Why Digital is Dying?

[andyoxon]

"Why Digital is Dying"
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/00-new-today.htm

It's been turned into an 'article'...Why We Love Film

What do you think?  I took a roll of 35mm Fujichrome Provia, this August and still haven't had it developed - mainly because I want to find the best value scanning service; but it did feel good. Does KR have a point..?

[pcolbeck]

Most of his arguments even if they are valid only really apply to pro users / very serious armatures and ones doing art house photography anyway. For the millions of happy holiday snappers out there digital is millions of times more convenient than film and much cheaper.

[FyPuNK]

He does make some interesting comments, I am a die hard filmie and spent many a happy hour on plate camera's at college and shoot loads of 120 B+W. Digital wont die, the corporates have too much money in it, and as pcolbeck points out the average camera user is now on digital.

[Jaded]

Isn't he known for blogging controversial things.

Maybe even to get his hit rate up?

[LEE]

A lot of what he says is nonsense with negative spin on positive benefits of Digital.  I assume it's tongue in cheek.

No attention wasted looking at the back of the camera after each shot.

Well, the fact you can pull up an exposure histogram of your shot immediately could be seen as quite an advantage.  Checking for sharpness another.

No computer required, ever! Pros use light tables many feet wide. You can't get computer monitors that big for sorting and selecting.

So having a huge light table suddenly becomes more convenient for the process than a PC?

No motel shenanigans. You have no digital garbage to take out, like downloading, filing, cataloging, sorting, organizing, posting, or organizing.

He means he doesn't have the option to do any organising

No friggin' shooting delays.

He may have a point here.  Some digital cameras do have an LCD/exposure/focus delay but the high-end cameras don't suffer from this any more.

Film costs much less

The most stupid claim because he argues that you shoot less film as the format gets bigger.  That's because it costs so much not because you get to be a better photographer with bigger film.  His entire reason behind shooting less film is really down to the cost of film.

Being able to shoot many shots of the same subject (at slightly different settings) is a huge bonus for the amateur who can't afford to motor-drive their way through film like the pros. (Patrick Litchfield was stopped at immigration on some Sun-kissed paradise becasue they thought he was illegally importing film.  He had to convince them that he was going to use them all (hundreds of rolls) for 12 Pirelli calendar photos)

Of course film can't be touched for some things (resolution, dynamic range Pirelli calendars for example) but the list isn't as long as he would have us believe.

Tongue in cheek.

[Biggsy]

While I think its nonsense to argue that digital is dying, there's no overall financial saving to digital for the typical enthusiast because you spend all the money that you would have spent on film on more and better cameras, lenses and accessories.  What is very nice, though, is not having a defined cost per frame - it feels like it's free when you're taking a picture, and of course you can take more pictures alogether.

[andygates]

Meh, scroll down, the whole blog is an anti-digital polemic. 

I know this about digital: I can now afford to take all the photos I want to take.  The rest is detail. 

[iakobski]

Just a snappy title.

Everyone else is saying "Film is dying", these are reasons why it's not. It's almost dead, but will not disappear completely for many of the reasons given. A few are a bit silly though.

A pro I spoke to ages ago said she preferred to take film on a job, with digital she ended up with so many shots it took ages to sort them out, which was more expensive in time than the cost of film.

[Really Ancien]

Archiving is the main problem. I've got a couple of biscuit tins with all the 8mm movie my family ever took. Very pricey per minute, but 45 years later I can see us in the early 1960s. The same is true of slides and B&W prints. You've doubtless got a biscuit tin or two in your family. I'm unsure of the longevity of digital formats, optical or hard drive. Video tapes are the worst, print-through degrades them fairly quickly. My mate Dave digitised a load of his best photos recently, he started off doing a few landscapes but soon realised that it was people that mattered. The danger is that all those precious people shots end up in the middle of a whole load of generic sunsets on a DVD or Hard Drive. My Grandad did some editing of his home movies and it's now the stuff he cut out that gets the most response.

Damon.

[rogerzilla]

Digital looks crap.

There, that's my considered view.

[LEE]

You can print with 'archival' quality inks if prints are your thing and, in theory, digital images are lossless if you backup correctly.  It's easier in some respects to ensure the integrity of digital images as it's so easy to store copies 'off-site'.

I lost a load of rather (sentimentally) valuable cine film in a leaking roof incident several years back.  Single point of failure in my backup plan (Cardboard box in the loft).

Trusting a single £50 hard-drive with all your images is asking for a similar disaster of course.

PC Hard-drive, external hard-drive and off-site storage (that's my Mum's House to you) of regular DVD backups would be my choice for 'valuable' images.  If I was a pro-photographer then I'd also use the services of a reputable data-storage company.

[Really Ancien]

You're more likely to print up generic sunsets than the funny shots of the kids. I've already lost track of stuff I took on digital five years ago, I can see the biscuit tins from here. Ultimately the DVDs wil be easier for our heirs to throw away, actual pictures are harder. I worked at a waste transfer station once, and it was quite upsetting seeing interesting photo albums dumped, it'll be a lot less upsetting with shiny plastic discs.

Damon.

[LEE]

you're more likely to print up generic sunsets than the funny shots of the kids.

