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Digital 35mm SLRs?
pipingguy asks: "Canon has released the first(?) 'low-priced' digital 35mm SLR with interchangeable lenses with the Digital Rebel. I've owned a few digital and non-digital cameras over the years (and am by no means a photography expert), and most annoying was the lack of manual zoom and focus, not to mention the barely-noticeable millisecond delay between button click and shutter closure. Can any owners of this and other digitals provide some opinions on how this new model compares to the more expensive digital 35mm's and typical $300 SLRs? Is it time to buy?"
The advantage to one of the digital SLRs versus pro-sumer models is no shutter lag. My 10D is very quiet and takes the picture when I press the button, not several ms later like my Olympus 3040 used to do.
Now that the Digital Rebel is on slashdot, surely firmware hacks are on their way. Heck, it's only a matter of time before someone is running a linux server on it. But seriously...something that has not been mentioned is the included lens. The digital rebel comes with a specially designed 18-55mm zoom lens. The kit with this lens is $999. DSLR 101: in most digital slrs, the image sensor is a little smaller than a 35mm negative. So when you use a lens built for a 35mm camera, the focal length is effectively multiplied by 1.6, as the edges of the frame fall outside of the sensor and get cropped. So the included 18-55mm lens is equivalent to your typical 28-90mm zoom lens that comes with film rebels. It is also specially designed for the rebel and won't work on the 10D. A lot of people may point out that the 10D is better and only few hundred dollars more, but people should remember that the cheapest canon lens that is equivalent to the 18-55 is the 17-40L...at $799. So Digital rebel kit = $999, 10D "kit" = approx. $2299. That's not a small price gap. Of course, if you never shoot wide angle, it doesn't effect you.
So first thing. I have over 50,000 transparencies in my collection (mostly scenics of the western United States from the Rockies west, and from Mexico to mid Canada.) I love film, and it's going to be superior in many ways to digital for some time yet to come. With drum scanners you can sanely go to about 10,000 pixels per inch converting film to digital (and I don't care what kind of film you're scanning, at that rez you can see the grain.) Of course, if you're taking about original art being a 8 x 10 inch sheet, you're looking at 80,000 by 100,000 pixels or 8 gigapixels... needless to say, digital has some distance to go before it can sanely reach those kind of resolutions.
This is a meaningful point of contention. I have a 4 x 5 inch transparency of the Athabasca glacier in the Canadian Rockies. If you look at the image though a 10x loop, you can find a bus in the parking lot below the access to the glacier. If you look through a microscope at about 100x you can make out by color that the bus has Alberta license plates. At about 500x you can read the license plate. Film really is that good.
That said... digital is going to win over the long hall.
1. The new Foveon chip (found in the Sigma SD-9), produces moire free images with huge color fidelity and shocking clarity (the original gallery images had black and whites blown up on prints 8 feet high without grain or digital artifacts... you could see the threads in clothes, and the fine detail on the pores and small hairs in the skin of the models.)
2. There is currently a digital camera on the market that has two imaging chips, one for high light levels and one for low, The chips both record the image weighted to their specific sensitivity, so that the images have the same or even better exposure latitude than film.
3. There are now 8 x 10 digital backs in use (a famous photograher did a series on the National Parks using one a couple years back and his name escapes me...) The resolution and quality of those images was, is, and will be mind numbing.
The quality is improving, and not slowly... the cost is falling, and quickly... the freedom of producing an image, telling if you got the shot instantly (and reshooting if you missed it... this is especially important to large and medium format photographers), archiving them in a place that takes virtually no space, organizing and filing them quickly and easily, not having to process anything (film or print paper), and being able to show them and send them instantly to family or business partners... all these things make digital mighty attractive.
Add being able to use the same camera to do still and video shooting. Add digital image processing. Add being able to burn, dodge, color correct, contrast balance, and correct for printing characteristics in computer... and digital just takes it for even the most religious film shooter. Don't get me wrong... I wouldn't trade my Cibachrome prints for all the tea in China... I just believe we are looking at a technology with such operational and economic advantages in the long hall, that film's day are prolly numbered for everybody, but the fine art photographer.
I'll still shoot film for fun or for something remarkable that demands the greater depth, but soon, digital is going to be my bread and butter.
Genda Bendte