[Leica] OT: The endless nonsense about film vs. digital (long rant)

[Martin Howard <mvhoward@mac.com>]

I subscribe to Photo Techniques, the US magazine primarily for LF 
weenies, but also a great bogroom read for wannabees like myself 
(actually my real reason for subscribing to it is David Vestal's 
column).  While seated upon the aforementioned facility this evening, I 
came across an article by Paul Schranz in the latest issue (Nov/Dec 
02).  He writes about "conventional" and digital photography, a sort of 
personal odyssey through technology and back.  In this, we can find the 
following sentences:

	Film is still the best means of recording an image. The best scanners 
do
	not yet meet the richness of data that is available on film.  
Inevitably,
	that time will come, as will digital camera quality.

I, for one, don't think that that time will ever come.  Like most areas 
of technology, what drives development is economy.  If there is little 
or no economic incentive of developing a digital sensor for cameras, or 
a scanner, that matches or surpasses chemical film, then it is unlikely 
that it will happen.

Fine art photographers seem to be split in two communities: those who 
vow to continue with film, printing on fibre paper to archival 
standards, and those who dabble with digital images at some point in 
the process.  (An interesting aside is a group who belong to the 
former, but still use computers to produce masks which are subsequently 
sandwiched with the original negative for [contact] printing.)  The 
most fervent arguments about quality seem to be raged in this 
community.  Is digital good enough?  Can you tell the difference 
between a chemical print and an inkjet print?

In reality, fine art photographers don't count worth a toss.  They're 
about as important to the those that fund the digital photography 
development as the super-heavy-weight vinyl LP weenies are to the music 
industry.

What matters are large volume, commercial photographers and the general 
public.  I'd guess that the commercial photographers that count are (a) 
advertizing, (b) press.  Both of these are characterized by a degree of 
ephemerality where convenience and "good enough" are more important 
than whether something is qualitatively the same as a archival, 
selenium toned, fibre print at 20x24" from an 8x10" T-MAX 100 negative 
observed through a 5x Schneider loupe.  The same goes for the general 
public: good enough is good enough.

What will happen is that digital (camera) technology will improve to 
the point where three things coincide: (a) tiered quality and pricing 
("consumer", "prosumer", "professional");  (b) quality improvements 
until "good enough" (given the application area) has been reached;  (c) 
ease-of-use issues, convenience, and infra-structure break above the 
cost-of-entry for new consumers.

Once this happens, improvements will not be in the direction of the 
information capacity of the digital technology and this will probably 
happen well before digital devices come even close to (i.e., several 
orders-of-magnitude away from) capturing the amount of information that 
film does.

And, just as you can still buy tube amps, and play new LPs on recently 
manufactured turntables, I suspect that film will be around for a long 
while yet.  Existing in a somewhat marginal role, but still existing in 
parallel with digital imaging.

M.

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