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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 "
I simply can't afford to take good pictures, no matter the format. No, sir, I'll stick with my Brownie.
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.
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?
11 megapixel may be nice, but it sure is a pain to have to buy a new hard drive for each photo album...
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?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Actually, that's not true. Film has a "grain" structure, caused by lumps of silver-halide. The grain is the limiting factor in film resolution.
Film certainly does not provide resolution at the "atomic" level.
The resolution of high-end consumer digital cameras now matches or exceeds that of typical consumer 35mm film.
The biggest advantage that film does have - it will continue to enjoy for some time to come - is dynamic range. You can't even come close with digital. No digital camera - even the most costly professional models - came come anywhere close to the dynamic range of consumer 35mm film and print material - let alone that in an Ansel Adams or Weston print. (And that was the film technology 50 years ago!)
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.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital .1.html
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
Here's the link: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2002/09/fore nsics/
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Check out Roger Clark's analysis for the details.
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); }
Conventional photo film has a wider contrast range than any digital technology currently available. Photographers divide this range into 10 levels from total black to total white in measurable steps. Known as the Zone System of photography it is the entire basis Ansel Adams' entire body of work. Digital cameras using either CCD or CMOS chips simply do not have that kind of range. At best the high end cameras might have 7 or 8 zones, resulting in muddy shadows and blown out hightlights. In addition they are slow compared to film, requiring more light to make an exposure. Even though manufacturers might claim that the cameras have an effective ASA/ISO rating of 100 or 400, when compared to film, the digital cameras require a slower shutter speed or wider apeture to make an acceptable exposure. Just like MHz ratings in computers, Mega-Pixel ratings are just a part of the whole when measuring performance.
The article compares the digital camera's output to a digital scanner's scan of 35mm film. But I imagine that the paper output of the digital camera's image is still not as good as an actual 35mm print, even with a top-of-the-line photo printer.
It's good to know that digital cameras surpass digital photo scanners. I don't know that it's true that they're surpassing 35mm film.
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?
Perhaps for consumer 35mm yes, the stuff you buy at Walmart, digital is surpassing film. Then again, most consumers like that won't spend $9000 for a camera. But no way digital is better than all film, certainly, not for slide films, and DEFINITELY not the medium or large format films used in most professional photography (eg, wedding studio shots, high-end photojournalism like National Geographic, etc.)
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
As much as digital affacianados would like to say that digital has passed traditional chemical methods of photography, it hasn't happened -- yet. Of course, there are those that will tell tell you that a synthesizer sounds identical to a real instrument.
All that cargo-cult science is all well and good, but I will tell you this as a photographer. Recently, we went to Yosemite National Park, and took photographs with a year old "pro-sumer" camera, a Nikon E-995. Aside it, on another tripod, was my trusty Nikon N90, which is the rough "pro-sumer" equivilant of the E-995. Pictures were made at the same time, with the same relatiove composition in the same light. And the prints from the film that came out of the darkroom had higher acutance and a world more contrast than did the digital, in every single case. Not even Photoshop could make up the difference.
Film indeed has grain structure, and the higher the "speed" of the film, the larger the grains, which gives them more surface area for photons to react faster. Hence, in film, faster film is "grainier" than slower. As for reactions taking place on an atomic level, actually it is at a molecular level.
I am at work at the moment, but once upon a time, I did the math and compared a typical ISO 100 film, T-MAX for example, and counted each "grain" (lump of silver halide) as a pixel. Roughly, according to Kodak's data, a properly exposed and developed T-MAX 100 film would have about 14 mega-grains, or megapixels.
But then there was a major, major rub in the favor of film: there was a huge variance, about a magnitude, in the size of the grains, which seemed to be roughly evenly distributed. This gave the film at least a magnitude of contrast advantage over digital pixels, as the pixels are all the same size.
Most studies I've seen place 35mm film resolution at an effective 20-40 megapixels. This makes a $5000 digital camera somewhat less performant than a $500 film camera.
For $5000 I can get a good medium format camera which puts me in the 100 megapixel range.
flexibility in color response
To get increased dynamic range in digital, you can do the following:
Will I retire or break 10K?
What they said.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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!
I have a 3 mega-pixel digital camera, and I love it. But I have a gripe with this story.
For some reason, no one ever mentions dynamic range in ccd/film comparisons, but this is a place where I believe film soundly tromps the ccd.
If you look at digital photos shot in a very high-contrast environment (such as almost anywhere on a bright sunny day), you will notice that either the bright areas are totally white, or the dark areas are totally black. There is no way to expose the shot so that you get detail in both.
Slide film, in particular, is excellent when it comes to capturing detail in the shadows, even in very high contrast scenes. The human eye has much greater dynamic range than the CCD, so this isn't totally without merit.
I guess that this dynamic range would be roughly analagous to getting 14-bits per pixel, per color from a digital camera, instead of the usual 8.
