Is Film Photography Really Dead?

A curmudgeonly photographer gets dragged, kicking and screaming, into the Twenty-first Century.

Ever since the first semi-decent digital cameras hit the marketplace, there have been people declaring that film is an artifact, a relic of the olden days. When a one megapixel digital camera cost over a thousand bucks and a good solid film SLR cost two or three hundred, it was just plain laughable to assert that film was dead. But that didn’t stop the marketing folks from making the claim. Now that the prices are much more competitive and digital cameras are much, much better than they used to be, it’s reasonable to re-assess the relative merits of film and digital cameras.

After many years of nature photography, darkroom work, and employment in camera stores, plus theatrical, portrait, event, real estate, and product photography; I’ve finally decided to buy a serious digital camera. Will it replace my trusty Olympus OM-2s film SLR? Will it be useful for some types of shooting, and not so good for others? Or will it be a $600 paper weight?

As I proceed from research, purchasing, testing, and real-world working with my new camera, I’ll try to keep this section of my site updated. I hope it will prove useful to other people. At the very least, it will encourage me to be more sytematic about semi-scientific testing of the new technology versus the old, rather than relying on whims and impressions.

What I am seeking

Since I have experimented with quite a few types and models of digicams, I have a reasonable idea of what type of camera I’m looking for... or maybe I just have a good idea of the types I want to avoid.

The size factor. One beef I have with a lot of the digicams out there is that they’re too gosh-darned small. I find very few occasions when a few extra ounces of weight are a disadvantage, but teeny cameras have major drawbacks every time one tries to use them.

Tiny lenses gather tiny amounts of light. That’s a simple fact of optics. Digital sensors seem to need at least as much light to make a good image as film does. As a practical matter, I find that teeny cameras are adequate for taking flash pictures of people in a room, and not much else. Without the flash on, there’s seldom enough light to make a decent, handheld image, and if you’re going to be shlepping a tripod around, it’s really silly to get the itty-bitty camera. Since I'm a nature photographer, my subjects are often too far away to be lit by a wimpy, built-in flash. Since I'm a snooty pants with pretensions of professionalism, I realize that an electronic flash right over the lens is just about the worst way to light a photo; you get harsh shadows, blown out nearby highlights, red eye, etcetera, and so forth.

I find that tiny cameras are also hard to hold without blocking the autofocus beam or something equally vital, and it’s really hard to use those teensy-tinsy controls. Tiny cameras can be really cute, but I’m willing to carry some extra weight since it inevitably involves a camera that takes better pictures and is easier to use.

I like to make big prints of my nature photos. I need lotsa megapixels, six at a minimum, plus a lens and imaging system that are good enough to make full use of every single solitary one of those pixels.

For landscapes, and also for my occasional real estate shoot, I need a wide angle lens. I seldom do wildlife or sports photography, so I’m not so concerned about the telephoto end. Most digicams have zooms which go far into the telephoto zone, but not very wide at all. Many models don’t go wider than 35mm* (in 35mm film equivalent terms). Part of the reason for this is engineering, and part is marketing. Whatever the reason, I need a field of view at least as wide as a 28mm* lens.

The money thang. I don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on the latest and greatest. For now, I’ll just barely be able to squeeze out six or seven hundred for a basic shooting kit, which will include an extra battery and at least a gigabyte of memory.

Manual controls. In most of my shooting, I use aperture-preferred automatic with exposure compensation. I seldom use full manual mode, and I never use fully programmed idiot mode. In other words, I set the aperture for the depth of field I want, the camera selects an appropriate shutter speed. If it looks like the scene should be rendered brighter or darker than a 18% grey card, I dial in a correction. My optimal camera should operate easily in aperture preferred auto; full manual should be available. Maybe I’ll learn to love some of the specialized program modes that high tech cameras have these days.

Manual focus.

