Traditional SLR or Digital SLR?

Question

I've had a friend suggest I should get a cheap 2nd hand traditional SLR and a negative/film scanner as opposed to Digital SLR. Do you think this is a good idea? According to him the quality will be far superior.

Answer 1

I actually would suggest getting _BOTH_, "as opposed to" one or the other, unless you absolutely don't want to spend the extra money on buying two cameras. And a scanner is invaluable in any case. I'm willing to guess you and your family have a lot of old film based photos that you could be scanned. And if you get film commercially processed, consider getting the pictures transferred to CD at the same time - it'll save you a lot of work for most pictures, and you can rescan the film later if you think the lab didn't do one to your satisfaction.

The prices of second hand film SLRs, in good condition, are dropping to rock bottom prices. Even very good new film SLRs, with a wide selection of lenses for every shootin occasion, are very reasonably priced compared with with the digital version with the same capabilities. Your friend is right, 35 mm film picture quality is still superior to all but the most expensive digital units, and the price of the film cameras can't be beat by current digital cameras of equal picture capability. And I've found that black and white prints made with a film camera are vastly superior to those coming out of the current digital cameras. Buy a film camera if you want to, or think you might want to, do any sort of black and white photography - but you'll have to get the darkroom setup too, since so few commercial labs do black and white processing any more.

The flip side of the film SLRs is that the selection of available film on the market is slim, and getting slimmer by the day. Slide film, true black and white film and printing paper (not chromogenic), etc. are all but gone from the mass market. Even the wide variety of film speeds from any one manufacturer are becoming non existant. And forget about getting your film camera fixed in a few years, as the camera makers drop their film cameras like hot potatos.
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In summery get both. Enjoy the better quality of the film pictures when that's what you need. Take digital pictures when convenience, low cost per picture, quick posting to the WWW, etc. are what matters.

Answer 2

I would say digital!

First if you are asking this question, you aren't a pro. Digital is much cheaper on the learning curve.

I have a nice little Cannon digital SLR and love it.

As to the quality, the average person can't tell the difference in the prints.

Also my local camera shop told me that Kodak is fixing to pull out of the film market, I think we can say that is the beginning of the end.

Some will fight it, but like records and cassette tapes, film cameras will be a thing of the past for the average person.

BTW if you decide you want a traditional SLR, I'll sell you my old one. Works just fine, the only thing I hated was using film. ;-)

Answer 3

With digital cameras coming out with 8 megapixels, then the best will soon equal the quality of the best traditional SLRs. I always used traditional SLR, but have now converted to digital, I can take more pictures, only need to download the ones I want, with top quality printers I can get almost the best quality. Traditional colour film will, because of the fact that the image is captured on three different layers, always be slightly 'soft' but digital pictures should be sharper, particularly at the high end of the market. What you really need is a top quality lens, and this is where the traditional makes will perform better with their digital cameras, Olympus, Nikkon, Canon etc.

Answer 4

Quality will be better with a traditional SLR, but that's only have you learn all about f/stops and exposure times. Are you planning on being a professional photographer with the camera? If not, personally, I'd go for the digital SLR.

Maybe you could get both! Check out pawn shops for a cheap traditional SLR, and then spend most of your money on the digital SLR. You can use the traditional SLR to learn, and while learning, you can take most of your pictures with the digital.

Also, when learning to take good photographs, you want to take lots and lots of shots. That will be infinitely less expensive with the digital camera. You can simply delete any that you don't like.

Answer 5

You will get better quality (not "far superior" quality, though) with a film SLR *if* the negative scanner is good, but digital SLRs are closing the gap with each new release. Also, you will save SO much time, and over the long run, money with digital.

I have two film SLRs and two digital SLRs. Honestly, I have not shot one exposure of film since I got the first DSLR, even though I have a sizable investment in film sitting in my refrigerator.

Answer 6

The quality is just as good, a traditional SLR is cheaper abut 200.00 for a Cannon EOS, a high digital SLR will start around 800.00.

It up to you, the bad thing and it happened to this weekend with my niece's wedding I wanted to shot regular film and i ran out of film but for the reception was finished. She did have a PRO photographer there so there was no real loss, The pro had a nice digital SLR with a large memory card, and was able to take over 250 shots and still have room on the card.

But now for true black and white photos film is always better

Answer 7

Quality depends primarily on the lens you have. There are also major differences between digital and film medias, of course. A film image is nearly (but not quite) a continuous tone image. If you drew a line across an image and made a graph of the things like overall brightness, level of each colour and so on, the line would be far more 'smooth' on a film image and 'stepped' on a digital image.

There are many other much more complicated considerations. But one of the major things, I have found, is how digital cameras deal with contrast edges - for example dark branches against a light sky.

With the increase in Megapixels and drop in price, other factors like the cost of processing begin to be more important. The digital advantage has to be the speed of processing and the ability to pay only for the shots you want to print. The film advantage at the moment is still better image quality (just) but in digitising a film image you are throwing a good deal of that away unless you pay heavily for a film scanner.

Ideally, if you are serious about your photography, you should carry both - preferably with lenses that fit both bodies!

Answer 8

A film SLR will produce significantly better results than a digital SLR, especially if you use reversal (slide) film which has only one processing stage and get it scanned with a proper film scanner. In this case the resolution for 50 ASA film is likely to be comparable to a 50 megapixel camera, the colour saturation will be better, the exposure latitute will be better, and there will be fewer artifacts that arise in the CCD technology.

However, if you are only going to print your pictures at standard size you may well not notice any of this (other than the exposure latitude - digital cameras are much worse than film at tolerating even slight exposure inaccuracies because their sensitivity is very linear and so they saturate or drop out quickly). In this case the huge advantages of convenience of digital are likely to win.

The fact that Nikon is only planning to support professional film cameras and Canon is "reviewing" its position later this year show how much the market for film is shrinking despite its still producing superior images.

Answer 9

With the prices coming down a lot, Digital SLR should be of your target. It does cost 2-3x more than the traditional SLR but seeing your images right away and convenience of having the digital files right away outweighs the price disadvantage.

I'm waiting for Nov. to buy me 8 MP Canon SLR.

Answer 10

instead of a film scanner, when you get your films processed get them put onto a cd at the same time - usually about £1 extra. this will give you very high quality digital images. To improve on the film quality and camera versatility you would have to spend about £700+ for a basic digital slr, and still have problems if you require wide angle pictures.