Granted, it is very hard to preserve all this detail on display. About the only way is to project the image onto a screen. Still, as far as I can tell, digital isn't even close to film in dynamic range, and there doesn't seem to be any improvement trend. 24bpp has become the standard.
Just my $0.02
MM
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By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
I hope this is relevant to the current discussion.
Last year, I went to visit my grandmother and she shared with me many of the photographs that my grandfather took of my mom when she was growing up. My grandfather was a prosumer-level photographer, and pretty good at it. I really enjoyed the photographs, and I realized at that moment that I would like to be able to provide photographs like that for my grandchildren some day (I'm in my mid-20s at the moment).
I currently have a point-n-shoot camera, but it's so old and low-end that almost I'm embarrassed to use it. So, I plan on buying a digital camera within the next couple months (so far, so good). Digital cameras interest me as there's no cost to developing the "film", and the photographs can be easily distributed to friends and relative through my blog or even through e-mail.
However, my primary concern is in the longevity of the data. Sure, the bits themselves may last, but would CDRs be readable by computers 50 years from now? I mean, even disks from 20 years ago (such as an 8-inch floppy) may still have good data, but you'd have a hard time getting the data off it today (who has an 8-inch drive anymore?).
So, I see two options: I could either buy an analog camera in addition to the digital camera, or I could get prints made from my digital photographs. (Or, is there maybe a third option that I'm not seeing?)
Through some Google research, it looks like I can get digital prints made for about 30 to 40 cents each. And, that works out to about the same price-per-print as getting regular film developed. One downside to digital prints (from a longevity perspective), is that there's still no physical negative from which other prints could be made.
The other option, as I see it, would be to buy both a digital camera and an analog camera. The advantage, of course, is that I would have the negatives and physical prints from the analog camera (along with the convenience of a digital camera). However, by having two cameras, I'd have to either (1) take both cameras to an occasion or get-together or (2) take only one camera. Taking two seems a bit unwieldy, but taking only one would seem to defeat the purpose of having both (as I would get only digital or only analog photographs that way).
So, any ideas or suggestions? If I were to buy an analog camera (in addition to the digital), the Nikon N90 (or maybe F100, if I can find it used) looks like it would suit me well (that's the level of quality I'm aiming for). On the digital side, the one I've had my eye on is the Nikon Coolpix 5700. My guess is that its quality-level may not (?) match that of the aforementioned SLR, but digital SLRs are just too expensive for me at the moment (about $2000, and that's without a lens).
I'd be interested in hearing how other Slashdotters have coped with digital's "posterity problem". I'd also be interested as to what digicams may be equivalent to something like Nikon's N90 or F100 (I'm not as concerned with the megapixel or resolution comparison between digital and analog, but straight photographic accuracy and quality of the two).
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Comment removed based on user account deletion
say what? it's already happened, it happened YEARS ago.
it's called DPOF.
I guess color is going the way of black and white film in manual cameras! To the dumpster!
Oh wait...
In a few years, film will be choosen for its properties and qualities--not as default. This is a good thing though.
Still, not all the reviews I've read say color accuracy is quite up to snuff yet. Also, you can't throw a new type of sensor into a camera for a special effect. You can do that with film.
Even more interesting though. When will digital allow camera manufactures to start designing "out of the box" for camera's that are easier to hold etc.
Step one replace film
Step two become primary in the industry's thoughts about the design of a camera.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Also, 32MB is nothing like the size of a "typical" film scan. I have a 4000 dpi film scanner, and my typical scan sizes for 35mm film are around 120MB, using 48 bit color depth.
Sure, digital will catch up to film but it's not even half there yet.
I think the first digital that's as good as 35mm film will probably show up in about oh... 18-24 months. (Moore's law...)
Yes, this camera may have passed 35mm film in quality.
But at this price range, you're already well into the price of medium-format film.
MF film can carry MUCH more data per frame than 35mm. While the resolution is the same, the area is far greater.
Heck, for that price, you can even get a basic used LF setup.
It's going to be a long time before this camera comes down enough in price to be the equivalent of a 35mm SLR with the same quality.
That said - I shoot entirely using digital cameras now. But I have much lower requirements than pro photographers. I'd be best described as "advanced consumer".
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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!
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
> 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.
I'm not sure what the Sigma uses. But Foveon has developed
a three layer CCD. The products using this CCD are
hardly affordable at the moment. But Canon is rumored
to also work on this. I'd say that those CCDs will be
standard in a few years.
lens system (corner falloff, radial distortion correction)
ISO rating (fortunately most digital cameras do 400 these days)
Color quality & noise (related to the demosaic-ing process)
The megapixel argument is very similar to the CPU clock one (A PIV 1.5 GHz is just 15%-20% faster than a PIII running at 1GHz - on spec 2000, but people still buy clockspeed.)
