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 All of the excitement, new products, and creative potential that are part of the digital revolution are enough to make film shooters paranoid. Add to this Kodak’s late-September announcement that the photographic giant would, as one headline from The Wall Street Journal put it, “Shift Focus Away From Film, Toward Digital Lines.” As a lover of things silver halide, you might be tempted to break out black armbands (yes, with sprocket holes on the edges).
But film isn’t going away. Overshadowed? Yes. Extinct or even endangered? Hardly. There are millions of high-end film cameras out there, and millions of serious film shooters. While some of this may be nostalgia, most of film’s continuing appeal is practical. Film still does a lot well.
With the help of the Pop Photo Tech Team, here’s a look at just some of the reasons we know film has a future:
Film Cameras Are A Steal. Got $300? You can buy a lot more film SLR than digital anything. For instance, a 35mm Canon EOS Rebel Ti with a 28–90mm f/4–5.6 lens costs less than a Canon digital PowerShot A80, with 4MP and an f/2.8–4.9 lens (38–114mm 35mm equivalent). Both are good, but face it: the PowerShot is really just a top-end snapshooter. The 35mm Rebel Ti, however, can grow with your ambitions and skills, since it has many more custom controls and can handle virtually any lens in the almost-limitless Canon EF optical family. Soon you may want to buy a digital SLR body to use with your existing lenses, but in the meantime, a digital SLR is far more expensive than its 35mm counterpart. Even that breakthrough bargain, Canon’s EOS Digital Rebel, is three times the price of the Rebel Ti.
Film Is Fast. Low light? For high image quality, you can’t beat film. ISO 800 color-print film can give you quite acceptable resolution, sharpness, and even grain. And while ISO 1600 film tends to be grainy, it’s not all bad. But with most digital cameras, digital noise can degrade your images to the point of “why bother?” at ISO settings above 400. Even the $11,995 16.6MP Kodak DCS Pro Back 645H has settings only up to ISO 400. At that point, our lab tests found “moderate” noise. Yet a $300 35mm SLR handles ISO 1600 film without flinching.
Film Can Be Enlarged…A Lot. Big prints? Think film. Load ISO 100 print film into any decent SLR, and chances are you’ll get negatives that can be blown up to 20x24 prints that are sharp and detailed. For a digital camera to match that, you’d have to spend five times as much.
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