Digital Camera

[hot_pastrami]

Originally Posted by russotto

And note that _film_ varies a lot. 35MM Kodak "MAX" film with (according to one photographer) "grain the size of beachballs" is going to give a much lower resolution print than Fuji NPC160, for instance.

Digital won't ever be indistinguishable from film; if nothing else, the artifacts (such as grain) are different.

True, but the silver-halide grains in film are of varying sizes and shapes, and are randomly distributed. This makes "low-res" film more forgiving than low-res digital.

In digital images, the pixels are all arranged in a grid, which makes it quite easy for the eye to distinguish a "grain" when enlarged, whereas the random, varied grains in film work like camoflauge to a degree. Of course this characteristic is lost when the image is digitally scanned, since the randomness is then organized into tidy little rows and columns.

So until the resolution in digital cameras is so high as to make the concept of "grain" moot, digital and film cameras will just be two different worlds, with differing strengths and weaknesses.