As a sort of arty street-shooting 35mm guy with intermittent journalistic and photo magazine connections, I used to worry about digitally matching the quality of 35mm film, principally Tri-X and Kodachrome. In 2002 Kodak came out with the DCS 14n, which put digital works with a full-frame 14 megapixel sensor inside a Nikon SLR body. I got hold of a second-hand one about three years later and found:
- It was a very crappy camera, that took several seconds to turn on, took pictures with appalling noise in the shadows, was poorly weather-sealed and had a slow frame rate.
- But on the rare occasions the subject contrast range matched the dynamic range of the sensor, it produced images with Kodachrome-level sharpness and general image quality. And since I was able to use the same clutch of Nikon lenses I’d collected over the years shooting film, it became clear to me that some of the qualities I’d liked about my pictures and ascribed to film were actually due to the lenses, because those same tonal qualities were (sometimes) apparent in my digital pics. For me, digital quality matched film quality at 14 megapixels as far as sharpness was concerned.
These days I’m using a 24 megapixel Nikon D610 which is ready to shoot when you turn it on, has better dynamic range than film if you shoot in RAW mode, and uses all my old lenses.
I also have a Nikon F4 film SLR, a lovely rugged device which I rarely use. I ditched most of my darkroom gear years ago, when Agfa stopped making variable contrast printing paper and Rodinal developer, and Kodak stopped selling Kodachrome and HC-110 developer.
I don’t miss film much, and I certainly don’t miss old digital cameras.
