Film vs Digital

Geoffrey Crawley has an interesting article in the new AP (out today for subscribers) and I thought his conclusions were worth putting up for discussion.

He says digital "sanitises the image, omitting some of the subtleties of analogue...but the result is a clear, well defined representation....at bigger enlargements the lower noise helps quality. For a lot of commercial, industrial and professional work, digital will win out." He also says "For those with a highly developed critical sense, film may remain preferable. It is clear that the top process is colour transparency"

As if to make the point, my slides fell through the letterbox at the same time, and very splendid they are. (Pentax MV, SMC Pentax-A 35-70mm f4). I'm going to run transparency film and digital together for the forseeable future. I like the gorgeous quality of slides, but I like the clean look of digital as well.

Got my pics back the other day from a professional developer.

I his opinion those I took at ISO1600 far out performed film at the same setting

We even enlarged one to A4 and the noise was still negligable

I don't think digital will ever out perform ISO32 slides but against normal ISO100+ film I cannot see any difference. In fact the ability to use digital darkroom has got to be the biggest advantage of all. I know I can't afford professional dark room facilites for film.

...and so it goes on just like CD and Records. At the end of the day, what do you prefer? Is there a quality difference or just different character attributes?

What made CD win over Record, was it the quality or the convenience of press buttons.? What will make digital win over film, is it the quality or the convenience of instant preview and not waiting an ice age for development?

Personally digital is better for me because it doesn’t cost me £5 or something for every 27 pictures to see my work. I still use film for B&W for professional use because I’ve got my own B&W darkroom and that is what the client specifies.

You're right of course, digital is the way to go, but I just think slides might still have a place to remind us of the quality we are chasing. After all, we've forgotten what is possible with traditional black and white printing, as I proved when I dug out the ADAPS archive prints and showed them to the club. It gave us a new incentive to make our digital prints better. It didn't make us long to use large format SLR cameras with plate backs.

Whe it comes to honing our skills with composition and exposure, slides are also useful there. What you take is what you get, no errors accepted. It's an excellent discipline that can only improve our digital photography. I still say if you can do good slides, digital is, relatively speaking, a doddle...

if you do slidehows with projectors, you want slides.
digital projectors cannot compete, and sadly the market for ultra high dpi/wide color gamut, ability to get full res for horizontal and verticle images, is too small for manufactureers to dump tonnes of research and development into.
If you want your projected image to reflect the glory of your original digital file, you're screwed.
Projecting an e6 slide on the otherhand...peice of cake.

Sadly, discipline is lacking with most digital users that never started with film. I've seen it far to often in my class. 'Ohh, a distraction, I think I'll clone/crop/paint/blur/paste/photoshop it out'. Pretend photographer is the better phrase