The Raven
The Raven
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.
That said, the only time I use film any more is in extreme low light situations and even then I usually don't bother if I can get the equivalent with a long-exposure on my G2.
My Canon G2 Tests
-Matt
Yes, analog has high resolution, but it's limited by the quality of the camera. If you have a disposable camera with crummy plastic lenses and 200-speed generic film, you'll never get the high-quality detail you would from a $500 SLR camera with professional 1000-speed film.
Yes, there are and will always be some people who need that kind of detail, but they're spending the money for the cameras and film to get it. Consumers are the real question here, since Kodak makes far more money off of family snapshots than they ever will from professional photographers.
Make the switch, it's amazing what you can accomplish with digital - as long as you can think as both a photographer AND a geek.
In this sense Photoshop most certainly does count, and eliminates the "Flexibility in color response and grain" per film. You can adjust the grain to your liking, and get a full range of artistic manipulation with a much greater freedom than traditional paper. I've yet to find an effect or filter I can't reproduce in PhotoShop. It even compensates for some lenses, though I'd still keep those handy (as well as a good polarizer - it's much simpler than photoshopping it).
As for quality of the final print, why go photo printer? I've got one (fairly good quality, 2880x1440 dpi 6 chrome) for proof production, but the cost is beat by going to a good development place with a digital processor. Note: MANY DEVELOPERS NOW USE DIGITAL FOR STANDARD PROCESSING AS WELL. It's just easier, and the results are more consistent.
As for $10000 for a top-shelf camera, pick up a 5-6MP for under $2K unless you have do larger than 20x30 frequently, then wait 6 months and get a 10MP for the same price. Photoshop makes smooth interpolations across the board, really, so that may even be unnecessary.
Any spoon would be too big.
Several years ago, I remember reading an article about news sources and digital prints. The concern was not about digital vs. film (I imagine digital is easier for them to work with for easy transmission and printing), but about Photoshopping news pictures.
The article mentioned that new services were already Photoshopping out things like clouds and other things that might distract from the actual news in the picture. However, there is oviously a fine line to be drawn - where does modifying the image begin to distort what the picture is? How should news services let the public know that the picture has been modified?
As we move from film to digital prints, this is a ethical question that needs to be addressed.
Sure, it is more than possible with film prints, but the ease with digital prints means that it will be happening more and more often.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
When I was in college, work in the Photo Lab, I knew a guy who could tell if a batch of photo chemicals was going bad by the taste (or so he claimed). With digital, you'd loose that wonderful, dangerous skill. What are you going to do, lick the Flash Card?
(DC, if you read this, get in touch man! It's been too many years...)
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
For those still holding on to analog film, check these links out with samples taken with the Canon 1Ds.
This link are Canon's official images.
And this link is of an independent reviewer's images in the field.
The amazing thing is that this is a first-generation true-high-end digital product behaving as a latest-generation super-high-end analog product. Expect the image quality to go even higher in the coming months/years.
You need more three-color samples *and* you need more bits per color. 8 bit just don't cut it.
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.
My son just got married a few months ago. We had about 200 guests between ours and the bride's family. For the reception, I put a Kodak MAX one-time-use flash camera on every table, about 25 of the damn things for under $200. Got the film processed, and put everything into a scrapbook of memories for the newlyweds.
When I can do that with digital for less money, then maybe I'll agree film is dead. Until then, I got three more kids to marry off....
Now, I am tempted not to take this at face value, because there are good reasons why CCDs should essentially never have the dynamic range possible with film. (Essentially: film responds to light non-linearly, such that x photons hitting your camera does not equal the same amount of "brightness" on your image independent of how many previous photons have been registered. CCDs basiclaly are linear in response -- x photons equals x number of counts, modulo factors of gain, etc. -- up to the point where the number of photons registered is a significant fraction (like say 1/2) of the maximum well depth. Note that film is in this way more like your eye: an object that is twice as luminous does not look twice as bright to your eye, and you can simulaneously see things with your eyes that are many orders of magnitude apart in true brightness. To go even more off-topic in this comment: this is basically the reason why the most common stellar magnitude scale is defined logarithmically, where a difference of one magnitude corresponds to a factor of about 2.5 in brightness; it's an historical relic of the fact that when Hipparchos looked out at the stars, he called the brightest ones "1st magnitude" and some of the faintest ones "6th magnitude" ... and the latter turn out to be about 100 times dimmer than the former. Whew.)
Having said that, though, I don't actually have one of these things, and he doesn't really post any objective backup for his statements about dynamic range, so it's hard to prove or disprove them. He probably does know a hell of a lot more about photography than I do, so I'm sort of tempted to believe that they dynamic range issue is ceasing to be a problem, even if only by careful post-processing and choice of exposure. fwiw.
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.
If you're using film, you can't tell whether or not the shot you just took, and may never be able to get again once you leave, until it's too late.
