I consider 2002 the year of digital photography. Why? For the first time I believe that digital and traditional (analog?) photography have come even in picture quality and the relative ease of taking pictures. So what did I do? I bought a new (and likely my last) traditional camera, an EOS 5 with a 70-200/2.8 IS lens.
Some numbers first: If you have a super-awesome, top-quality normal focal length lens such as the Leica Summicron, you may be able to resolve 200 lines per mm of negative. A very good quality telephoto lens may resolve 100 lines, a good one maybe 70 lines, and so on. For a 35mm film (24 x 36mm size, that results in the following:
| Max. Resolution | Equivalent Megapixels | |
| Awesome lens, laboratory | 200 l/mm | 34.56 |
| Very good lens | 100 l/mm | 8.64 |
| Good lens | 70 l/mm | 4.23 |
| Good lens, normal conditions | 50 l/mm | 2.16 |
As Robert Monaghan explains in one of his articles, many amateur photographers will actually max out at 50 lines per mm, and beating 100 lines per mm is in reality almost impossible. If you look at the comparable image sizes in megapixels, it tell you that equality has been achieved. Of course, there are other factors that favor film, such as the "unlimited" number of shades of each color. But with the ability of today's digital cameras to produce 12 bit depth per color (RGB), the resulting image has enormous color depth. Further, digital cameras have a clear advantage when the desired outcome is a digital image. With traditional film, there is one more image degrading scanning process involved, versus none for the digital camera.
If I knew all this, why did I go and buy another traditional rig? Because of the lenses, the price, and image storage. What's clear from the chart is that the next barrier for digital photography is the lens quality (not a boost of the image size). The best lenses are still available for traditional cameras, or for cameras that are available now both in traditional and in digital format, such as the EOS. The EOS D30 (3 Megapixels) and the EOS D60 (6 Megapixes) both take the standard EOS lenses (increasing the effective focal length by 1.5, though). Hence, they combine the new advantages of digital photography with high quality lenses. BUT--this comes at a high price. A Canon D60 will cost around $2,200 (once available). Compare that to $400 for an EOS 5 with similar or better features. In other words, then, the best possible wait-and-see strategy is to buy the best lenses and cheaper bodies, until the digital bodies have become competitive in price. Finally, image storage is another issue. A Canon D30 will store images in RAW format (12-bit depth) at an image size of about 9MB. For the equivalent of a 36-picure negative, that would come to over 300MB. Thus, 100 rolls would take up about 30 GB of memory. That is not outrageous for today's harddisks (less than $100 storage cost), but requires discipline to safely store and maintain a large number of files, with back-up to avoid any inadvertent destruction.
I personally also like the flexibility of the traditional medium with fully mechanical cameras. I can bring plenty of film to the middle of nowhere and shoot with a mechanical camera without fear of battery death. And if I run out of film, there's hardly a place in the world that doesn't carry Kodak or Fuji 100 ASA film.
Nevertheless, the tide has turned in favor of digital, and it's now only a question of time until the economics change sufficiently enough in favor of digital for most photographers to make the switch.
© Christian Wagner, 2002
As I am writing this, I find a report from Ricoh which states that Ricoh developed a lens for digital movie cameras that can resolve up to 300 l/mm in the center and 200 lines at the edges. Of course, such high resolutions are important for digital equipment with small CCD sizes (i.e., 9mm). It appears that the higher resolution can be more easily achieved at the shorter (digital) focal length. http://www.ricoh.co.jp/rdc/techreport/No26/Ronbun/B05.pdf