I agree, it is an argument that would never end, like BMW vs Merc etc. It is down to personal preference and for me at the time Canon won due to AEB and probably a better sales person.

I had to spend 3 days on a raft trip with a girl who sold Sony camera's I think or maybe Samsung anyway she just went on about XYZ, all the sales stuff she was tought out of college. At the end of the day her pics were crap so that made me happy.

The other option is to go traditional. You can buy a high quality film SLR from Nikon or Canon and a great assortment of used lenses for quite a bit less than a DSLR body and lenses. Put the difference into film and processing, which really isn't that expensive.

In my case I bought Nikon's top of the range film SLR (the F6) and compared to Canon's top DSLR at the time the difference in body costs was $7500. I can buy a lot of film for $7500, and the F6 isn't obsolete in 18 months.

Either way you go, film or digital, KEH.com is the place to buy. I generally never buy better than bargain grade equipment and it always looks just lightly used. Their ratings are very conservative, and excellent service.

film and processing costs add up fast, plus there's the space required to carry the film. thousands of digital photos can fit into a pocket, with no concern over keeping it cool or being subjected to airport x-rays.

the problem with that comparison is that you are comparing a five year old used film camera (which was nearly $3000 when new) with a new top of the line dslr that produces images that are substantially better than what the f6 can ever hope to produce.

a more realistic comparison for the f6 would be with a nikon d90 or d300, as well as the older d200 which can still be found new for under $1000.

yes, keh is a great place to buy stuff.

and if you include sigma, tamron and tokina, there's about 70-80 lenses from which to choose.

that pretty much sums it up, and don't forget the paid shills who do a 'test' only to find what they set out to 'prove.' however, it can be quite entertaining at times, and every so often, there actually is some useful information.

I bought the F6 new, and at the time the best DSLR out there was the Canon 1DsMKII, which was $10K, and I paid $2500 for the F6. A friend of mine is also a photographer and he has the 1DsMKII as well as a 5D MKII. I've shot with both extensively, and given that they both are full frame cameras they certainly do not produce images "substantially better". Different, yes, substantially better, no. My camera has proven to be much more rugged, as we've gone hiking together in the rockies, and his has failed while mine kept working. It was pouring rain, and the Canon didn't like that, while mine kept going.

I have two 16x20's on my office wall, one digital printed on an Epson inkjet, the other from film that I printed in my darkroom on Ilfochrome. My colleagues know nothing about photography, but so far they have all preferred the film print, even though the subject matter is very similar.

In black and white the difference is much more pronounced, digital simply cannot produce prints with the subtilty of tone that a traditional print can, and from a large format negative it's not a contest, people pick the film every time.

Digital has a place, but its too expensive for me. My cameras are still precision optical mechanical instruments, instead of disposable consumer electronics.

From my perspective, film is too expensive. I can shoot over 7000 frames on a three week trip. Carrying 200 rolls of film would be cumbersome to say the least and the price would be absolutely prohibitive.

And I don't quite get the statement that digital cameras are disposable consumer electronics. I've had my dSLR body for nearly 5 years and it is still going quite strong.

But film has its place, as well. A local camera shop is in the process of going out of business and they have some Nikon F4 bodies for �150... I just may pick one up.

Cheers,
T.

In the sense that yes it works, but the sensor can't produce images up to the standard of today's DSLR's. I can drop the latest film into a 5 or 50 year old camera and have the latest technology available.

I bill the client for film and processing, whereas I can't bill the client for the substantial amount of post processing that is necessary with digital capture. Plus, I hate the time spent doing the boring work (sharpening, colour correction) in Photoshop, but I can send film to the lab and have it back in 2 hours.

Out of curosity, how many of the 7000 images are good? Do you shoot that much because it's necessary, or because you can?

I've never shot that many on a 3 week trip, but have a good percentage of "keepers". I find my percentage goes up with the format: I shoot more in 35mm, but have fewer "outstanding" shots, but in 8"x10" just about every one is good shot because its a much more contemplative approach to taking a photo. When it takes 30 min to set up the camera, you make sure its worth taking before you bother setting up the camera.

i don't know where you are shopping, but the canon 1ds (all versions) listed for $8k and the 1ds iii is currently about $6.5-7k street price, usa currency. $2500 sounds about right for an f6, however.

and you don't need to get a 1ds ii to outperform an f6 (or any 35mm film camera for that matter). a nikon d200 (at the time) would have sufficed and a d300 very definitely will.

no offense, but something is wrong. a canon 1ds mark ii and certainly a 5d mark ii enter into medium format film territory. they both produce images that are much better than from any 35mm film camera.

here's a comparison with a nikkormat ft3 35mm camera & velvia iso 50 film, a hasselbald 503cw camera & velvia 50 iso film, and a 12 megapixel full frame canon 5d digital slr (about half as many megapixels as the 5d ii):

http://www.ales.litomisky.com/projec...anon%205D).htm
"The best quality both in print and on the screen viewed at 100% are clearly from the Canon 5D, followed by the Hasselblad, and lastly - after a significant gap � by the 35 mm film camera."

another comparison (and note that the canon d60 was a 6 megapixel camera):

