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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 "
Film is a chemcial reaction with light and a photosensitive chemically treated film. This captures things at the atomic level, and has a VERY high resolution. This is something that will probably never be replaced by digital.
Crime scene investigators are a good example of people who need to have that resolution. If you were on trial would you rather have a hard photo, or a digital photo? I'll take kodak film any day over anything digital.
You haven't shot with a good digital camera. ANd I doubt you've eve used a decent film camera. the delay is about 50ms in the higher end digitals - plus time to focus if you are using auto focus.
I have a high end digial camera (canon d30) and it's as easy to use as the body for my film camera (elan II).
Photos taken with this camera aregood enough to print at 8x10 with very little pixelation, if any.
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.
Being a semi-pro photographer, I've considered moving to digital for a while now. Lately I've been getting really close:
...but I've resisted so far. I shoot a medium-format Yamica and a 35mm Leica M4P, both dazzling in quality. Digital currently cannot match:
* similar image quality, with very expensive digital cameras, to medium format
* zero printing/developing cost
* high capacity for 35mm-quality shots
* flexibility in color response and grain afforded by different kinds of film
* quality of final print (photo printers haven't caught up yet)
* artistic manipulation. Photoshop does not count.
Until it's really worth it to blow $10000 on a top-shelf digital, I'll stick with my film.
... that film still, and will always have its advantages. For one, all charge coupled devices (CCD and CMOS) with the exception of one camera (The Sigma SD9) use a pattern of red, green, and blue sensors, tiled. This causes artifacts in the image which must be fixed in software, causing "blurriness" which must be sharpened in post production.
Besides, being a photographer, I still prefer real film, to digital.
Now, A lot of people would argue that digital is good for a lot of low end consumers. I still won't buy that argument either. A lot of digital cameras still suffer from rather severe Chromatic Aberrations, and ccd noise.
And finally, yeah, digital might be getting up to film quality. So what?
The Nikon D100, a "prosumer" digital SLR camera is over $2000, and that's just for a body, no lens. I can get a Nikon F100, the professional Nikon film camera, for half that.
I can also get a Nikon N90, for around $500. Thats a SLR film camera on par with the D100.
See why i'm not excited about digital yet?
There are qualities of film which derive from its imperfections and these are not addressed by a strict comparison of the various media based on criteria such as pixel size or color accuracy.
To me, there are also some abstract issues, such as the fact that people take a LOT more pictures today, with digital cameras, than they ever would have done with film. I remember when 3:20 of super-8 film would cost about $4.00, $8.00 to process, and projector bulbs were not cheap.
Also consider the environmental impact of film photography. I cannot stand to even go into the town of Longview Texas, where the Eastman Kodak factory spews the waste products of film manufacturing. It literally makes me ill to breath the "air" for MILES around the plant. They claim their emissions are safe (but nobody should ever have to breathe air that smells this horrible). According to my sources, that town has the highest proportion of ancephalic babies in the country, and it is very common for kids to be ADHD. I can't make a credible correlation, but I can say with certainty that it is not a place where I would ever choose to set foot again.
So, if the digital revolution reduces the environmental impact from film manufacturing, I'm all for it.
There is a question of permanence also. We take digital photographs with no regard to the fact that the formats might be locking us out of access to our own work, or that the storage used is rather ephemeral.
Is there a digital alternative to the sort of photography that would be considered museum quality? How about X-Ray film? Infrared?
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"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."
Painting is dead. As a semi-pro photograper, and someone who has been doing it for a long time, I can say; painting is dead.
Hmm. Does that sound short sighted and assinine?
What a load of crap. First, lets get one thing straight. You can be no more "semi-pro" than you can be "kind of pregnant". You either are or aren't.
For mass produced, K-Mart style, get 'em in and out type photography, digital as a medium kills film. There is however, the right tool for a particular job. If you wan't to project HIGH quality images or make archival prints, digital looses (don't give me crap about the new epson inks, they haven't been proven and still can't hold a candle to platinum prints).
I guess I should throw out all my vinyl too, huh?
Pyramid
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
My dad was an avid photographer and has a closet full of shoeboxes of 35mm color & b&w slides documenting the family going back to the 1940's and beyond. Most are in excellent condition (except for some ektachrome(sp?) organic dye slides with some mold slowly growing on them). To view them you just hold up to a light or use a fairly simple projector.
Q: If someone takes as many pictures in digital format will they be as easily viewable 50 years from now? Will those inkjet printouts have all faded away, the CD's become unreadable, or no readers available unless you transfer to the latest and greatest digital storage format every 5 years? Will your grandchildren have to hire a data recovery specialist to see their parents 1st birthday party or what Aunt Jane looked like?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
More importantly, how are these pictures going to be stored long term? We have photos and negatives lasting over a hundred years. I'm lucky to have a hard drive last longer than three. The possibility of the great photographs of our day being erased with an accidental click of a button or the failure of a hard drive read head worries me.
