I am an avid film user and especially a fan of MF but I have to say that
something is just plain wrong with this test. Maybe the Zeiss 25mm lens
is not so good on the digital body? I don't know but the degree of
aliasing and color noise is just far beyond what one sees normally with
a decent digital SLR. If I took that shot with my K5 and saw that much
noise and aliasing, I wouldn't be thinking of going back to film, I'd be
thinking of camera repair options.
I still think MF film beats digital (at least my K5) in a few
specialized situations were there is a ton of detail - like scenes
dominated by lots of trees or brush or foliage. Dense young woods,
scrubby brushy wastes, tall grass fields, etc. The film can better
resolve the detail and the high degree of visual content hides the
film's inherently greater amount of noise (grain). But that is a
specialized situation - in most situaitons, there just isn't that much
detail and the digital sensor can handle it just fine and the benefits
of lower noise make the digital image more pleasing. The majority of
human environments have very little fine detail in them and digital is
as good or better than film, IMO.
Mark
On 7/16/2013 12:50 PM, Darren Addy wrote:
I believe that Tim Parkin is a PDML subscriber, so maybe he can
illuminate this a bit more, but on Twitter yesterday he pointed to
some extreme crop comparisons between:
Nikon D800E with a Zeiss 25mm lens
and a Mamiya 7 (6x7) with a 50mm lens with Velvia 50 and Adox CMS 20.
The results might surprise you.
Here is the whole scene: http://static.timparkin.co.uk/static/tmp/fullframe.jpg
Here is the D800E (top) and the Velvia (bottom)
http://static.timparkin.co.uk/static/tmp/compared-with-clean-velvia.jpg
And here is the D800E (top) and the Adox CMS 20 (bottom)
http://static.timparkin.co.uk/static/tmp/compared-with-clean-cms20.jpg
I suppose that there could be some debate on the differences in the
lenses and I'm not sure if the film was scanned (or with what). But I
find it interesting that film can still exceed digital at exteme
crops/very large printing sizes and only by going to a 6x7 size over
what is considered the state of the art full frame sensor camera
available today. I think the film wins by a substantial margin.
(Keeping in mind that this is just not *any* film).
For most of us, this is academic, since we rarely need such extreme
crops or print at such sizes, but I find it interesting nonetheless.
--
"Photography is a Bastard left by Science on the Doorstep of Art" -
Peter Galassi
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