/do/ get the shot -- which, unless you're either a photographic deity, or shooting set-pieces, or extremely relaxed about quality, won't be 100% of the time.
A large part of the benefit of digital is the ability to know, right then and there, whether or not you screwed up. That way, you can change settings or your position or what-not and make sure that you
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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
Yep, digital cant possibly match the distortions from vinyl warping, and will never match the wow & flutter from vinyl playback.
Then you get the nice harmonic (and other) distortions created by the analogue pickup and amplification processes required to convert the feeble movement of the stylus into signals.
Not to mention that everytime you play a vinyl disc you score it with the needle wearing down the vinyl so every playback is subtly different from the last one.
for inaccurate reproduction and distortions, you can't beat vinyl.
Any sort of archiving is expensive. I don't doubt film is expensive. And certainly the preservation of motion pictures is *obscenely* expensive.
It's tricky, though. Archival arguments can go either way. When the twin towers fell in NYC, thousands of negatives of JFK were destroyed. I suppose digital might have helped out here if people make copies of their analog media and store them in alternate locations. One location's destruction wouldn't mean total destruction.
But I fear not all photographers think this through. Or, if they do, they think it through when it's too late -- after their hard drive has crashed and they lost the 216 wedding photographs they took for a gig they'd just come from. (It happened to a pal of mine recently. He's sending the HD off to a data retrieval place to see if there's anything left on the HD that can be salvaged.)
Now, yes, you can attribute this to stupidity or ignorance, but that's the main problem I hear about digital photography -- a little stupidity can cause a *lot* pain.
The same thing can happen in a darkroom, of course. More than once I've mistakenly poured fixer instead of developer. It's rare, but it *has* happened.
Most pros I work with have found a comfortable hybrid workflow. Folks with rush jobs shoot all digital, but for jobs that they care about -- and jobs that don't need to be finished yesterday -- they still shoot some film, just to have a back-up.
It's a weird time for photography. I've sold all my Nikon SLR gear, but I absolutely *love* my Leica M6 and will never, ever part with it. Apart from a fine picture taking machine, it's a fine machine, period. For anyone who's ever held a Leica or had a chance to use one, you'll know what I mean.
It's built like a rock and feels good in my hands. It has a weird "talismanic" property, too. I carry it -- and shoot with it -- because it feels right. It feels like this is what I'm supposed to shoot. Yet, I shoot digital, too.
I suspect my own middle-ground is much like the middle-ground I found with digital ebooks. I understand ebooks and will occasionally sit down on a train or a bus and read one on my Palm. It gets the job done but it's nothing like reading a book. Much like the Leica, I realize that if you're a reader -- and if you are really a *reader* -- you'll appreciate this. There is a weird talismanic quality to a book. It feels right in your hands, and if you're reading for pleasure, there's nothing else like it.
Yet I know ebooks have their uses. I understand that, and I appreciate it. I just don't care for them, although I'll read them if I need a text and if the only text available is an ebook.
Sorta like me reconcilation with digital photography, I guess.
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.
Nope. There are several crime scence photographers that use digital. Its all explained in this article.0 02/09/fore nsics
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/articles/2
I first bought a Kodak DC50 to see if I liked digital photos and digital photography. I was hooked. I then bought a DC265 (as did my father-in-law 6 months later). Together we have taken over 12000 photos and printed hundreds to send out as well as burn CDs for friends and family. I am looking to move up to a higher resolution camera and a better printer. My 35mm camera sits in the closet....
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Film cameras use expensive film and expensive processing. My CD1000 uses mini CDs at $0.005 a shot and I don't have to archive them. They already are. I can copy the data to a regular sized CD for backup and I can print or not print as I like. And I don't have to carry a laptop around with me. The one advantage of film is it gives you high definition with a small storage format (the roll of negatives). That's where digital still hasn't quite caught up. The bigger the file, the more portable data storage you need.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
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.
This, of course, begs the question, what is actually the resolution of a 35mm film?
From what I've read, a top-quality 35mm image, tripod, top-rate lens and finest-grained film under good light conditions has some 20million pixels. Twelve million is a more typical amount. And 4MPixels for a point and shoot cameras. (source
Colour seems to be a different point.
Of course, this is all highly subjective. So, let's start another Analog/Digital discussion (see LP/CD)
To avoid a flamewar, I don't want to imply that a Digitcal Camera is of has the same quality as a CD, and a analog 33mm is inferior to Digital cameras.
To avoid another flamewar, I don't want to imply that LPs are inferior to CDs.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Unfortunately I haven't had a chance myself to carefully compare the results of digital and analog photography for the same subject and light settings. Does anyone know where one can find such comparisons? What do the pro's here think about those two issues: color and contrast ratio?
