I'm in Canada, and our $ was worth quite a bit less than the US at the time.


The weakness with all of those comparisons is that the film is scanned, and there is quite a bit of image degradation in the scanning process. I've done similar comparisons myself by comparing prints, and not come to the same conclusions. The Portaria's and Kodak's new Ektar 100 scan quite a bit better than other films.

I know Michael Reichmann, and I've been to his gallery and seen quite a bit of his work. Is it good? Absolutely. Did it blow me away compared to prints I can make from film? No. Was there an obvious quality advantage? Again, no. Actually, I thought the blacks were muddy and it was lacking both contrast and D max, and this was stuff off of a Phase One medium format back that cost roughly $40K. With that sort of investment I was expecting something amazing, and it wasn't any better or worse than a competent photographer could have produced using film. Maybe there is an sharpness or detail advantage under a magnifying glass, but standing 10 feet away in a gallery that is lost.

If you're a pixel peeper digital does do better, but I look at the overall image. Does any one discredit Robert Capa's Falling Soldier because its soft, grainy, has blocked up highlights and a bit of motion blur? Of course not, its still a moving image, and I think that counts for more than absolute image quality. Most of the memorable pictures from the Vietnam war are quite poor technically, but that doesn't lessen their impact. Grain can be good! Why else would photoshop have an add on to to make things look like they were shot on Tri-X? Call me crazy, but I think its easier to shoot it on Tri-X if you want the results to look like Tri-X.

Obviously digital works for you, and that's great. I just trying (and probably not well) to point out that its not the only way to capture images, and the quality from film can be excellent. Given the crap that's on photo sharing sites like flickr and such, it seems that most people really don't care about quality, just convenience.

For me, one of my most important subjects has a particular shade of red that I've found Kodachrome is the only capture medium (film or digital) that can get it right. That's part of the reason I stick with film, plus I'm not on a constant backup and data preservation treadmill.

I never have to worry about CD'd becoming unreadable or upgrading my computer and software, or changing formats. I've dealt with format migration of going from 8" floppys to 5.25" to 3.5" floppies to zip drives, jazz drives, and now CD's and DVD's and I'm tired of having to migrate all that data just to ensure that it will remain readable.

I'm trying to simplify my life, so I just file my slides in archival steel boxes and my kids can look at them in 50 years by holding them to the light. I get a lot of pleasure in knowing that I don't need a piece of software to look at my images. Plus the impact of an 8"x10" transparancy on a light table isn't to be underestimated