Film vs Digital: An Image Comparison
Over a year ago, someone (Chuck) commented that he'd like to see a comparison between digital images and film images. Curious myself, and not ever having seen it done, I decided to test this out. Since my mornings at the time consisted of walking K around the neighborhood for an hour or so before 8am, I figured this comparison could be easily done in that time behind the stroller. After about two weeks, I finally had enough images to compare. I was surprised that I while I saw a big difference, it was not one that I cared about much. I wasn't swayed enough to give up using film, but the digital files were more than adequate for everyday use and looked much closer than I'd expected. Once I finished, it was my intention to do a full display of the high res images on my website to give people a real chance to compare the two types. Life took over and the whole thing got shelved.
Since getting back to the US, I've been madly trying to clean up and organize various harddrives and directories of old photos. Then recently someone asked me if I'm a "purist" as a photographer. It got me thinking once again about this delayed project. Not wanting to put it off any further, I'm now presenting this scaled down version of the comparison shots.
My parameters were basically this: as much as possible take the same shot with the two different cameras/formats. This included perspective, composition, and exposure settings. This comparison could have been more representative if I'd had cameras that matched up better in their features. On the film side was unfiltered Fuji 160S in my Bessa R2A rangefinder. I usually put an 81B filter on this film to warm it up, but I didn't plan on doing that for the digital, so I opted for no filter. The digital images were done with my Canon G9 set to ISO 100. I typically pull a half-stop on the 160S anyway, so while this too wasn't a straight one-to-one comparison, it seemed pretty close. While I have a deep affection for both cameras, the built-in lens package on the G9 is optically inferior to the lenses I can put on the R2A. This is the most obvious difference between the images. If someone ever makes a decent digital rangefinder, I may redo this experiment in the future. Or if I ever buy an older Nikon SLR, I can put whatever lenses I end up getting for my D700 on it. Sharing the lens at the same format size and ratio would have been a better comparison. Given these differences, I did have to do some cropping on the film images to make the composition align more closely with the digital version. Other than that, there has been no adjustment to either set of images. I could have tried to match the colour better, but that just seemed boring.
If I were fancy or smart, I'd put in some kind of radio buttons and let you choose which is film and which is digital. As you might guess, that feature is not available. If you are curious, email your guesses to yoshi@demandingrobot.com and I'll send you back the results. That's as sophisticated as I can get right now.
Since getting back to the US, I've been madly trying to clean up and organize various harddrives and directories of old photos. Then recently someone asked me if I'm a "purist" as a photographer. It got me thinking once again about this delayed project. Not wanting to put it off any further, I'm now presenting this scaled down version of the comparison shots.
My parameters were basically this: as much as possible take the same shot with the two different cameras/formats. This included perspective, composition, and exposure settings. This comparison could have been more representative if I'd had cameras that matched up better in their features. On the film side was unfiltered Fuji 160S in my Bessa R2A rangefinder. I usually put an 81B filter on this film to warm it up, but I didn't plan on doing that for the digital, so I opted for no filter. The digital images were done with my Canon G9 set to ISO 100. I typically pull a half-stop on the 160S anyway, so while this too wasn't a straight one-to-one comparison, it seemed pretty close. While I have a deep affection for both cameras, the built-in lens package on the G9 is optically inferior to the lenses I can put on the R2A. This is the most obvious difference between the images. If someone ever makes a decent digital rangefinder, I may redo this experiment in the future. Or if I ever buy an older Nikon SLR, I can put whatever lenses I end up getting for my D700 on it. Sharing the lens at the same format size and ratio would have been a better comparison. Given these differences, I did have to do some cropping on the film images to make the composition align more closely with the digital version. Other than that, there has been no adjustment to either set of images. I could have tried to match the colour better, but that just seemed boring.
If I were fancy or smart, I'd put in some kind of radio buttons and let you choose which is film and which is digital. As you might guess, that feature is not available. If you are curious, email your guesses to yoshi@demandingrobot.com and I'll send you back the results. That's as sophisticated as I can get right now.
It seems to me that the colors in the "b" images are generally more vivid. The yellows in 5 and 6 are notably more appealing in the b's than the a's.
What would be even *more* interesting would be to look at the images and the real thing all at once. Even if I like the colors better in the b's, it doesn't mean that's what they really looked like, either, I suppose.
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Colour is really SO subjective and prone to shifting (even in digital where it's supposed to be linear). The first thing you learn in printing colour images is that there is no base line reference point to start from. It's all pretty much made up as you go along. And very minor shifts in tone can have a great impact. It's funny that you mention the yellows in 5 because the a version to me looks vastly better. To each his own.
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1a: digital
1b: film
2a: film
2b: digital
3a: film
3b: digital
4a: digital
4b: film
5a: film
5b: digital
6a: film
6b: digital
Ha! How'd I do?
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Almost. I'll email you the results.
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