Re: A simple question...

Jennifer Usher wrote:
I have been wondering..what was the first digital camera that was considered to be a true replacement for film? I mean, I remember some years ago that there was a lot of talk about this. That digital would reach the point of being as good as film. When did this happen?
Digital is as good as film? News to me :-P

The problem with that statement is that there are so many variables. There are also many different qualities to measure - resolution, colour accuracy, grain/noise, dynamic range etc. For the following, lets assume by "film" we mean 35mm film, and by "digital" we mean 35mm or smaller format. Larger format film delivers significantly better results than even the best of the 35mm digitals. There are large format digital cameras available, but they are priced such that they would be only used for niche purposes.

On straight resolution, a typical 10MP consumer DSLR is about on par with typical consumer colour-neg film. Some of the top B&W or Slide films (eg techpan, Velvia, kodachrome) easily exceed all but the very top-of-the-line DSLRs for resolution.

One of the big drawbacks with digital is its highlight performance. Even the pickiest of slide films will give more headroom in the highlights than most digital cameras. Plus film has the advantage that when it does exceed it's highlight range it does so in a more graceful manner, easing into it rather than the abrupt and ugly white cutoff of digital. Some of the latest cameras utilise various tricks to try to overcome this problem, getting them to about on par with slide film. Negative film though is still miles ahead of digital in this regard.

On the other hand though, digital retains much better shadow detail than film does. They take advantage of this capability to deliver high-ISO modes. This is one of the big strengths of digital - changing ISO on the fly. And while Digital cameras get quite noisy when the ISO goes up, they still deliver (arguably) better performance than high-ISO films. Personally I find digital noise to be much uglier than film grain.

The first consumer 6MP DSLRs were probably the first that were considered on par with film. While good film could still deliver significantly better results, the 6MP DSLRs were definitely good enough for most needs. Film could perform better, but the difference in most cases wasn't worth the hassle. Regardless of the technical aspects where film was better, the convenience of the 6MP DSLRs, combined with their ability to produce good-enough images was such that they were readily embraced, and film started its rapid decline in usage.

For the consumer point and click market, the Kodak DC3400 (2MP) was probably one of the earlier digitals that was "good enough" to be on par with 35mm & APS compact cameras. It was one of the first that could make a 6x4 print at 300dpi. It also had very good performance for noise and colour accuracy (in fact it did this better than many much newer high megapixel compact cameras). It probably wasn't quite up to the task of producing 11x14 prints, but certainly up to about 6x9 it was on par with most of the 35mm compact cameras.


I should add, I did a lot of film work in the past, but quit around 1982. I only took up the habit again a bit over a year ago, and am getting back into it seriously again. So I sort of missed a lot of stuff over the years.

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