One: I have yet to see a digital camera beat film in low light level situations. Yeah, the Sony F707 is incredible in low light, but a high quality ISO 1000 film is better. And where long exposure times are okay, ISO 100 film with really long exposures is many times better than the F707.
Although, I think the point of this article is that the new 11MP cameras ARE as good as film.. When the end format is digital. I won't argue that nothing beats film for a print. But if the final destination is digital (or, heck, if it needs to be digital at any point) then these new cameras are better.
Yes, if you're a professional photographer that never digitizes your film, then yes, you have no reason to go digital. But if you're a news reporter, who needs pictures to go digitally to the publisher, then you can finally stop using film. (At least, since I haven't seen the output myself, that's what I'm taking this article to be saying.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Sorry, try again. Depending on how many pictures you take digital is cheaper once you subtract film and developing costs. In addition, anything that can be done in the darkroom can be done (with undo) in software.
You mention experimentation is good, but then you condone the taking of 20 pictures. Which is it? Should consumers just 'know' how to get the right shot, or should they have the flexibility to throw away bad pictures without paying for them?
Spencer Ogden
Large DOF has nothing to do with digital vs. analog and everything to do with the fact that the focal length in most consumer digitals is so short that the hyperfocal distance becomes very short. A random shot taken with a DC280 selected from my archive says 6.3mm at f/4, putting the HFD at 1.3 feet and everything from about eight inches to infinity in focus.
I found the excess DOF in my DC280 annoying enough that I sprung for a DSLR, and when I want that much DOF, I can have it.
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
There is one major area where digital photography has not overtaken film, and one area where it never will.
The first area is price. Provided we're not just talking about casual snapshots, you can get some fantastically good medium-format analog cameras for a fraction of the price of the high-end digitals.
The second area, which is the important one for me, is process. Taking, developing, and printing analog images is an enjoyable craft. Whether it is for anyone else is a matter of personal taste, but I enjoy the hell out of it. I also enjoy painting and drawing, too, and those are skills that have long since been "obsoleted" by film and now software.
Now mind you, I own several digital cameras, and there are tasks for which I prefer doing things digitally, but the very labor and uncertainty which digital photography eliminates are a very large part of the charm of analog photography.
Plus, knowing that my pictures will be viewable with nothing more expensive than a human eyeball for at least the rest of my lifetime is a big damn plus.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Actually, chromatic aberration is caused by the lens -- whether the camera is CCD or film makes no difference. Perhaps the digitals you've used just had crappy lenses (made of cheaper glass)?
The point about CCD noise is a good one, though. A CCD cell can hit saturation even in low-light conditions if the exposure time is long enough, and there are other effects like electron spill that can contaminate the image near really bright objects. In the future, though, CCD materials will no doubt improve (wider bandgaps, tighter electron wells, quicker drainage times).
When digital really does start surpassing film, try to set your bias aside and at least give it a shot...
I can shoot pictures with my film camera with dead batteries, or no batteries. If I'm out in the far reaches of BFE and my batteries go, I still can take photos. I have cameras that don't even take batteries. If a freezing wind puts the chemical reaction in my batteries to sleep, I can still take photos. I might run out of film sometime, but for the price and weight I'm sure I can carry around far more high-resolution high-fidelity frames.
Whilst you are looking into suitable suppliers I'll keep on using my Kodachrome 25.
I could have dreamt it, but I do recall reading on dpreview.com that some high-end camera came with fingerprint firmware. That would solve some of this problems.
can beat a $500 35mm quasi-professional film camera, not using the best film available, and only in terms of pixel resolution (not dynamic range).
Big deal.
I'll put your puny digital toy up against a decent medium format camera any day.
You still won't get the detail of a photograph, and I'd have to see it in action to know if it would look better.
/. linked to a story about getting more quality out of your game system. One point tehey made was that the "Sharpness" feature on TV sets caused lower quality in digital images, because the added data created sharp lines and gradients that were not there before.
A few days ago,
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The real comparison is effective resolution and noise, and on these counts it should be clear that the new Canon 1Ds is comparable to 35mm in every meaningful way. At 11x17 print sizes, uncropped shots from the 1Ds will equal in sharpness all but the most carefully handled 35mm negs on top quality gear, and in noise there is no comparison at all. Heavy cropping _might_ still be easier on film, but even that doesn't appear to be the case.
Of course, this is still pretty serious $$$$, but even the D60 is very close to 35 in basically every way. 18-24 months? Guess what - that's when digital will start to rival 645, not 35mm. (of course, that'll be in an MF body, and probably cost $10k++)
Yes "dynamic range" is just the range of dark to bright across which the sensor gives you meaningful information.
Photographic negative film has something like 9-10 stops (powers of 2) dynamic range. That means you can record a bright highlight that is ~1000 times brighter than a dark shadow in the same image, and still retain full detail in both.