I'm not sure about that.  The only pictures that I actually print nowadays are of friends and family and they go into 6x4 albums like my old film prints did.

chillmoister has exhibited large prints from digital photos and they look stunning.  I think it's getting harder to tell the source of prints now.  Transparencies projected onto a large screen however are a different league entirely.  I sometimes miss my Kodachrome 25, projector and my parents' 25 foot living room and white walls.

[nicknack]

Ooooh! Kodachrome 25. Now that was a film.

[rogerzilla]

I found it a bit blue, and the speed to be a little optimistic.

What was sad about digital was that some really major advances were being made with film in the last ten years before it became a niche.  It wasn't a technology that had run its course, and had the advantage that upgrading your old camera to the latest technology just involved buying a roll of the new film.  Upgrading your digital camera usually involves dumping it and buying a whole new one.

[tonycollinet]

Well I know that the pictures I now take on digital look much better than the ones I used to take on film. And that is mainly because my photography has improved due to the ability to take lots of pictures, and to get same day feedback.

Regarding the "digital looks crap" statement, I would really like to see a specific example (taken on a half decent dslr*), together with an explanation of why it looks crap. To my eye a carefully shot digital looks as good (on average) as a carefully shot film.

[frankly frankie]

I am a die hard filmie and spent many a happy hour on plate camera's at college ...

So did I.  But I'm fairly sure I've moved on now ...

[Jaded]

Archiving is the main problem. I've got a couple of biscuit tins with all the 8mm movie my family ever took. Very pricey per minute, but 45 years later I can see us in the early 1960s. The same is true of slides and B&W prints. You've doubtless got a biscuit tin or two in your family. I'm unsure of the longevity of digital formats, optical or hard drive. Video tapes are the worst, print-through degrades them fairly quickly. My mate Dave digitised a load of his best photos recently, he started off doing a few landscapes but soon realised that it was people that mattered. The danger is that all those precious people shots end up in the middle of a whole load of generic sunsets on a DVD or Hard Drive. My Grandad did some editing of his home movies and it's now the stuff he cut out that gets the most response.

Damon.

This is false.

Please take your ageing analogue images and make backup copies of them all! 

Then report back on how long it took to copy your analogue images and how you did it (and maybe whether you used digital in the process of copying  ) and whether the copy that you made was identical to the original. Oh, and please give the same answer for the digital images. 

I have bucket loads of shafted images taken analoglly. Why? We had a flood. I had no copies. All beyond repair.
Copying them would have taken me, well, how long it would have taken to copy the contents of 5 Patterson 35mm negative albums stuffed to the gills? 

Edited for YACF Goggles

[Biggsy]

Watch the repeat of Five's Gadget Show (on Sunday?) to see film compared to digital.  They massively blew up shots taken on 35mm film and "full-frame" digital (with similar cameras & same lens by professional photographer) and hung them on a multi-storey building to compare.  They all thought the digital one was superior in a number of ways.

I don't know how good a test it was, but at least it questions the assumption that digital photographs are still not as good as film ones.

[EDIT: Not "same camera", of course]

[Jakob]

Ken Rockwell also insists that there's no point in shooting RAW and that jpegs are just as good.

I think he mainly does to generate hit counts.

[iakobski]

I don't know how good a test it was, but at least it questions the assumption that digital photographs are still not as good as film ones.

Not a particularly good test in many ways, but as you say it shows you can't just say one is "better" than the other. For most people, the quality of either nowadays is way higher than "acceptable", so it comes down to convenience and cost. Once you start becoming super-critical, you have to choose what you want out of the image and choose your equipment and media accordingly.

Ooooh! Kodachrome 25. Now that was a film.

My all-time fave was Technical Pan, sadly discontinued many years ago. 

[iakobski]

Ken Rockwell also insists that there's no point in shooting RAW and that jpegs are just as good.

I think he mainly does to generate hit counts.

Many years ago (before digital cameras) a mate of mine did his PhD on jpegs and other compression techniques. One of the findings was that lightly compressed jpeg images were almost universally regarded as higher quality than the uncompressed version.

That's not to say there's no advantage shooting raw and enhancing out of camera, but does throw some light on Rockwell's opinion.

[LEE]

I found it a bit blue, and the speed to be a little optimistic.

Yes and yes (and very contrasty) but, using a tripod, it could capture incredible levels of detail (our living room wall was about 15x8feet letting you see the fleas on the back of fleas on a fly)  I wonder what the equivalent megapixel rating would be.

[DrBru]

I found it a bit blue, and the speed to be a little optimistic.

Yes and yes (and very contrasty) but, using a tripod, it could capture incredible levels of detail (our living room wall was about 15x8feet letting you see the fleas on the back of fleas on a fly)  I wonder what the equivalent megapixel rating would be.

This only really applies if you're buying top of the range lenses though. In the vast majority of cases resolution will be limited by the optical performance of the lens rather than the detector (be that digital or film). I only have one lens (300mm f4 Nikon) which you can just about see pixilation on 6MP digital camera - and even then you have to look hard. That might get some benefit from using film rather than digital, but I wouldn't notice the difference with any other lenses I have. Of course, if you are going to the bother of slide film and projectors, you probably ARE using lenses which justify it

To answer the question though, low ISO films have grains about 0.3um apparently (according to a quick googling). So, for a 35mm format (36x24) the equivalent MP would be 9600MP...

[Jaded]

However, the grains are not uniform in size or distribution, so I wouldn't have thought there is a direct comparison between size of grain and size of pixel. You'd need a fair few grains to mimic a pixel.