Digital equipment remains a difficult investment -- especially if you're a working pro. Just because a camera is 4/8/11/14 megapixels doesn't necessarily mean it's better than "film" or better than "last year's camera" if you have to pull two or three times the job to cover the cost of the initial investment.

There's no doubt digital is here to stay. And there's no doubt that many folks have proclaimed digital to be "better" than film, but "better" can mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people. I suspect folks mean "better quality" when they say "better", but I'm not sure what that means either.

I can show you Winogrand photographs taken, oh, in the 1950s that are, in fact, "better quality" than anyone's digital photograph. Anyone's. And Winogrand used a beat-up Leica M4-P without a meter!

I can point to a grainy, dim Salgado print and say, well, that's grainy and dim, but it's "better" than anything I've yet to see reproduced digitally.

Yet I can also point to a hybrid print -- analog film, digital manipulation -- by someone like Gurksy (the guy who makes those massive prints) and say, well, in Gursky's case, the hybrid approach works wonders.

And I can, of course, go to a site like Photosig.com and Photo.net and point to any number -- literally thousands -- of "digital photographs" taken with prosumer gear like the D30 or the new Nikon D100 and say they're absolutely dreadful -- despite the fact they are *crystal clear* pictures of dogs and cats and babies with sticky oatmeal on their face.

So you have a D100 and are able to take crystal clear pictures of baby drool that can be blown up to 16X20?

Great.

The other issue -- much more serious -- is that digital cameras simply won't leave behind the sort of "archeological" records that film cameras leave behind.

This is an unpopular argument, however. Folks always say, well, you can burn whatever you want on whatever medium you want -- CDROM, DVD, you name it.

But as someone who has spent many, many hours in dimly lit photoarchives, I can say without hesitation that if someone like Garry Winogrand shot digitally, there would *be no* Garry Winogrand. Ditto for someone like Cartier-Bresson. They might have one or two great pictures but there would be no beagtives -- only old, outdated media -- most of which (possibly) cannot be salvaged.

Winogrand, for example, had stacks and stacks of prints and negatives in his little NYC apartment. You'd come in for a visit, and he'd toss you a stack of workprints.

His was a "record it all, no matter what" mentality. Now that's both good and bad, but for sifting through an artist's work, I suspect it's bad if you use digital. There's a permanence to a negative which may or may not be the case with CDROMs burned today. There's also a *bulk*. Negatives took up a lot of space. And that fact alone prevented many boxes of negatives from many photographers from being tossed out or misplaced.

Don't underestimate *bulk*. Physical product. In art, it's very important. Maybe not now, not today when the artist is alive and struggling, but when he or she is dead, bulk of what remains -- the presence of his or her remnants -- play a siginicant role in preservation.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[The Madpostal Worker]

One more place where digital is killing film: newspapers.

No longer do you need to develop a roll, look at them on a lighttable, scan a picture in, and then edit it to be used on the page. Now you can just download all the pictures, arechive the ones you want, edit the others, and send it to production. Savings of 30-40 minutes.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[neuroticia]

Newspaper work has very specific requirements. Quality of the print doesn't need to be amazing--no one will be able to tell the difference once it's in the paper anyway. Color doesn't have to be accurate. Time is essential. Etc.

In similar situations, digital will take over (and has taken over) like a firestorm. In other areas like fine art and advertising, the take-over will be a longer process. Film won't die overnight... And I'm hesitant to say it will ever die. There's something about being in a darkroom that makes even the most digital fanatics long for it. It's an artistic magic that doesn't have a digital equivilent. (Unless you start getting into things like 3D.)

-Sara

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[scotch]

Why don't you use that dictionary of yours to look up "semipro" or "semiprofessional",too? MW online shows that term being at least as old as 1900. Like it or not, it's a valid term used in the modern world, your clever but inaccurate "pregnancy" analogy notwithstanding.

Maybe you should step out of your "tiny sphere in which you reside"?

Personally, I don't think film is "dead" either, but what the hell does dead mean anyway? People still use latin, but they call it a "dead" language. Dead used in this context usually means "no longer mainstream", which of course it doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing, IMO.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[Wavicle]

The 100 year old photos of your great grandmother are probably black and white photos on fiber based paper. Because that is an archival print process.

If you had color film photos of your kids, 100 years from now those would probably be gone too because color negative film is not archival quality. The only archival color film process that I'm aware of is Kodak's K-14 "Kodachrome" process. It will keep for 100 years in dark storage, but it is a slide film ("color reversal"). The good aspect to this is that in 100 years, provided humans still have eyes, the technology to view this will still exist.