Many, perhaps most, digital cameras have manual focus controls that are very nearly useless. The problem is that their viewfinders have such low resolution that the photographer can’t tell reliably what’s in focus and what isn’t. I want a high resolution viewfinder and depth of field preview.

The Research Phase

Once I had a reasonable idea of what I was seeking, I started to look at the available camera models and tried to find the best match. This seemed like a daunting proposition; there are about a hundred gazillion digital camera models out there. But, once I eliminated the itsy-bitsy cameras, the tooo expensive digital SLRs, and the cameras without a wide lens, one group emerged. These are eight megapixel cameras with a built-in lens. There are a few models using the same imaging chip, but with very different features and lenses. Most of these models were introduced in early 2004, so now the prices have come down and used and refurbished cameras are available.

A good summary of these models is available here.

The first model to emerge as a contender was the Olympus Camedia C-8080 Wide Zoom. I’ve been an Olympus shooter since I started taking photography seriously in 1984. I have a friend who owns an 8080, and he likes it a lot. I’ve also done some fairly serious shooting with one of the 8080’s predesessors, an E-10. The 8080 has a nice feature set and gets generally high praise from reviewers [1 2 3].

It’s been discontinued by Olympus, but there are readily available refurbished units and gently used ones. The 8080’s successor, the seven megapixel C-7070, looks like an adequate camera, but hardly an outstanding one. If I had more money budgeted for this adventure I’d seriously consider the new Olympus dSLRs.

For a while, I was seriously considering the Nikon Coolpix 5400. Its conspicuous advantage for me is having the widest lens available in a camera of this type, a 24mm* at the wide end of the zoom. It’s also readliy available at a nice price, around $400. But the reviewers aren’t so impressed [1 2 3]. They grumble about poor ergonomics, and a not so hot lens fraught with barrel distortion, purple fringing, chromatic aberration, etc.

Then, I started reading about the Konica Minolta Dimage A2. It has a 28-200mm* lens and built-in image stabilization. While I’m a big advocate of shlepping a tripod and using it for (nearly) every shot, the image stabilization is intriguing. There are times when a tripod won’t get high enough, or low enough, or set up quickly enough. There are times when I don’t want to bother. I’ve seen test shots with the A2’s stabilization taken handheld at 1/15 of a second that were still nice and sharp. The A2 also has an EVF viewfinder that is much higher resolution than the other cameras in its class, a big plus for manual focusing.

The A2 also seems to be much better for using the RAW format, which the reviewers say is cool. It's still new to me, but apparently the RAW format preserves a lot of image info which would be lost in jpeg-ification, so the resulting image can be adjusted for color accuracy much better, and since it’s uncompressed, there should be no compression goobers. The A2 has a buffer that allows it to shoot several RAW images in quick succession. The other cameras in this group have to stop and write the file to the memory card before you can shoot another frame.

The reviewers rave about this camera [1 2 3 4]. There are always some problems; a few of the just plain folks reviewers got bad ones, or didn’t learn how to use their A2, or something, but the reviews are on the whole very favorable, and the camera has won some pretigious awards.

Ironically, this highly regarded camera is not as easy to find as the others. Konica Minolta has a newer model out, the A200, which has economized on some key features, mostly the high resolution EVF. Several of the online stores carrying Dimage cameras seem to have the two models confused; they use the terms A2 and A200 interchangeablely. My hunch is that they’re shipping the A200s.

I search the world for an authentic A2 at a nice price. There are a few used ones on Ebay, and a few online stores have refurbished or remanufactured units. The fully new ones are hard to find and pricey.

After much researching, hemming, hawing, and lurking on Ebay, I opt for a remanufactured A2 from a firm called Nice Electronics.

I pick up a couple of inexpensive replacement batteries on Ebay and a 1GB compact flash card from buy.com. The grand total including 2nd day air shipping for the camera and cf card, is $630, a little over my budget, but I'll get by.

Coming soon: another installment of Garth’s Digital Camera Saga