Although image quality is a major factor in deciding whether to use digital imaging, film, or both, there are other criteria that cannot be overlooked. Here are a few that I think are worthy of consideration ...
Cost
With the current state of digital photography I’m not entirely convinced that shooting film is really that much more expensive than shooting digital. When you choose the digital route you are boarding a fast-moving train that requires you to buy a new, often high-priced ticket every year or so. Sometimes less. The pace of development is still very high, and the leaps in performance and features at each new level are significant enough to warrant (necessitate) another investment in order to stay current … for a few more months. At some point this progress will slow down and we’ll have a bit more time to enjoy and create with our digital gear before it ends up on the ecologically unfriendly waste heap.
Film equipment, on the other hand, is not only relatively mature, but some of the best can now be had for almost unbelievably low prices. And a good film camera, even if it’s already quite old, will continue to provide top-notch performance for many more years – possibly decades – if given the proper care and maintenance. Of course the costs of film and processing are ongoing, but I doubt that they’re higher than the cost of keeping up with digital progress.
Some quick and rough research on the net reveals that the price of 35-mm and 120 roll film ranges from just under US$2.00 per roll to about $5.00 for the really good stuff. So if you shoot an average of about two rolls per week (I know some people shoot a LOT more, but let’s set an arbitrary baseline), you’ll be spending between about $100 and $250 per year on film. The cost of processing varies so much, especially if you process your own, that it’s difficult to figure into the equation, but even making allowance for the lab, a whole year’s worth of film and processing for the average amateur is likely to be equivalent to the cost of an inexpensive digital point-and-shoot camera. The film, however, will deliver much better quality than a current point-and-shoot with a teeny sensor – no matter how many megapixels it offers (when I refer to “sensor size” I’m talking about the physical dimensions of the sensor, not its resolution). The difference diminishes as the sensor size increases, but digital cameras with sensors large enough to scare film require an investment that will keep you well stocked with film for many years at the two-rolls-per-week rate mentioned above.
Then there are the peripheral costs. The biggie for film users who employ a hybrid workflow is scanning. To make the most out of film in a digital world there’s no way around the fact that you need to spend a significant sum on a scanner for your own use, or on scanning services. There’s a lot of argument about how much scanning quality you actually need to make film sing in various applications, but I’ll stay out of that one for the time being. Suffice it to say that a flatbed or film scanner that will deliver satisfactory quality for the serious amateur will cost about as much as a good DSLR body (with an APS-C size sensor, just to clarify that point).
Many of the peripheral costs of shooting digital overlap with those of shooting film and scanning to digital: the computer and image editing software are two big ones that come to mind. There is a noteworthy divergence when it comes to how and where you’ll keep your images, however, and this will be discussed in more detail in “Storage and Archiving,” below.
Convenience vs. Artistic Goals
To most people there is simply no question here: digital photography is clearly more convenient than using film. For many applications I will have to agree. But I believe there are compromises involved that become more or less significant depending on what the user wants to achieve. For family photos, travel, or any type of basic documentation it’s pretty hard to argue that film has an advantage. Just transfer your digital images from the camera to your computer and make prints or upload them to the web. Digital wins that round hands down. The same goes for sports photographers and photojournalists who can transfer their digital images directly to their photo editor via the Internet almost as they shoot. I’m afraid that in those arenas film is no longer merely dying, it is thoroughly extinct.
The question marks start popping up when artistic or esthetic goals become an issue. When you’re trying to create a certain “look” that’s relatively easy to achieve with film, the aggravation of spending hours and days dredging the depths of a complex image editing program to achieve the same results becomes a distinct inconvenience. Of course that doesn’t negate the validity of digital photography for fine art applications. In fact, digital technology opens the door to potential modes of expression that were unavailable with film. But, to draw a possibly contentious analogy, does “painting” directly to a computer via a pen tablet create the same look as painting on canvas with oils? If you preferred the latter would you be satisfied with the former?
Storage and Archiving
One of the nice things about film is that as long as it is processed and stored properly no further care or maintenance is required. I’m not even sure about what “stored properly” means, because I have black and while film that I processed myself more than 30 years ago that has been through extremes of temperature and humidity while being kept in simple plastic sleeves that is still in perfect condition. I have improved my storage practices a bit since then, but I am amazed at how well that old film has held up. On the other hand, there are several types of color film that that have generally degenerated badly since the 50’s and 60’s, but those weaknesses have, at least in theory, been eliminated in modern color films. Modern film keeps well, and can be rescanned and reprocessed digitally at any time with whatever the latest tools and techniques happen to be. That, in my mind, is a good thing.
Digital images, on the other hand, have to be kept on some sort of digital storage media. As megapixel counts increase the amount of data that has to be stored increases correspondingly, and although mass storage costs continue to drop, the future is uncertain. Since the dyes currently used in recordable CD and DVD disks are too unstable to provide reliable long-term storage, hard drives are the medium of choice. But there’s no way of knowing how long they will remain so. In addition to the fact that hard drives can and do fail, there is, at some point down the line, a physical limit to the volumes and speeds that such electro-mechanical devices can be engineered to provide. It looks as though the future will be a bit more solid state. Computer manufacturers are already implementing solid-state memory devices that take over some or even all of the functions that hard drives have handled thus far. It’s clear that digital photographs will have to be migrated from medium to medium for some time to come. The cost of all of this is surprisingly high (just ask the movie industry).