In addition to the above, professionals will find:

Equal to film resolution at an affordable price- now around $2000 for a 6 megapixel image camera that takes standard interchangable lenses.

Convenience advantages:
1- No Polaroid test prints for studio work.
2- Real-time previewing.
3- Deleting of unwanted pictures from the camera memory.
4- Reusable media.
5- No bulky rolls of film to carry around.
6- Media is stable without refrigeration and will last indefinitely.
7- A digital image ready for transmission and pre-press.
8- Automatic white balance- no filters needed for Kelvin compensation.

Quality advantages:
1- No loss of image information as happens when scanning film or prints.
2- No processing or handling damage, and no need to clean film.
3- No film grain as happens in a scan of film.
4- Greater latitude than any film can give.

The Latitude advantage:
Film has always had a very limited latitude. The slower (and, with that, the finer the grain the film), the narrower the latitude of a film stock. Digital cameras have a wider latitude, and better color fidelity between highlights and shadows, than film.

1- The wider the latitude the more detail you get in highlights and shadows.
2- In flash photography, wide latitude lengthens the distance before complete fall off, and gives less harsh shadows.
3- Digital cameras can provide information in low and artificial light situations where film would be just black. With Photoshop, that digital image can be enhanced to make clearly visible information that is critical for crime scene and surveillance photography.

Comparative latitudes:
Digital..: -------------------------------------
ISO 400: -------------------------
ISO 200: --------------------
ISO 100: ---------------
ISO 25 : ----------

Color Fidelity advantage:
Film tends to exaggerate the blue in shadows in full daylight and go orange in low light. Digital cameras set a white balance to compensate for the Kelvin color shifts, and they also have far less shift of color between highlights and shadows. This is a great advantage in portraits, where I have been able to get very natural skin colors in open shade near sunset, with lovely gradients as well using a digital camera. (see example)

Smooth gradient advantage:
Because of the latitude, digital photographs normally have smoother gradients than images taken on film, and especially better than the scans of film. For this reason, digital photography is excellent for portraits.


Quality disadvantages:
1- A digital image does not carry as much information as fine grain film, so you cannot crop as deeply into the image and still have enough resolution for large prints.
2- Jaggies on high contrast diagonals, especially with lower resolution cameras.

JPEG compression and automatic sharpening disadvantages:
1- JPEG compression creates artifacts, so you should always look for a digital camera that gives you the option of taking an uncompressed TIFF image.
2- However, taking an uncompressed image is pointless if the camera or the driver does automatic sharpening, which creates many of the same artifacts as JPEG. Olympus has proprietary in-camera sharpening and saturation enhancement. Nikon assures me it does not make any changes to the original image. Kodak provides no information on this.

Digital Zoom Disadvantage
Avoid digital zoom, which just crops into your image and then interpolates pixels to make up the size. You can do this better yourself in an image editing program.

The photo to the right is a reduction to one third original size of a photo by Tom Pittman taken with his Canon D60 and a Canon 100 - 400 mm zoom lens at 400 mm.


By D'Lynn Waldron, PhD . © 2003