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After doing our last digital vs. film test we received several questions from followers wondering why we didn't compare a full frame digital capture to 35mm film or 645 film to a $30K digital back. The simple answer was that we were simply comparing the capture mediums, not cameras. The easiest way to do that was to use smaller format pro-sumer cameras. At the time many enthusiasts and "Professional" photographers were still shooting the D300 and other cameras like it (I still think the smaller sensor size has an advantage when shooting telephoto zooms). For those pro photographers shooting 6cm film that went digital, most have opted for, or later upgraded to, a full frame sensor. But the medium format backs have been predominantly (due to numerous practicalities) reserved for 4x5 and studio shooters. In context, the 645 format is really a relatively small format for film. The largest you can go with a great digital back is about 6x4.5 but with film you can go all the way up to 8x10 or even larger. The smallest serious digital format is M4/3, but with film 35mm is lowest quality available. There was also the price gap between a Nikon F3 and a Canon 5D Mark II. Not even in the same ballpark. In the end we felt we chose two easily accessible formats to compare.
It would seem a fair assessment, that digital sensor sizes scaled to film sensor sizes, tend to line up in accessibility, application and functionality of each medium pretty accurately...
That being said, recently we talked a friend into letting us borrow her 5D Mark II and we decided to do the test all digital photographers really wanted to see... Full frame digital vs. full frame 35mm film! So here it is!
Above you can see Matt really enjoying having us point our cameras at him. :) Thanks Matt! On the left is the Cannon EOS 5D Mark II with a 50mm f/1.2 L shot RAW at ISO 100 and on the right our little Nikon FE2 with a 50mm f/1.2 AI-S loaded with Kodak Ektar 100. Both were exposed identically metering for Matt's face. The digital was edited in Aperture to maintain optimal latitude, color and contrast. The film is a straight scan made on our Fuji Frontier SP-2500. The output at 300 DPI is 10 inches in width (conservatively 14MP), so we scaled in a little on the negative when scanning to match the 21MP (about 12 in.) resolution of the 5D.
There are some definite differences in the overall look of the two images. I love the color of the Ektar! Skin looks great! The digital appears to fall just shy of the highlight detail of the film. Detail is definitely lost in the background but the transitions look much better than other digital cameras. The Ektar is a very contrasty negative stock but it still performs rather well under intense lighting.
Next, exposure forgiveness... The series below were shot underexposed 2 stops, then normal exposure, and finally over 2 stops. (Digital hates it when we do that!)
No too surprising. Pretty self explanatory. The Raw files really handled the over and underexposure well in the soft light, but had little to offer in way of highlight detail in the sky even when underexposed 2 stops. The tree and the building above Matt's right shoulder are totally destroyed by the sun on digital, whereas on film, all the detail is retained in every exposure. Now take a look at the detail pixel for pixel.
On the right, film does really well with the harsh back light. The 5D has digital's signature neon glow. I could have spent time reducing noise and fringing but this is a capture test, not a digital post test. In regards to grain vs. noise, these two seem to go toe to toe and I'm sure everyone who sees this will have a different opinion on which is better so I'm going to stay out of it. The film grain appears a little larger but the film has no interpolation so therefore finer resolution. I will say that the beauty of film is that you can get 5X the resolution just by upgrading to a Mamiya C330 and Ektar in 120 and little to no cost! Not available for the Canon. You have to invest in a $30K digital back and a brand new camera! Either way, grain and noise this size would not be visible on any print under 16x20. What would be visible in a print would be the spectral highlights and interpolation you see around Matt's head where the highlights blowout on the digital shot. In our experience, film always looks better printed whereas digital tends to fall apart when you print it due to the aforementioned and the fact that gradients and color ranges that look great on your screen don't always look great in the print.
In the end I was actually blown away how good the 5D Mark II actually did! I have nothing but good things to say about this camera. I still love our film but later that night when we pushed some Kodak Vision 3 500T 3 stops to 3200 to compare to the Cannon's 3200 setting I was amazed at the performance.
These shots are straight out of camera! The 5D has a little built in color noise reduction and sharpening in camera but I didn't do anything about the noise in post. The 5D Mark II is just that good at ISO 3200! The 500T is amazing for being pushed 3 full stops in developing but didn't turn out to be true 3200. Maybe a halfway between ISO 1600 and 3200 and seeing that I can underexpose 500T 2 stops in low light without pushing and still only loose a little shadow detail tells me that pushing color film only increases your mid-tone and highlight levels. You may get a little more separation by bringing some of your shadows into the mid-tone range, thus getting images that look better exposed, but in the end you are not adding information to your negative. Color film pushed is only as good as the shadow detail of your film stock. I do prefer the look of the film shot better than the digital but at the cost of some speed and resolution.
