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The battle between digital and film has reached the silly walk stage.

One of the financial hazards of me being a self-confessed trainspotter is that I try to subscribe to various railroad and model railroad magazines to keep up with what's happening in the world of steel wheels on steel rail(s). Most of the magazines are either model railroad magazines or specialty magazines for special interest groups, but I do subscribe to a mainstream railfan magazine (I periodically pick up Railfan & Railroad at the local hobby shop, but I don't subscribe to it because they suffer from the nasty tendency of railfan magazines to morph into photography magazines that happen to include pictures of trains), so I get to see, along with the obituaries for Alco locomotives (when I started subscribing to TRP, they still had little sections for Baldwin and F-M locomotives, but there aren't enough of those engines left to write about anymore, even though Switching Management Services is busily buying and leasing every Baldwin they can pry out of the hands of their current owners), an occasional lunge into photogeekery.

I don't have a philosophical objection to photogeekery -- after all, I spent a lot of money recently buying a digital SLR and a (tiny) handful of lenses -- but one of the things the photogeeks are obsessing about is digital vs film cameras, and they're obsessing about it in the same was the audiogeeks obsess about digital vs. analogue sound reproduction; they pick out some tiny little things, then pump them up to be a Major! Flaw! With! Digital! that cannot, of course, be worked around.

The silliest of the claims (and thus, the one I present first) in this article is that digital is inferior to film because, um, you can't tell the difference between the original picture and reproductions. I spent some time trying to justify this as a feature, but all I could come up with was "if you want that behavior from digital, just print a negative image to film and delete the image without making a backup copy." I'm not a professional photographer (as you can tell from the pictures I put on TSFR), so it's not really important to me that I keep the One Ring True Image™ to myself, but if I did want to keep the original image to myself I'd just save it as a jpeg, then resave it again as another jpeg before sending those copies off to someone else; jpegs use lossy compression, so an additional save step will ensure that the copies aren't the same as the original.

A somewhat less silly, but not much less, claim is that if that it's harder to save digital copies than it is to save film, because either (a) the formats will change or (b) since you have to keep upgrading your Microsoft operating system you'll need to spend lots of money upgrading your image reading and processing software every year or so. And you'd have to buy a computer! And do backups! Well, um, I've got, floating around in my big pile of computer pornography™ (railroad photos. My collection is woefully lacking in Hot!Hot!Hot! man2man sexxor action, because I didn't actually have a digital camera or exhibitionist boyfriends when I was sleeping around. Sorry), some scans of Milwaukee Road diesels that I snarfed off the net in the late 1980s. And they're still readable with the (freeware and GPLware) readers I am running on my (freeware and one remaining gatesware) PCs. And these images have migrated from floppy disks to SCSI hard disks attached to Atari STs to SCSI disks attached to IBM PCs to IDE hard disks attached to IBM PCs. So it's not really a problem for me, because I already had the computers. I've been a lot happier with retention of my digital images than my film images; I didn't take very many pictures, etc when I was young, but the 45 minutes of 251 engine sounds I took one cold afternoon in the LaCrosse yard didn't even last as long as 576 did, as did the several hours of film showing various Alcos around LaCrosse, GM&O F-units in Central Illinois, and B&M engines on the Conway branch in New Hampshire. I consider myself to be very lucky that my photos of the F-Ms in Madison survived (ditto for my photos of the CSS&SB Russas and Conrail GG1s.) All of my digital images, on the other hand, are still consuming a slowly growing slice of my hard drive, and the only problem I have with them is that I can't weed out the duplicates fast enough.

Which leads me to the third issue I've got with this outburst of "film r00lz, digital dr00lz!"; as an aside, the article mentions just how cheap film is, and lists as an example that a roll of good quality film (Velvia? I've never heard of it) with developing costs US$10 for 36 pictures. I've taken ~3600 pictures with my US$1100 camera (camera back + 2 lenses + service plan + media), so at US$10 for 36 exposures I'd have spent, um, US$1000 for film, and, just as an aside, had to find storage facilities for 3600 negatives (and nowever many prints I wanted to keep for display purposes.) I don't have the best 35mm-equivalent camera back in all christendom, but if I looked to buy an equivalent Pentax film camera back, I'm looking at US$450 for back+lenses before I start buying that US$1000 worth of film.

I don't really see the savings here.

If I was planning on using a 4x5 camera body and had the skill to develop pictures myself (some more of the pictures I've lost were a series of photos of Milw H16-66s on their way to the scrapyard. I tried to develop them myself, and ended up with a collection of badly developed blurry photos of orange and black boxes), then spending US$3500 + OhMyGod! per print would be cheaper, for a long time, than spending US$30,000 for a digital 4x5, the attached hard drive pack, the 2-3 terabyte disk array (I only have 80gb today, but I expanded up to that size when I digitized the family CD library and it completely filled the 40gb IBM deathstar that used to be /home), but the pricepoint for digital camera backs has come down to the point where the marketing people have taken to calling the less feature-ridden SLRs "prosumer" in the hopes of getting the yuppies to buy the more feature-laden expensive SLRs (I don't know if the real pros really care, as long as they can attach their menageries of optical glass to their camera backs. I know I don't care, unless it turns out that Pentax-compatable glass is all garbage and it's not possible to get adapters to attach Nikon-compatable lenses to my *istDS) which will then grow old in the toychest at their expensive summer homes. And unless you get really good film, the equvalent pixel density just doesn't win, so I couldn't point one way or another and say which is better.

But I'm certainly not going to claim that images saved in a published format are less reliable that picture stored on camera film. If civilization collapses, well, yes, you'll probably lose most of the digital pictures (we've only got enough photo paper for about 600 pictures. and if civilization died it's not likely we'd be able to get more), but there's no way I'd bother to save out any negatives if there was no chance they'd ever be used for printing again. Failing that, it's really your own fault if you store your images in a proprietary format (he-lo! Polaroid, and your stupid PDN format. Every other camera in the world stores pictures as jpegs, so why can't you?) and then upgrade your computer to the point where you can't load the images viewers that will view them. Ditto if you store your negatives in a place where rats can eat them.

—orc Mon Jul 11 02:16:49 2005

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