Digital Vs. Film

Heated discussions are held around the issue of which is better, at what point does digital replace film, how many pixels are needed to equal film. I think it is simpler than that. You can break it down into issues for the photographer and issues for the viewer.

The Photographer:
Here digital has it over film in most ways - cost of film and processing, time to finished image, instant review, greater dynamic range (more f-stops of brightness), carrying capacity of images, xray issues, blended exposures, stitching, dirt and dust, filtering to name some. On the other hand, long term storage of images is a huge issue and the tendency to upgrade computers and cameras regularly and often can be very expensive. I'm guessing that more digital photographers have lost more images than film photographers ever did - backup while travelling isn't a luxury, it's a necessity, and I would guess that few casual shooters back up and the majority of ammateurs don't either, at least till they get home.

The Viewer:
We can spend time arguing about how many pixels does it take, but I think that ultimately the real question is what is the reaction of people looking at our prints. In general and when done competently, reasonably sized prints from digital look darn good. My own experience is that 35 mm. never looked as good as the images from my 6 mp camera and my 16 MP camera produces results that overall look as good as my 4X5 work. Now, I'm not comparing outright resolution, nor am I comparing giant prints, bigger than 16X20, but reality is in my wet dark room days I never ever made a print bigger than 16X20 so knowing that I could have is somewhat irrelevent. That the quality is there in digital for colour is becoming the accepted truth. In black and white, the situation is more controversial. My own feeling is that when you throw away much of the recorded information (ie. the colour) to make a black and white print, you need to replace that discarded information with more recorded pixels (and I don't mean uprezing - which would make an interesting topic on it's own). My own path to quality black and white images has been to stitch most of the images from my 6 MP Canon 10D, and some from my 1Ds2 as well. The result from the 6MP camera stitched has been some very nice 8X15 images which look as good as 4X5. This usually involves mounting the camera vertically and swinging horizontally so the total pixel count is in the order of 3000X6-10 thousand pixels. People like Bruce Barnbaum have said they have never seen a digital print which equalled a wet print. I think the biggest roadblock to changing his opinion is the current lack of inkjet papers which have a surface as good as the traditional glossy dried matte that most fine art photographers use. I'm hearing rumours that the new papers coming out real soon may change that situation, but we'll see. Tonality wise, resolution wise, there is no issue. Colour wise, I much prefer the colour of inkjet images to untoned black and white photographic papers and even with selenium toning, I have more control with my inkjet printing.

I know that my inkjet prints on matte paper don't have the rich deep shaddows that traditional photographic papers are capable of reproducing, yet overall the images look great. Brooks Jensen has actually done comparisons and people strongly favoured the inkjet prints over wet darkroom so even in the world of black and white - digital is taking it's place.

Staying With Film:
There are lots of reasons to stay with film - many people like the darkroom and have the time to do it well, I have a friend who shoots slides and as of now, slide projectors are still a heck of a lot more common than digital projectors and he likes slide shows. When friends dig out 35 year old kodachrome slides and painlessly project them, you have to see their point - what are the odds that digital files from 35 years ago are going to be readily accessable. Mind you, you have to file the slides in some sort of organized fashion - the idea of finding a particular 35 year old slide from a large number of unlabelled shoe boxes isn't to be thought of.

Anyway, each of us uses what works for ourselves.