In the end, I still can't see film becoming obsolete anytime soon. There are so many great cameras and film stocks out there at truly affordable prices that there is no reason for anyone not to get into it. On the other side, digital is very expensive and time consuming. To have the current top of the line digital gear we would have to sell almost all of our film gear. And we have a lot! But if you have the cash and are good at working in RAW and love spending time editing images on your computer the Mark 2 is probably perfect for you. But I say film is beautiful! If you get good scans you really don't have to do anything to it and it will look gorgeous.
So what are you waiting for? Go out and shoot some film, take it to Richard Photo Lab and tell me you don't love it!
Added 1/26/2011...
Our friend Zach Hodges saw this post yesterday and offered to put a few of the images from the Canon 5D Mark II through his normal work flow to see if he could improve upon the initial capture quality. So we sent a few over and here is what he had to say:
"I ran three of those through my usual assembly line. I tried not to spend more than a normal amount of time on it but I suspect I may have, about 7 mins a photo. As I suspected, there was some improvement to be made, but film obviously still destroys in the DR department. The f/2 and 1/1000 one was the only one that had recoverable highlights. Fringing was pretty easy to get rid of with a few clicks and skin tone is very subjective, but I took it to where I liked it."
This was the same raw file from above that was exposed 2 stops under. It looks much much better! But the film shot that was exposed 4 stops more (16X brighter highlights) than this one retained just as much highlight detail with zero post. Fringing is gone and color looks a lot better! Goes to show that good postprocessing makes all the difference with digital photography. Thanks Zach! :)
For many artists straining to see in the dark of a digital age, the recent news of Fuji ending production of 400H in 220 can feel like the final blinding blow from the digital demagogues. After seeing Kodachrome, 800Z, and countless other beautiful stocks (not to mention Polaroid) vanish before our eyes, we have clung to the analoged daylight of the past. After all "Photography" breaks down to "the writing (archiving) of light" in greek, and as photographers we cherish moments of light. I recently received an alarmist text from a fresh photographer, choosing to shoot film, reading "Film is dead, Fuji is killing it!" Another such phone call left me with the image of a successful photographer weeping at her desk, after running into "discontinued" notifications online. I have followed up these emotional reactions with reassurance and rationality, but as these occurrences are becoming all too common, I decided offer our foresight to the public.
The future may seem pretty dark, but to everything there is a time and a season, and you can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs. And if Fuji's 400h is an exegetical egg, then Kodak's Vision3 is the Goose that's laying the golden egg! But platitudes aside, let me assure you that film is only going to get better! How do I know this? Because I have seen the future, and it's brighter than ever. You see, film is manufactured (and will continue to be for a long time coming) primarily for motion picture films. TV shows and movies pay millions of dollars per production to film manufacturers. So it is in the interest of; say Kodak, to spend all of it's R&D on motion picture stocks. This technology is only handed down to us, still photographers, years later; i.e. Kodak's celebrated Ektar 1oo is based off of a technology used by cinematographers for a decade.
As recently as this June kodak has been releasing the most exciting emulsions in their Vision3 line of film stocks. We have been shooting these ECN2 negative films since January, and working with Technicolor to have our 250 exposure rolls processed. Our journey into the future has been quite amazing! Our first test was high ISO 35mm 500T vs 800z in low light, and the results blew us away. We then followed up with some real world examples, and upped the ante by comparing 500T to 35mm 400H and 800Z in 220! Now I'm going to blow some minds...
We shoot the Vision3 500T film in our 35mm Nikon F3's with bulk backs, and one of our favorite setups for MF is our Pentax 6x7 with Fuji 400H. This is far from a fair comparison here. A 6x7 negative is 4 times the size of a 35mm frame, and the P67 SMC glass is the best around, not to mention 500T's native ISO is 1000 & tungsten balanced! But I figured what the heck... I exposed 35mm 500T at ISO 800, and 220 400H at ISO 200 (both wide angle lenses were shot wide open). I performed straight scans of each on our Fuji Frontier at an 8x10 proportionate print resolution, then scaled directly to original magnification. You can see for yourself...