CCDs are improving quickly, but the ones in most digital cameras today don't have nearly the same dynamic range as film (something like 100:1, but there is a great deal of variation). You can certainly take good photos with these, but you'll have trouble capturing good detail in both bright highlights and dark shadows in a single exposure. You tend to get washed-out uniform highlights and shadows.
Another issue is that amateur digital cameras only give you 8 bits of brightness information per pixel, whereas negative film has something like 12 bits of information. Most pro cameras do give you access to 12 or 16 bits of brightness, but you'll have a hard time handling those images without special software.
When all is said and done, I don't think the reduced dynamic range of CCDs versus film is going to be a major problem for anyone except professional photographers. The shortcomings of low dynamic range only become apparent if you are doing extensive image processing. (such as brightening or darkening the image before printing it)
One last area where CCDs don't do so well is with sharp edges at high resolution. The digital images on the review linked from this article have what I call a "shitty edge" effect - there are dark contours around all of the sharp edges. Granted this could be an artifact of the JPEG compression, but I've seen it in almost all CCD photos and videos. Edges and color transitions should be smooth, like in the film images.
I think the problem is that CCDs do odd things at the individual pixel level - the red/green/blue sensors are not exactly coincident, so the camera needs to do a bit of image processing or filtering to produce a final RGB image; whereas in film the dye layers are exactly on top of each other. You can mitigate this by downsampling the digital image, but then you sacrifice resolution.
I've looked into this extensively, both as a working press photographer and during my degree in Photographic and EI Science. Aside from the plain fact that scientists rarely talk about resolution in regard to image quality but, rather simply analyse MTF, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that a realistic "resolution" limit for 35mm film is 100lpmm, which gives a 24mmx36mm full frame image a useful information content of around 9 million pixels. This is the sort of figure that lower end film scanners work to (usually 2500-3000 samples per inch). Scanning film at 4000ppi WILL improve system MTF however, so is probably worth doing, despite the fact the vast majority of extra information will just be noise. Interestingly, film "grain" follows a Poisson distribution VERY closely, and is therefore usually benign and - in some cases - actually beneficial. This Canon D1s seems to beat the 100lpmm "aim point", and - with it's inevitable system MTF advantages over scanned film - is almost certainly "better" than film 95% of the time.
I'd like one very much, though as a Contax owner, I'd rather see this chip in an SLr suitable for my existing lenses. Ever since the T-90, Canon has been leading this industry, and this new camera is an impressive achievement indeed.
That was classic intercourse!
b) You won't get anything usable from scanning 35 mm film beyond around 4000 x 3000 anyway, with most film stocks - the grain overwhelms the pixel size.
c) The Canon 1Ds (and Kodak 14n) have 12 bit sensors, which gives a dynamic range of 1:4096.
d) The Kodak DCS 14n is built with a standard Nikon SLR lens mount. The Canon EOS 1Ds is compatible with over 60 of Canon's EF lenses.
OK, a decent SLR is a lot cheaper, but it doesn't have any of the advantages a digital camera gives you, either.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
Check the Foveon images on dpreview.com. They are amazing! The Bayer based images just look "flat" in comparision. I can't tell you what it is, but the 3MP Foveon images just look so much better.
Obviously you don't take many photos, so I assume (slashdot style) that you don't know what you are talking about.
Try shooting 200 images in a day for a 0$ on a film camera. Oh, you can't? Ask your newspaper photographer what he is using. Image quality is already good enough for 2 page spread in a magazine. That is the 'good enough' threshold. Every professonal photographer speaking on dpreview.com is saying that their Nikon D1's and Canon 1D's are paying for themself in a matter of months. Digital cameras are still 3-4 times more expensive than their film brothers, but chemical processing costs (in time and money) are quick to add up.
Bear in mind I'm not an expert in optics or photography, and this is only a rough sketch of what could be done.
We can easily scientifically validate whether digital film or analog film is better, and at exactly what resolution they are better. Construct a poster of an enormous barcode... row upon row upon row of millions of tiny lines. At first, make it finer-detailed than you can possibly resolve with either camera. Set up your analog camera so that the poster exactly fills the frame, then snap a shot, print it out to the size of the original (make sure you use a method of printing that preserves the detail in the photographic image), and run a barcode scanner on the printed result.
If you get the wrong result from your scan, construct a new poster with slightly less fine detail, and do it all again. Repeat until you get the correct scan from the printed result.
Then take the same shot with a digital camera at some fixed resolution. Print it out, and scan that. If you get an incorrect scan, increase the digital image resolution and try again. Repeat until the digital camera printout also scans correctly; you have now found the resolution at which the two images, analog and digital, have the same amount of detail. Any higher digital resolution should be superior to film of that quality.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
People here seem to have a bad case of the old if-it-isn't-suitable-for-me-then-it-is-useless-for -everybody syndrome. Digital is good enough for majority of photography. Can you imagine a newspaper that still uses film? No, it would be just plain stupid. :)
Digital cameras today are "good enough" for majority of uses. I guess that the people who count pixels are the same that overclock newest and greatest CPUs.