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/re...shootout.shtml
"Then in mid-2002 I upgraded to the Canon EOS D60. This cameras clearly surpassed 35mm film quality in every respect and so I retired my film-based Canon EOS 1V. But I still continued to do my landscape work with medium format and film."

i've had better results from a lowly 6 megapixel nikon dslr than i ever got with 35mm film, especially at medium to high iso. with a 12 megapixel dslr, it is simply no longer a contest.

that has more to do with the build quality of a given body than it does for film versus digital. the 5d mark ii is not well sealed while the f6 is.

there are far too many variables for that comparison to be meaningful.

and they'd pick a large format print over one made from 35mm film too. that has more to do with the vast difference in format size than film being better.

dslrs are hardly what i'd call disposable consumer electronics and they're just as much precision as any film camera, if not more so. digital is also significantly cheaper and more convenient than film for anyone who shoots more than a few rolls a year.

that's true, but even a digital camera from a few years ago is already beyond what the same format film can produce.

you can 'send out' the digital images by taking the flash card to a camera store and having the images printed. also, the amount of work in processing digital images isn't typically that much and a lot of it can be automated.

nothing prevents someone from taking 30 minutes (or more) to set up for a digital shot either. that's a question of technique, not film versus digital.

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

Many, yes, certainly but not all. I got a quite good 28-200mm AF-D lens for $150, and an even better 18-35mm 18-35mm AF-D lens for $250 used. I would contend that these two lenses combined outperform the 18-135mm and 18-200mm current lenses, in particular, at the wide end the 18-35mm is FAR superior in terms of distortion, than any of the newer wide range AF-S zooms lenses are. And an un-sung SUPERB cheapo Nikkor zoom is the 28-70mm f3.5~4.5 AF-D lens, a tiny, sharp, contrasty, low distortion, completely flare free lens that can easily be gotten for under $100. And one can get an older 80-200mm f2.8 Nikkor Zoom for under $600 that is optically the equal of the 70-200 f2.8 AF-S VR lens that sells for $1700. VR and AF-S is nice, but they are not worth spending 3X as much for basically the same optics. This also ignores a whole lot of nice lenses from Tokina and Tamron that don't have AF-S support. Like the great Tokina 12-24 and 11-16mm superwides, and Tamron's great Macro lenses.

And how many of them are primes that are currently available for under $400?
ZERO. Meanwhile, I use a 50mm f1.8, a 24mm f2.8, and a 180mm f2.8 lens, all of which are among Nikon's finest performing lenses, all of which can be found inexpensively, and none of which will autofocus on a D40 or D60.

So right now, Nikon has introduced, but will not ship for another 2 months, exactly ONE high quality but inexpensive prime that works on the D40 and D60. And I am sure that all of the future AF-S lenses that Nikon will be producing will be nowhere NEAR as great values as the zooms and primes that I listed are on the used market. But a D40 or D60 precludes anyone from using them if they want autofocus - and believe me, manually focusing an autofocus lens on an autofocus body is no picnic for someone who has never used a manual focus DSLR before - which, I sensed the OP to be.

And the cost of the D90 is why I recommended a D80. Those bodies cost around $550 new nowadays. A used D50 would also be great, and those can be gotten for $250 in near mint condition.

BTW, I am the happy owner of a D80 (bought used for $425 with battery grip), and I just picked up a nice D50 with a Katz Eye screen on ebay for under $225 as a backup body.

Out of the 7000, perhaps 100-200 are good (which, of course, is a relative term). On these trips, I mainly shoot animals in the wild, which for me requires a lot of shots to get right. A better photographer might get by with far less.

I can imagine a pro in certain situations getting excellent results with film. For a hobbyist (such as myself, and, as I understood, the OP), I feel digital is definitely the way to go.

Cheers,
T.

Interesting, I haven't pulled out my 4x5s in twenty years.

Yes, we still have two full sets of Canon film SLRs and three sets of Nikon dSLRs along with 4x5s and numerous digital P&S. My kids still insisting to keep the film cameras around to get that film look.

Although the film cameras are getting less and less use nowadays. I think as our dSLRs' lens collection grow, the film cameras will stay more and more in their bags.

Some people are selling the 18-55mm+55-200mm kit lenses for $300. I pickup a 55-200mm VR in mint condition for $170.

A new D40+18-55mm just went for $355 on eBay. So I don't understand why you are buying $150 of this and $250 of that that a basic kit will cover.

I am also looking for a cheap 80-200mm f/2.8. But there are only two versions of two ring design, one AF-S and one AF. And both are not cheap. Many writers suggested against the AF version although I have not tried it myself. VR does exactly what people who looks for f/2.8 needs to do, extend the low light range. So if one will paying for a $800-$900 non-VR, is $1300 a far stretch? These are the questions I ask of myself and so far I could not reconcile either way.

The D70/D70s is even better. At 6MP and 1.5MP/CM2, it must be as great as the newer D40 for low light. It can also do wireless flash where the D50 cannot. You can get a D70 body for around $300 and the D70s slightly more.

When I bought the D200, I pass on the D80 mainly because it used SD instead of CF and lacking the 10 pin connector.