If there's one thing that the old 35mm cameras have over the newer digital ones is that we pretty much know how long the images will last over the course of time. How long will it be before we lose our digital pictures because of an unreadable format or digital failure?
flexibility in color response
To get increased dynamic range in digital, you can do the following:
Will I retire or break 10K?
indeed the quality of 35-mm dSLR at high end, like canon 11 mp and kodak 14 mp is better than almost all 35-mm film quality. now these cameras are getting limited by lens quality. though it will still take time to kill regular SLRs, high-end SLRs are likely to be the first casualty. there are many things to be worked out, among them: standardization, print color matching, display matching (images looks very different when viewed on different monitors), cheap prints, print ordering convenience and most important of all, the price.
also, it seems the 35-mm dSLR may not be the future for replacing regular low to medium end 35-mm SLRs. the main obstacle is sensor size. it is extremely costly to make a large chip (24x36mm). and if you reduce the sensor size, then it is costly to make wide angle lens (35 mm lens on film camera would become 70 mm if the sensor size is 12x18). so the future looks like smaller sensor, smaller lens. olympus and kodak recently introduced a new format called 4/3. this standard if adopted widely could become equivalent of 35-mm film standard in future. this uses smaller sensor (i guess, the diagonal size would be 4/3 inches), so the lenses would be small and dedicated lenses would have matching focal lengths.
Price wise and quality wise, full frame 35-mm dSLRs are likely to be in the range of current medium format cameras and hence the medium format market seems under direct attack too. Goodby hasselblad, welcome kodak!
As an astronomer and an amateur photographer, I agree with everything you said, but disagree with your lead-in.
Astronomy used to be done with plates: glass plates with custom emulsions, which would be developed in labs and illuminated for research work. Nowadays, it is all, without exception, done with CCDs. No professional optical telescope uses anything besides CCDs, and it's not just because of advantages in post-processing. CCDs have higher sensitivity, higher dynamic range, and higher fidelity than plates ever did. And yes, they are robust and easy to import into workstations too.
Of course, with CCDs, it helps a great deal if price is (almost) no object, upto a few tens of Gs. For amateur (prosumer) cameras, cost is abig deal, but this is one case where I'd bet on rapid development. The 11MP cameras show that we're getting close: when we get, say, 15 MP cameras for under $1000 (at the level of the Canon A-2 or whatever it is these days), I'll bid a fond farewell to film.
But until then, I agree with you - I'm not excited by digital cameras yet.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Rather the going based on visual appearance, here's a discussion on Google Groups that attempts a more scientific approach to the Digital vs. Film question. Using mathematical calculations and physical light propegation properties of lenses, film and a high quality drum scanner, this discussion arrives at the conclusion that film will only hold it's own up to 5.22MP. All else being equal, go digital if it's over that value. Speaking as someone who has recently purchased a 6.3MP Canon EOS D60, I can tell you its picture quality is exceptional!
Pardon me, but the battle won't be "lost" until the local supermarket starts selling disposable 3M-pixel digital cameras.
Photographic film is by its nature disposable -- you can only shoot a roll up once. The whole point of digital film is that you can reuse it endlessly. Even if the technology were that cheap, you wouldn't buy disposable digital cameras because it defeats the point.
Your point about cost is valid, though. The whole reason we still use pads of paper and pens is because tablet PCs aren't economically viable as an alternative -- yet. On the other hand, you hardly ever see people buying or selling typewriters anymore because the advantages of a word processor and printer, even ones that aren't PC-based, far outweigh the added cost of typing digitally.
Polaroid has (or had) a digital camera that bypasses the PC by including a digital photo printer attached to the camera itself, mimicking their longtime instant film while adding the advantages of digital film. Other digital camera makers like Canon have developed small portable printers that can connect to the camera directly for printing 3x5 or 4x6 shots without a PC. Alternatively, commercial digital film developing (and CD-R backups) will become more and more common for people who either want long-lasting film and ink for their photos or don't want to spend the money on their own photo printers.
As these devices come down in price, they'll displace reusable consumer film cameras more and more. Small, cheap digital cameras are $50 and lower today. Most consumers are more interested in quick and dirty snapshots of their friends and family than in high resolutions. Disposable film cameras can't catch enough quality to justify 8x10 blowups of your photos anyhow.
Bottom line: disposable 3M digital cameras aren't necessary to displace film. All that's needed is widespread sales of a 2M, 20-shot digital flash camera for less than $50 and the ability to plug it into a USB cable at Walgreens and get them printed, burned to CD and flushed from the camera's memory for $9.99. If Joe Consumer had access to that, the only thing holding him to film cameras would be the ones he already owns.
