Photography Thailand Forum

[johnkphotography]

"let alone the fact that the quality of 35mm digital has already surpassed the quality of 35mm film" - Marc Schultz

When reading through Marc's article on pixel pitch and how it affects factors like resolution and noise on digital sensors I came across the old film vs digital debate.  I was prepared to start running my mouth about how film still has a leg up because of bit depth factors, but felt compelled to do my research first.  Here is some of that research (there is tons more solid research on the site and it is worth view).

http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summary1.html
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/does.pixel.size.matter/

From the research that I looked at, it would appear that on high end dSLRs an advantage over 35mm color film is evident.  They seem to have a better dynamic range than color film and also seem to have better resolving power.  My bit depths arguement doesnt seem to have much sway because of limits on perception of the human eye.  Of course there are about a million mediating factors, but the trend is certainly there.  So, science has provided me with an answer that I didnt like but appears to be true none the less. Pro digital beats color 35mm film now, at least in terms of resolution and signal-to-noise ratios.  Not on your point and shoot digital camera, but certainly on your 1Ds Mark II. 

I just thought I might share this with other photographers, as I'm sure that many of you still believe, as I did, that film has a leg up on digital.  This information could prevent the unpleasent leathery taste you get when you realize that you have just planted your loafer in your mouth. That being said, I still love film and will continue to use it along with my digital camera.  But I will no longer blather on about how film is better, except for nostalgic reasons.
 -John

 

[Marc Schultz]

First off, I am glad to hear that someone hung in there long enough to read my long winded article. Thank you, you are a brave man 

I am also glad to see you eventually came to the same conclusion that 35mm digital cameras at the professional level have surpassed 35mm film quality in every way.

The main areas as you noted being sharpness, dynamic range, and low noise at ISO ranges where film would start to show a fair amount of degradation.

Without opening up the debate too much, although I think there is no longer a scientific debate on this issue anymore as you noted, there are a couple of other points worth noting:

With 35mm film, even when talking about the top of the range slide films, it was generally accepted that print sizes could not go comfortably beyond 16"x20" without starting to show film's own weaknesses.

Even though film can now be scanned to produce larger prints than direct film prints could before, 35mm professional digital can now comfortably produce prints at 20" x 30", and often much higher if the image was shot in good lighting with a high quality lens.

What else is very interesting is that 35mm digital is now challenging medium format film as well. Which is even more amazing. This is also discussed in some of Michael's Reichman's articles on www.luminous-landscape.com so this is not a debate I am starting on my own. 

But without getting too much into either a technical or a personal preference debate on film versus digital, I also want to add that already today 70% of all professional photography work is shot on digital. It is expected than within another 5 years this figure will increase to 90%. So I think those figures speak for themselves.

I can also comfortably say that since I started shooting with a 1DS Mark II in mid 2005 that I have not taken my Hasselblad out for a shooting even once, either with film or with a digital back on it as it simply hasn't been needed. In fact, I have had agencies tell me that the quality of the pixels from the 1DS Mark II look better than the pixels from some MF film drum scans they have seen. So that in itself also helps to validate the new debate of 35mm digital versus MF film.

[Christopher Swift]

I have a comment and a question on this one.

I've shot film for many years but am now recently into digital with a Nikon D70s. Love the digital images but here's my problem: From time to time I do exhibitions and I like my images large. Shooting in digital, the RAW images come in at 300dpi and dimensions of about 6x10inches! Shooting in film, I can get a great quality scan at large file sizes and the images digitize to the large sizes I want - no PS enlargement needed.

I've experimented with the digital images and doing a series of 110% enlargements in PS (bicubic smoother). I took a 6 x 10 up to 36 inches on the long side, and had it printed at IQ Labs. The quality seems pretty good, but since I never did a side-by-side comparison (shooting the same image in film, scanning to a large size and printing), I can't tell which would have been better.

Has anyone done these kinds of comaprisons? Again, love the image quality of the digital stuff but I am a bit worried about degradation in quality when you do large blow ups!

[Marc Schultz]

Hi Chris. If you go through Michael Reichmann's site I think you will find some comparisons at www.luminous-landscape.com that he did a while ago on print quality of film versus digital. Generally though I don't think a 6 or 8MP camera is enough resolution to make 36" prints with, but it somewhat depends on the type of the image, how good the lighting was and what the overall quality of your original pixels are prior to interpolation.

