Digital or Velvia?
 

Alex 1994 and I started a little discussion on another thread which threatened to hijack that thread so here is a new thread for the discussion. Alex wrote: "The joys of digital? What joys? Substandard resolving power, saturation, dynamic range and storage in a medium that will soon enough become obsolete?"

Any comments folks? I have plenty of thoughts but what do others think?

I must also bring Kodak Ektar into the fray, this is the finest grained colour print film there is and the most Velvia-like C41 film. I have yet to try it.

It's a fact of life, with the ever changing technologies any media will become obsolete in the course of time. When they stop producing film stock in 5, 10, 20 or 100 years time will it not become obsolete ? Change and obsolescence has kept industry working to put food on mankind's table.

Music recording is a classic example of the different media formats used throughout its history. With its own set of debates on the merits and demerits of each format.

Should we all still hanker for the personal service of telephone operators making our call connections or be grateful to Mr Strowger an undertaker for his invention in 1890 that has led to direct dial to anywhere in the world.

Film has some advantages over digital and digital has some advantages over film. Swings and roundabouts.

Perhaps we should start yet another thread to debate whether film and its processing is more toxic than semiconductor sensor manufacturing.

On trawling the web there appears to be a number of flawed tests/examples on the film vs digital debate. None of them conclusive enough to say there is an outright winner especially when you take full frame sensors into account. On Birdforum Nigel Blake produced a link to an informative article on photon collection relative to pixel size and its impact on image quality.

Now that the pixel war is just about over maybe the emphasis will be put on improving dynamic range. Much of films dynamic range is due to the flattened toe and shoulder in the response curve. These areas will have a much reduced contrast. In fact on recent DSLR models there has been a trend to provide options that flatten contrast in the highlights to reduce burnout.

At the end of the day it is all about tone mapping to whatever output media your using. Film or sensor, neither use a transfer function that is true to life. For very high dynamic range scenes massive tone compression has to take place to fit the image onto the limited contrast ratio of output media currently in use.

Doesn't matter in the least to me. All I care about is the pictures. It matter not which sensor technology was used. Stop arguing about trivia and concentrate on the results.

If you want to use film, then use film. If you want to use digital then use digital. Is one any better than the other? Swings and roundabouts as Rob says.

I thought this sort of debate had died years ago.

Couldn't agree more Duncan, It's the picture that counts. Everything in between is just a means to that end.

My thoughts exactly.

Through one means or another, advances in camera technology has gone along way to improve image quality and the capture of difficult subject matter. A point made very clear by David Attenborough when he compares his wildlife filming attempts in the 1950's to current footage. Will we marvel at the advances made in the next 50 years ?

Pen and ink, water colour, oil paint, digital, film. Use what ever you think works best for the picture.

I suppose Alex would argue that his beloved Velvia makes the picture that counts better in some way though obviously I disagree. I feel that digital makes it easier to capture the shot you want in the way you want it and make sure you have got it before moving on. Changing ISO on the hoof, shooting in RAW so all the parameters can be changed later to give many options. I could go on but you all know the list as well as I do. Enjoy your Velvia Alex, I have not touched my film cameras for years. I have several thousand of slides and colour negative the older ones of which, about 50 years old and some older, have slowly deteriorated by fading and some getting mould on them despite as careful storing as I can manage.

From my point of view the wonders of Velvia 50 are pretty academic. Velvia 50 would never cut the mustard when I am shooting at ISO400 and upwards 99% of the time.

Let me put something to rest: Yes, it is all about the pictures. That doesn't stop us discussing the tech behind them--so long as we still care less about the tech than about the images. Musicians know their craft is all about the music, but they'll happily discuss instruments and methods of recording (e.g. digital keyboards vs. real pianos).

So, film will never be obsolete as a storage medium. This is because developed film can be scanned easily using whatever scanning technology we have available (and we'll always have scanners). Glass plates from centuries ago can still be viewed today. Prints, slides and negatives will be scannable in centuries time, ready to be viewed on a computer screen.

Digital, by contrast, is tied by two things: file formats and digital storage media. Hard drives continue to crash on a fairly regular basis, so the best option is a DVD, a format that in itself may become obsolete and still isn't as reliable as a negative/transparency.

Secondly, file formats: these come and go all the time. RAW will be replaced sometime in the not-so-distant future, when someone comes up with something better. In the race to stay on the cutting edge, companies will drop RAW support on their hardware. Result: you have to convert all your images into the new format, or bin them.

And at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter. It's all about the piccies!!