But congratulation Canon and Kodak. Now we can use our $1000 wideangles again.
Come on, what kind of confused reasoning is that? Digital cameras have shorter focal lengths and larger DOF because digital sensors are smaller than 35mm film.
I found the excess DOF in my DC280 annoying enough that I sprung for a DSLR
I agree that excess DOF is not particularly nice for certain shooting situations. However, for most people, it's a good thing because it makes "getting the shot" much easier.
Actually, I find 35mm DOF to be neither here nor there: it doesn't give satisfactory separation of subject and background in many situations, yet it is small enough to punish inaccurate focussing ruthlessly. I think MF and digital each represent better tradeoffs: with MF, I get meaningful separation of subject and background, and with digital, I generally don't have to worry about it at all.
Film vs. digital? I do both, because they complement each other nicely.
I like to use my digital camera for quick and dirty shots. No processing, instant pictures. I use Polaroid if I know I'll need pictures before I can get back to a computer.
I also shoot medium and large format. They require more care and thought in setup and use, and cannot produce a picture as quickly. But even if digital could produce the quality and general impact of a good large format print (debatable; some digital is crap, and some is awfully good), I couldn't afford to do it.
At least, not in this epoch: my total investment in photo gear wouldn't buy a professional digital camera, let alone the printer I would need to go with it. So I continue to play with wet things in the dark.
...laura
Anyone?
Sorry. But it just pisses me off when several people post the exact same question that is disscused right on the first page.
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.
> The grain is the limiting factor in film resolution.
Many times that is true, but keep in mind that for a wide variety of situations, diffraction is the limiting factor. Diffraction! The inescapable wave nature of light interacting with your lens aperture. Any lens with an aperture (all!) are subject to the effect. Diffraction prevents a lens from achieving a perfect focus spot. Instead, any one point of an image diffracts to cover a small disc, the airy disc. In MANY shooting situations, the airy disc is bigger than film grains, and much bigger than digital camera pixels. At that point, smaller pixels dont help any furthur. As most know, the furthur you stop down a lens, the greater the depth of field becomes, but at cost -- the airy disc size increases with each reduction in aperture.
IIRC these new high density cameras are actually CMOS (at least, i am very certain that the Canon is). CMOS used to not have as good range and performed much worse in low-light conditions, but that is slowly changing, i suppose.
And one of the important thing about this new thing (canon / kodak) is that the chips themselves are the same size as 35mm -- which means no focus multipliers, no lens adapters, no nothing). now -- here is the kicker: how many sensors can you fit onto a 200mm wafer? not a whole lot (try it, the sensor size is 36mm x 24mm; add a couple more for the cut-line and the contact patches)... i honestly believe this is what's making these things so expensive, and why their prices won't budge as much as you guys seem to think it will (in the future). sure you will cram more pixels onto this area, but you are still only getting handfuls of sensors per wafer...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
That's a lot of film...
For my favourite application (sports photography), until cameras you can strap a decent size telephoto lens come down in price, digital won't be usable. When they do, of course, digital will become the medium of choice because with a large enough memory card you could basically shoot continuously.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
errgh, this really strikes close to home and I cant really argue this with quantitative numbers, but the truth is that i just cant say that Ive ever seen a print done with digital technology that looks as beautiful as a simple 35mm film. Im not particularly attached to regular film as a matter of religion, i just like the results better. Its like with audio most audiophiles will agree that tube amps are the way to go for a sweet sound. yet tube amps are actualy LESS acurate at reproducing sound than conventional amps are. I see photography in the same way, you can get cameras that are more acurate and more acurate but until I see one that LOOKS better then youre going to have a hard time convincing me that digital cameras outperform 35mm.
that said... here's my adhock attempt at explaining in definite terms why i think film looks better. when you make a print every silver molecule on the film or on the paper caries one bit of information, it's one molecule wide to fit that much information in memory you'd need one transistor for each molecule. lets be generous and say that a transistor is 90 molecules by 90 molecules and they can be packed edge to edge. the simple physical size of the memory that would store the information that's in one 35mm negative is enormous and impracticle.
that said ive been convinced (in no small part by a comment on slashdot a couple weeks back sorry i forget who the poster was) that for the large majority of commercial tasks digital photographs are just fine and easier to use.
--aiee
Come on you're taking ISO 50 velvia (that oversaturates and looks like a cartoon) as your benchmark. How about a useful film? Also what about dynamic range and noise in shadows. This analysis was way oversimplified and distorts the truth. You say 10-16 is required but this camera is 11.2 mpix, that seems like it's in your range and wins in many areas like noise and lack of grain. So I think digital is there. Unfortunately at $9k it's not really there in a practical sense so the whole debate is a bit of a red herring.