I would say though if you started with RAW files from a full frame 35mm DLSR camera of 12MP and up, you could more comfortably print at those sizes. I recently did a 20" x 30" print from a shot taken with a 16MP camera and I felt, looking at the print quality of the image, I could have probably printed it another 50% bigger at least, with no anticipated loss of quality.

Mind you a print that size from a 135mm piece of film I don't believe would have been as good.

There were also some discussions on this last year on the Canon Professionals web site from Europe, but I will have to try and dig up the links.

Hope this helps.

[Christopher Swift]

Thanks Marc - appreciate it!

[David Salmanowitz]

The problem with the film versus digital debate is the change has happened so rapidly. I still have a Nikon Coolpix 990 that was the cat's pajamas when new at 1.6 MP (might be 1.7MP, can't remember), now it is right up there with a Kodak Instamatic or Polaroid Swinger--for what that Coolpix cost new one now can buy an 8MP digital SLR! I believe just about four years ago a friend and I were wondering when digital would be equal to or surpass 35mm film. Then a few months afterwards at Photokina in Cologne, Germany Canon unveiled their 1Ds and the rest pretty much is history. Now we have assorted brands with incredible image quality. The problem was digital was much more expensive than a comparable film SLR, but that is changing as I type as well. I was in denial for awhile as to digital being better than film, but when the results in actual photos and tests were before me I could see digital's superiority. I still think 78 rpm records can sound better than LP's, and LP's sound better than CD's, but that is another can of worms. 

[Christopher Swift]

I think I read it on http://www.kenrockwall.com that to get the image quality you need for larger prints (20 inches or more), you'd need a 12 megapixel camera. If this is true (don't know myself), the cost factor weighs in for film (and scanning at high file sizes).

Most of my exhibition work comes in at about 12 x 18 and the dSLRs seem fine for this comparing to film.

On another note - when TV arrived, many predicted the death of radio. Didn't happen. Now with the advent of digital photography, many say the same for film. In my opinion, film will go the way of radio - diminished market presence, but it'll never go away. Nor should it. There are negatives that survive today from, what, 100 years ago? 150 years? Not bad for longevity!

Can the same be said about digital images burned onto CDs? No way. The expected lifetime of CDs is about 30 years (give or take). And unless we remember to re-burn before our CDs dissolve, a whole generation of images goes away - not so for film.

Having said that, I'm in this kind of gray area between film and digital. The convenience of the latter is unbeatable and, yes, the image quality is on a par with film, but I really do miss the weight and sounds of my 20-year-old F3.

PS: I don't know, David - I think 45s beat them all to hell! You just can't beat that hissing and popping.

[David Salmanowitz]

I am a digital convert but that does not mean there are not some inherent problems. The sensor reacting to shooting up towards the sun has usually been a problem, as often times the pic could be blown out. I had read and heard this before, and did a side by side test shooting a bright sun with slide film in an SLR and a digital SLR and the slides won as far as not being blown out, otherwise the digital was better I thought. Batteries are another problem that comes to mind, as with many model film SLR's you just pop in some AA's instead of a rechargeable battery. The problem is when the power goes out you are in trouble as there is no way to charge your batteries for the camera. Even with some spares with full charge when those are gone so is your shooting. Size is another issue--when my friend bought himself a Canon 1Ds when it was released I commented that it was enormous, bigger than my Nikon F5, and weighed a ton! Yet things do change as now you have the Canon 5D which is so much smaller and lighter, and the new Nikon D200 is smaller than the flagship D2X, the sensors are getting better all the time (though I am not sure Nikon will ever opt to go the full frame sensor route), ...I still think the most beautiful designed cameras ever were the Leica M series, though I prefer using an SLR. BTW, Leica is supposedly going to come out with a digital M series rangefinder camera--Epson is already on their second model digital rangefinder.
PS: I don't know, David - I think 45s beat them all to hell! You just can't beat that hissing and popping.--I will take a 78 over a 45 anyday, but that is because of the sound quality and that the the music of Blind Blake and other great country/blues artist are found on old Paramount 78's, and not on 45's. 
The website you mentioned is kenrockwell, not rockwall.

