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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.
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.
"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.
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?
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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!)
"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.
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?
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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?
What a foolish extremist assertion. There is no doubt that digitals have some benefits, but they have some downsides as well:
I'm hoping to find a digital camera that convinces me to dump my film habit, but so far it hasn't happened, at least not until looking in the $2000+ range.
First, the D30 is not exactly a high-end camera. It might have been two years ago, but now the D30 is decidedly mid-level. It's a prosumer camera, at best.
But that brings up an interesting point -- one that I continue to struggle with. Digital equipment remains a difficult investment -- especially if you're a working pro. Just because a camera is 4/8/11/14 megapixels doesn't necessarily mean it's better than "film" or better than "last year's camera" if you have to pull two or three times the job to cover the cost of the initial investment.
There's no doubt digital is here to stay. And there's no doubt that many folks have proclaimed digital to be "better" than film, but "better" can mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people. I suspect folks mean "better quality" when they say "better", but I'm not sure what that means either.
I can show you Winogrand photographs taken, oh, in the 1950s that are, in fact, "better quality" than anyone's digital photograph. Anyone's. And Winogrand used a beat-up Leica M4-P without a meter!
I can point to a grainy, dim Salgado print and say, well, that's grainy and dim, but it's "better" than anything I've yet to see reproduced digitally.
Yet I can also point to a hybrid print -- analog film, digital manipulation -- by someone like Gurksy (the guy who makes those massive prints) and say, well, in Gursky's case, the hybrid approach works wonders.
And I can, of course, go to a site like Photosig.com and Photo.net and point to any number -- literally thousands -- of "digital photographs" taken with prosumer gear like the D30 or the new Nikon D100 and say they're absolutely dreadful -- despite the fact they are *crystal clear* pictures of dogs and cats and babies with sticky oatmeal on their face.
So you have a D100 and are able to take crystal clear pictures of baby drool that can be blown up to 16X20?
Great.
The other issue -- much more serious -- is that digital cameras simply won't leave behind the sort of "archeological" records that film cameras leave behind.
This is an unpopular argument, however. Folks always say, well, you can burn whatever you want on whatever medium you want -- CDROM, DVD, you name it.
But as someone who has spent many, many hours in dimly lit photoarchives, I can say without hesitation that if someone like Garry Winogrand shot digitally, there would *be no* Garry Winogrand. Ditto for someone like Cartier-Bresson. They might have one or two great pictures but there would be no beagtives -- only old, outdated media -- most of which (possibly) cannot be salvaged.
Winogrand, for example, had stacks and stacks of prints and negatives in his little NYC apartment. You'd come in for a visit, and he'd toss you a stack of workprints.
His was a "record it all, no matter what" mentality. Now that's both good and bad, but for sifting through an artist's work, I suspect it's bad if you use digital. There's a permanence to a negative which may or may not be the case with CDROMs burned today. There's also a *bulk*. Negatives took up a lot of space. And that fact alone prevented many boxes of negatives from many photographers from being tossed out or misplaced.
Don't underestimate *bulk*. Physical product. In art, it's very important. Maybe not now, not today when the artist is alive and struggling, but when he or she is dead, bulk of what remains -- the presence of his or her remnants -- play a siginicant role in preservation.
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
One more place where digital is killing film: newspapers.
No longer do you need to develop a roll, look at them on a lighttable, scan a picture in, and then edit it to be used on the page. Now you can just download all the pictures, arechive the ones you want, edit the others, and send it to production. Savings of 30-40 minutes.
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
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."
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.
The 100 year old photos of your great grandmother are probably black and white photos on fiber based paper. Because that is an archival print process.
If you had color film photos of your kids, 100 years from now those would probably be gone too because color negative film is not archival quality. The only archival color film process that I'm aware of is Kodak's K-14 "Kodachrome" process. It will keep for 100 years in dark storage, but it is a slide film ("color reversal"). The good aspect to this is that in 100 years, provided humans still have eyes, the technology to view this will still exist.
Black and white negatives *are* archival. Black and white prints today generally are not. Resin coated B&W photo papers will not last that long.
Now in defense of digital...
Dye stabilized CD-R's *are* archival. Most CD-R's are not dye stabilized, you have to pay a little extra for those (the non-dye stabilized have an expected shelf life of about 5 years). So assuming something that can read a CD exists in 100 years, digital photos stored in this medium will be available then.
NASA's problem is that they have photos stored on magnetic tape, a process that was known to be non-archival when they implemented it. It can take an hour or more to get all the data off one tape. In comparison a 700MB 80Min CD-R can be read in under 5 minutes.
So, if you want color pictures of your kids to last 100 years, you can:
a) have them transferred to Kodachrome slides (a cost of about $0.50/picture)
b) put them on dye stabilized CD-R (a cost of about $0.01/picture)
Makes digital look like a very attractive option for archival purposes.
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