Please don't talk about stuff you don't understand. There are numerous factors that limit film resolution. Not least being film grain but there are all sorts of chemical issues in the development process and issues trying to obtain an image from a slide or negative that limit resolution further. Kodak don't even make the finest grain structure film. On crime scene photographs the camera can record many details and software audit packages exist to maintain a chain of evidence from the camera to the courtroom. It's a useless strawman and infact has no basis in fact.
The fact that an 7.6mm lens on a digital camera is a moderate wide angle, while it would be an extreme wide angle on a 35mm camera, has to do with sensor size.
What it comes down to is that digital cameras, in practice, have larger DOF than 35mm cameras. That's not so good for some art or portraits, but it's great for snapshots and other, more utilitarian photography.
Now, I am tempted not to take this at face value, because there are good reasons why CCDs should essentially never have the dynamic range possible with film. (Essentially: film responds to light non-linearly, such that x photons hitting your camera does not equal the same amount of "brightness" on your image independent of how many previous photons have been registered. CCDs basiclaly are linear in response -- x photons equals x number of counts, modulo factors of gain, etc. -- up to the point where the number of photons registered is a significant fraction (like say 1/2) of the maximum well depth.
The image sensor in the 1Ds is a CMOS sensor, not a CCD. This may be merely a nitpick, since both sensors likely measure photons linearly, but there *is* a difference between CMOS sensors and CCDs.
I guess in order to fill the field of view of a larger sensor, you need a faster lens, which then results in a smaller depth of focus. But the reason for the smaller depth of focus is still the lens, even if the selection of the lens is based on field-of-view (sensor) considerations.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
If you read those links, they explain that depth of field is a direct consequence of the focal length and aperture setting, as I outlined in this post. Those links also clarified my question about the effects of sensor size on lens selection. For larger sensors, a faster lens is needed to fill the field of view, so the depth of field is smaller. Conversely, smaller sensors use slower lens so as not to overfill the field of view, and that results in larger depth of field.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Jesus H. Christ on a pogostick! :)
What kind of FUD is this? The Canon D60 costs around $2000. And since it has smaller image area, you can get away with shorter (and therefore cheaper) telephoto lenses. A 400mm lens on a 35mm film camera works like a 600mm lens on the D60. Since you are sports photographer, let me set up a example:
Canon D60 + 400mm/f4 = $7400
Canon EOS 3 + 600mm/f4 = $8800
Now tell me, which one is a better deal?
The price of the camera is the smallest part, as you can see.
(Of course, if you are into wide-angle landscapes, then you are officially screwed!)
Sure, for pro-level equipment, the costs are comparable (and once you factor in film much cheaper for digital), but you can get away with cheaper lenses and still take decent sports photos, which simply can't be done with digitals.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Seems to me the "definate proof" of the existance of the lockness monster was on analog (yes, later disproven, I know). And how about Bigfoot being captured on an analog camera... does it prove he exists since we have in in analog?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
My film scanner produces roughly 28Mb TIFFs (about 10 mega-pixel) which easliy compress to less than 15Mb PNG's.
That way I can put an entire roll of film plus two sizes of smaller images (thumbnails plus fits on a 1024x768 screen) on a single CD with space to spare for captions, etc.
It's not just a matter of deciding how you want to expose. When you can use it, this technique produces OUTRAGEOUS richness and color saturation. You can also do stuff like vary lighting- average some pics with sharp pinpoint lighting to hit highlights, and some with a big light diffuser to give warmth. Average them all together and you have lighting that can't quite exist in nature :)
That picture was taken with a WEBCAM- in about 12 distinct images that were averaged. Got the idea from Helmut Dersch, who wrote the software I used to do it. It's part of 'Panorama Tools' :)
No because you don't capture in 8 bit per channel. These cameras capture with way more precision.
It appears people are always comparing $6,000 digital cameras to 35mm film, for which a good pro kit can be found for (IIRC) around $2,000.
Can we compare the quality of a $6000 digital kit to a $6,000 120mm Hasselblad kit?
So you get a digital system with so many bins that they can easily classify even the rnadom microphone vibrations from the warmth of the air. At that point you'd completely captured the sound to the limit of the capture equipment (microphone) regardless of how you store it.
Also, analog storage is just as imprecise in the real world. Vinyl isn't perfectly smooth, look at it under a magnifying glass and you'll see the grain of the material. That's the limit to what you can retrieve during playback.
As to the watch... Your second hand may show the sub-second time more easily, but I doubt your watch it accurate enough for it to matter. Who cares if you think the time is 4:15:32.026 when the time is really 4:15:37? If your friend's watch is accurate to the second he's got a better clock. Then, consider that he can get a watch that shows hundredths of second in an unambiguous way. Can you really distinguish a second-hand's position to a hundredth-second resolution?