Digital or Film - Cost vs Versatility
First, film is leaving us. For the last several years various film lines have been shut down or become less available while sales and capabilities of digital cameras have been increasing. So no matter what comparison between film and digital imaging we make, film is leaving, digital is here. We have to get used to it and welcome the products of versatility brought to us by digital.
That said, it is helpful to compare them.
| Feature | Film | Digital |
| Tonal Scale | Scale is the length and smoothness of the progression in tones from lightest to darkest. Film and photographic paper produce the best appearance. Nothing beats the appearance of an art-quality print with conventional methods of printing. |
Still nowhere close to what film can do, however this is compensated for to some extent by image editing programs which can "fill in" levels and by printers which can also "fill in" on paper giving a printed image with the appearance of more continuity than actually exists in the image file. |
| Grain | Grain in film is a clumping of silver molecules deposited in the emulsion by the developer. In the case of color film the development action causes a secondary binding of dies in the area of development. In any case, these clumpings are without an underlying pattern and this contributes to the sense of finely continous tones in film. | There is no grain, as such, in digital images. There are a couple of equivalents which can loosely be thought of as grain, but technically the production of these artifacts differs from film grain. Pixels - |
| Archival Permanence | Color permanence depends on the type of color material and on storage conditions, perhaps 28 to 80 years before noticeable fading but as little as a few years for some materials. Black and white can be made much more permanent and B&W prints can last centuries. The storage and keeping of negatives is dependant on temperature, humidity, the containers holding the film and on the material on the film base as well as the emulsion. |
Color and Black and White have the same permanence because they are both from inks. Inks made of pigments (ground minerals) have the best archival possibilities and are rated at from 60 to 200 years before noticeable fading. As with film, storage and display conditions affect permanence of prints and are a large variable in determining how long a print will last. The storage of image files is more problematic. CDs and DVDs are currently recommended but no one can really say with confidence how long these media will last. Both have different construction and the types of storage containers, labels, markers used as well as heat can all mess up these disks. Even if the disks manage to last centuries there is no promise that machines will be able to read the information in the future. The computer age has produced a previously unknown quantity of data storage and along with it a rapid rate of obsolescence of the machines able to read the data (tape and disk). |
| Color | Requires
either Usually these are films for daylight, tungsten (room lights) and tungsten floods (studio lights). For flourescents usually a magenta filter is used. |
Setting the "white balance" controls how the red, green and blue channels or differently amplified to compensate for changes in lighting coloration. Generally there are pre-sets for daylight, tungsten, flourescents, and cloudy daylight. Most important is a method for getting the right balance by using a white target (paper, card, wall) to set the color balance (the white balance) as a custom setting for any environment. This can be a source of digital noise when setting for tungsten because the blue channel gets extra boost (amplification). Tungsten has a lot of yellow-red. |
| Light Level Sensitivity (ISO) | Requires changing the film in the camera. Each film has its listed ISO. Development is used to change that by pushing or pulling in the developer, with a consequent increase or decrease in contrast. | Just a roll of a dial or a menu change to amplify the signal at each pixel. Very convenient. In a sense this is a little like using sheet film where each sheet of film can be exposed and developed differently. |