I know that the Pentax glass is superior, and the Nikon is a little softer wide open, but this stuff is ridiculous! Printed at 8x10 neither would have grain visible to naked eye, but the 35mm shot would actually have smoother texture! And just looking at the emulsion close up, I can't help but get excited about what "new" bright ideas Kodak has on the horizon for still photographers... Perhaps in medium format? :-)
Within the last year digital has made great leaps in high ISO capabilities. But unbeknownst to the world outside of hollywood, film has been making it's own advances well into it's supposed afterlife. This is part 2 of our Kodak Vision 3 500T motion picture film test. For part 1 we set up a controlled study, which can be viewed here. This time we brought our Nikon F3 with 250 exposure MF-4 back to a wedding. Most of the day was to be very low light photojournalistic coverage of a traditional Jewish wedding (full real wedding post coming very soon!). We shot the 500t along side our Nikon FE-2's, range finders, and TLR's and the results are amazing! We had the ECN-2 film processed by Technicolor here in Hollywood, and I scanned all of these samples on our Fuji Frontier with no post-correction in the computer. This is the honest truth!
First off, during preparations we shot some 400h in the lobby of the hotel. We usually overexpose our 400h by a stop. But the 500T? no need. One under is just fine!
The 500T in 35mm holds up against medium format, could you image 500T220? The exposure difference under the altar was 3 stops and change. Look at that DR!
This bulk back came in super handy through all the events leading up to the ceremony in this low lit temple.
This shot was taken during the day with window light metered off of the table.
The most amazing thing is the versatility of this film. All temperatures of light and extreme under and over exposure produces acceptable images. But 800z does have a look all it's own.
Color images in low light are possible on film! That's the cinematographer's dirty little secret...
This just demonstrates the advances and potential in film, that are kept just out of arms reach, since the popularization of the "film is dead" ideology, when in fact film is still just maturing! Digital would have a hard time getting these kind of images straight out of the camera, or even through RAW processing. I don't even care if I could achieve it through the right combination of money+time, I still love film! :-)
Everyone is raving about the new high ISO capabilities of digital, and the future of digital. What about the future of film? Well, one way to find out is to look to the motion picture industry. Any R&D into new emulsions by Kodak or Fuji is going to be for film's biggest clientele, Hollywood movies! It usually takes years (if ever) for the technology to trickle down to the still community; e.g. Kodak's Ektar 100 that was finally released to photographers years after the vision negative technology replaced older emulsions for movies circa 1996-2002. (Listen to Inside Analog Photo Radio's interview with a Kodak representative on Ektar's success HERE!) That film is amazing to us photographers today, but the technology is really over a decade old! Imagine a digital capture that old. Talk about dinosaur! Another film from Kodak that's a part of their Vision series motion picture films is their 500T. This film has yet to be packaged for still photographers, but we figured that we'd use our Leica Summicron 5cm for what it was designed, to test movie film!
This film is ECN-2, virtually the same as normal C-41 process 35mm but it has a Remjet antihalation layer for movie cameras that must be removed (it's like a black carbon coating on the base of the negatives). We paired it up against our favorite high ISO Fuji film that we love, PRO 800Z.
I shot in a mixed lighting situation, with wide range of exposure to demonstrate the film's latitude (digital could never touch this detail in light bulb's filament at any exposure). I light metered off the wall behind bird cage to let the purse overexpose, and the Louis Vuitton logo fall well under. We prefer to rate the 800Z at 400, so I started by rating both films at ISO 200 to test for overexposure. Then from there stopped down, step by step, all the way to metering at ISO 3200! Please keep in mind that there was no push processing on any of these negatives in standard C-41 chemistry, and they were straight scans, untouched from Richard Photo Lab.
Rated at ISO 200 (f/2.0 & 1/30th sec): 500T/800Z
Rated at ISO 400 (f/2.0 & 1/60th sec): 500T/800Z
Rated at ISO 800 (f/2.0 & 1/125th sec): 500T/800Z
Rated at ISO 1600 (f/2.0 & 1/250th sec): 500T/800Z
Rated at ISO 3200 (f/2.0 & 1/500th sec): 500T/800Z
I was blown away when I got the scans back! The 500T has virtually unlimited exposure range, and has better grain structure and shadow detail underexposed at ISO 3200 than the 800Z exposed at it's native ISO 800! Ignoring the fact that it's tungsten balanced film (meaning less color correction in common low light situations), this film destroys any Kodak film I've ever shot!!! Why has Kodak been sitting on this film?
Here are a few more comparisons in a real world situation, rating both at ISO 800 in camera...
This just demonstrates the advances and potential in film, that are kept just out of arms reach, since the popularization of the "film is dead" ideology, when in fact film is still just maturing! Can you imagine if the same amount of R&D went into film these days as digital? Really it's the marketing dollars that make the popularity difference, resulting lower availability and research investment.
But hey, the new Digis. have high def. video now! The question is, are the new Blue Ray readers gonna be able to read all those lush word processor docs on your 5.25" floppy, that killed paper and ink so many years ago?
I remain hopeful...
