SLR: Shootout On The Strip

Maybe I’m exaggerating, but it seems that serious film SLR owners primarily enjoy shooting pictures, while most serious digital SLR owners spend much of their time hunched over computers, massaging, enhancing, and changing images into something they weren’t originally.

A large number of digital SLR camera owners can’t seem to feel proud of a picture unless they’ve doctored it. And magazine picture editors looking for digital exotica sometimes seem more inclined to buy photographs if the photographer says they were digitally enhanced, even if they weren’t.

Film SLR owners have generally been straight shooting slide and print color film since the first Exakta of 1936. And when they talk of doctored film prints, they usually think of black-and-white darkroom work by a small body of skilled pros and amateurs—the Ansel Adamses and W. Eugene Smiths of the world.

But is all the post-shooting digital folderol necessary, or can a digital SLR stand on its own, and take good pictures to begin with?

To find out for myself, I decided to give a digital SLR the chance to shoot alongside a film SLR in some practical picture-taking situations. There would be no post-shooting doctoring other than what a competent minilab could render in reprints, if the picture had to be redone. The digital minilab I used provided me with 4x6 prints and negatives from the film camera, and 4x6 prints, a CD, and index prints from the digital camera.

I used my recently acquired digital Pentax *ist D and the *ist film camera. Both have similar exposure and autofocusing systems.

Can you spot the differences?
Digital: (top) Look at color contrast and narrow picture angle from 28mm setting on Pentax *ist D camera with 1.5X 35mm lens factor.
Film: (bottom) It wins winder-angle contest at same 28mm setting. Water's about the same color, but what differences do you find? Which do you prefer?