[Marc Schultz]

I think what Ken says pretty much is right for the most part, but as I said, there are exceptions to the rule and a lot of it has to do with how much digital noise and overall sharpness the image has to start with.

As an example of an extreme case, I recently made a 24" print from a file shot with a 3MP digital camera shot back in 2001. There are a fair amount of visible artifacts on the print, but it is still quite OK if viewed from a slight distance. In fact, a large worldwide retailer of posters commissioned the image recently and is using the file to print posters that are 50CM x 70CM. After doing test prints they agreed there was some loss of quality, but they said they felt the print quality was still commercially acceptable. In the end we agreed that is what counts.

As for the continued use of film in photography, it is a fact that 70% of all professional photography work is now shot on digital. They are predicting that by 2010 the figure will increase to 90%. In my personal opinion, I think it has reached 90% already from what I see happening in the market.

As for the physical longevity of film, the plastic emulsions start to break down on even the highest quality slide films after 5 years. Film may last a long time, but you will never be able to get the same quality of print from a piece of film after 5 years as you could from the day it was developed. As we all know, with a digital file there is never any loss of quality, ever.

Optical storage media for digital files may only be good for 30 years at the moment, but with the size of hard disc storage increasing, and the price coming down, you can expect that within 30 years you will be able to store your digital files more permanently on something that will last longer.

5 years ago some old-school professional photographers resisting the new technology were still predicting that the quality of digital would never overtake film. Just a couple of years after, this self fulfilling prophecy had already fallen by the wayside. Going forward from here I think we can only expect to see technology continuing to advance in the world of digital photography. In that respect, you might find the attached article interesting as well. 

[Christopher Swift]

Oooops! Sorry about the misspelled URL (horrible speller, I am. Just horrible). Indeed, it is http://www.kenrockwell.com.

[Marc Schultz]

I found that article I mentioned from the Canon Professionals site which explains a bit more about upsizing of ditial images and getting good prints from them. Maybe it will shed some more light on why I say that there is no way to decisevely say one can only print up to a certain maximum size print from a digital image which is dictated by the resolution of the image you started with:

http://www.cps.canon-europe.com/articles/article.jsp?article.articleId=100302

And this article is about someone who produced some huge prints from only a 6MP Canon EOS 10D digitial camera:

http://www.cps.canon-europe.com/articles/article.jsp?articleId=100300

All good stuff.

[Christopher Swift]

Thanks for the links, Marc. Read through them, then followed links to others. It's a topic that is exhaustive. I was taken by some of the reviews of Genuine Fractals (GF), the 3rd party plugin for PS that deals with enlargements. Sounded very very impressive - if you follow some of the links, though, there are some (well, one) negative comment on the software.

From what I'm gathering from this, PS 110% enlargements, bicubic smoother should be OK for blowing up a 300dpi image by, say, 10 inches on the long side to 20 inches.

The overall take on GF, though, just gives me one more thing to hunt for at Pantip next time I'm up there.

One thought/opinion: it's important to analyze tests of image quality on how the tests are conducted. Some practically look at images under an electron microscope to do comparisons. And nobody I know brings along one of these pieces of equipment to view a show. Their noses usually never get closer than about 2 feet or so!

[johnkphotography]

Great article links Marc.  I usually print at native resolution even with Lambda printing, which is really limiting in terms of size and ultimately impact for the images.  I think its time to make a larger book.
 

[Marc Schultz]

Your welcome Chris. Glad you found some of it useful.

I used to use GF Pro myself until someone told me about PhotoZoom Pro, which uses the S-Spline algorithm and others and, in my opinion, does a much better job than GF Pro or Photoshop at upsizing.

[Marc Schultz]

Sure John, some digital cameras these days produce such high quality native pixels that you can really push them when it comes to upsizing. Seems like if you don't then you are really not making full use of what the camera can do. If you have the right interpolaiton algorithm you can really go quite far with them.

Also, that Canon CPS site has some good stuff. The thing about it though is sometimes I found that it is oneline and other times its down. Not sure why and new articles don't seem to be added so often, but if you have not been to it before it can be worth a good look through.