Spatial resolution is catching up and will surpass film, but one spec that still miles behind is dynamic range, i.e. the magnitude ratio between brightest and darkest resolving light levels. Film still kicks digital on this, with digital using either using only a few decades or using autoranging. Film still has a large non-auto-ranged dynamic range. Being in the IC business I don't see this changing any time soon.
A normal 35mm slide film has around 100 lines per mm.
The size is 24mmx35mm.
That's ~34 million pixel.
Now how can 11M be more than 34M.
The funny thing ?
That's not even important.
Contrastrange with slide film is above 1:1000.
Very good digicam manage around 1:150.
Natures range is around 1:1000000.
So guess what a digicam can do in high contrast situations.
Once a >30MPixel cam is cheaper than my RebelG SLR (~$300) and I can put on high quality lenses.
I might consider it.
Digital?
For ebay pics: Yes.
Anywhere else: No.
On the other side of the screen it all looked so easy.
The rise of Digital photography will only push film photographers in to the catagory of artist. Photography comes from Greek meaning "light writing". I take pictures with a Holga, Ansco Shure-Shot, Kiev 60 and a Canon AE-1 because I like the way the pictures look. The first two produce images that are far from technically perfect but are still beautiful. It's sort of a contrived imperfection. The Kiev take great medium format pictures for its price, and the AE-1 handles things like family gatherings and friend's weddings. I have one old digital camera which is ok, but I'm not really drawn to the medium. I like working with "antiquated" camera's just like I enjoy playing guitar through tube amp and analog effects even though digital effects are "better". There is something to be said for the warmth of analog imperfection.
Just for grins check out Digital Sucks for interesting Holga photography.
Whenever the "digital vs. film" debate turns up, I can't help but think about the "film vs. video" debate that went on in the 70's and 80's.
Maybe this has been mentioned already, but it seems to me that eventually these things sort themselves out. Film isn't the same as video. Obviously, the contrary is also true. Even though we only thought of the new media in terms of a previous type of media doesn't mean we should necessarily place them in the same category and assign them a rank.
Clearly filmmakers are now able to use film and video to get different effects to convey very different ideas. The news is much different now that we can have a "man in the street" with a video camera to catch the action -- something basically unheard of (at the same scale) in the old film-only days. There are countless other examples, I'm sure.
I have faith that eventually digital "film" will become it's own unique thing. It will become just another colour in the photographer's palette. We haven't even seen what the digital image people can do with digital cameras yet; this stuff is just too young right now.
Just as some photogs will eschew digital for "pure" film, I'm sure there will be many who take digital beyond film, into something else.
-- clvrmnky
I can speak to that. The finest grained color film around is Provia 100F, with it the 1Ds will have pixels smaller than individual grains given that it's producing 30+MB images. With 100MB drum scans of Provia (less than a factor of 2 bigger in 3 of pixels in each dimension), the shapes of the individual film grains are apparent.
I'm a nature photographer.
As a software engineer currently working with vision systems, I understand a bit of this, and as one other poster commented, dynamic range is where film has it "all over" digital.
That's changing, however.... because of non-linear sensors that can greatly enhance the perceptual range of color at 12-16 bits per pixel (by pixel, I mean a single red, green or blue imaging element)
The thing to remember folks, is there are OTHER problems as well; sensor artifacts, for example, are a big barrier to imaging without supersampling techniques (which reduces absolute resolution). We currently see 'edges' on objects as they pass across the imaging quad arrays (RGGB), resulting in false red and blue edges. Not only are the edges a problem, but fin objects can even be lost BETWEEN these pixels.
BTW: Pixels != RGB Quads in imagers. If I'm not talking out of my ass (since my experience is in machine vision), imagers running 1600x1200 pixels, for example, are ACTUALLY 800x600 QUADS. You need 4 pixels (one red, one blue and two greens) to make a valid 32-bit quad (which is a screen pixel, but not an imager pixel, get it?) Camera use interpolation techniques to create the image, effectively grabbing the other three pixels surrounding each sensor pixel. It's a cheap way of anti-aliasing and extrapolating an image larger than the camera is physically capable of. Essentially you are looking at redundant data.
That's a HUGE assumption. Do you have access to something that can read 10 year old 5.25" disks now?
That is a big assumption, but I don't think it is that unreasonable an expectation. About 75-ish years ago someone put video on a phonograph and about 1-ish years ago, someone figured out how to get the video back off.
You can still buy vinyl record players, but if all of them suddenly disappeared from the earth, somebody already figured out how to scan them and reconstruct the audio from that.
There are geeks now who are into high tech ways to work with antique tech, I'm assuming the same will be true 100 years from now. Even if no CD reader exists, somebody will figure out how the data is stored, and come up with a way to lay the CD data side down on a scanner and reconstruct the data from that.
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