Black and white negatives *are* archival. Black and white prints today generally are not. Resin coated B&W photo papers will not last that long.

Now in defense of digital...

Dye stabilized CD-R's *are* archival. Most CD-R's are not dye stabilized, you have to pay a little extra for those (the non-dye stabilized have an expected shelf life of about 5 years). So assuming something that can read a CD exists in 100 years, digital photos stored in this medium will be available then.

NASA's problem is that they have photos stored on magnetic tape, a process that was known to be non-archival when they implemented it. It can take an hour or more to get all the data off one tape. In comparison a 700MB 80Min CD-R can be read in under 5 minutes.

So, if you want color pictures of your kids to last 100 years, you can:

a) have them transferred to Kodachrome slides (a cost of about $0.50/picture)
b) put them on dye stabilized CD-R (a cost of about $0.01/picture)

Makes digital look like a very attractive option for archival purposes.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[bashibazouk]

Ahh, but take those "great" photos you mention. Would you say the same thing if that artist had made the same image with a digital camera? Your argument seems to go along the lines of: group A did killer photography with film. Group B did crappy photos digitally. Therefore film is better. But it sounds like the composition of the film photographers was better not the technology. Sure you can hold up great photographers to support your case but you forget billions of mediocre shots taken over the same period by lesser photographers as well as JQ public. Give digital time and the cream will rise to the top.

As to the long term storage...lots of early films (as in cinema) are rotting in their light-prof cans. Add a little too much humidity, and negatives will stick together permanently. But a digital file can be copied infinitely. And can be easily copied to the next best data storage format. If you are at all careful, the digital file can be permanent. Something film has never done.

The other part of this argument is that 35mm is not the only format of film. Digital may be ready to take over 35mm but 4x5, 8x10 or 11x14 negatives? I don't think so. Not for awhile yet.

Re:Consumer Cameras are REAL far off

[WNight]

Yeah, painting is dead. Point to the thriving community of professional portrait painter.

Blacksmithy is dead. Fact. There are some blacksmiths, but the industry is dead.

Film is dead. Some diehards will use it, but for all practical purposes 35mm and smaller is dead. MF has been mortally wounded. Large Format's relatives are taking out large life-insurance policies.

Face it, digital provides better pictures than color 35mm film hands down. B&W film has a higher dynamic range, but only barely, and digital can bracket the shot and comine the two pictures for a much higher range.

Semi-pro is generally known as someone who makes money off of it, but doesn't try to make a living from it. If "Pro" is such a hard line, what's the defintion? Anyone who pays all their bills? Anyone who has ever taken money for a picture? Or anyone who shoots as if they were getting paid, regardless of ability to pay the bills? How about someone who makes money with a disposable camera?

And yes, you should throw your vinyl out. Or rather, sell it on EBay, some gullible fool there has been conned into calling static noise "Warmth" and will snap it up. You can either buy the music in digital form or record it yourself before you get rid of it, though a record sounds so lousy you might as well download a 128mbps MP3 for all the fidelity you'll get.

Film VS CCD/CMOS ...

[bani]

... is like vinyl vs CD

Well...it's a step

[Kaz Riprock]

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.

This battle ain't over yet

[HawkinsD]

"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.

bye bye film..

[RealBeanDip]

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.

Wrong, wrong, wrong

[doublem]

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.

Issue is deeper than quality alone

[peterdaly]

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

Re:Pros and Cons of digital

[micromoog]

* artistic manipulation. Photoshop does not count.

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.

I'm not a photographer

[shepd]

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.

The camera body is an issue...

[cmat]

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

you can't compare digital and film image quality

[g4dget]

The two media have completely different characteristics and applying 35mm performance characterizations to digital doesn't make much sense. For example, people love to point at the high resolution of 35mm film, but that's only for contrasty images. Digital cameras give you 12bpp or 14bpp even at the highest resolution. If you asked: what is the highest resolution at which 35mm film gives you the equivalent of 12bpp, film resolution would be very poor.

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.

Re:FILM HANDS DOWN

[MarcoAtWork]

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.

I can't believe the hype!

[SheldonYoung]

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.

Re:FILM HANDS DOWN

[phliar]

Film is a chemcial reaction with light and a photosensitive chemically treated film. This captures things at the atomic level ...

Sorry. Have you heard of grain? Clumps of metallic silver form; and due to the thickness of the emulsion, many clumps roughly line up to form the shadow called grain.

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.