My first job over a decade ago was managing a photo lab. The x-ray machines would often damage film that people traveled with. Amateur photographers just weren't aware. The damage typically looks like white fuzzy diagonal lines across the image. It's not enough to completely destroy a picture, but it'll ruin it. The most common widespread damage we saw were people that bought like 50 disposable cameras for their Caribbean wedding, then brought them back home to get developed.
The worst overall damage we had at that lab was when high school kids would run customer Tri-X film through the C-41 lab. That would completely wipe the film, no recovery whatsoever possible.
Ever get any of that Seattle FilmWorks film? Not C41 process, but people didn't understand that, and I learned it the hard way myself when I first started working at a lab. I had some really frustrating conversations with customers who thought I was lying to them when I told them we couldn't process it for them.
There are companies like Silbersalz (https://silbersalz35.com/) selling ECN-2 cinefilm stock in 35mm cartridges. You have to return the film to them for processing, rather than take it to a C-41 lab - and they warn that if you send them to a C-41 lab, you can damage the lab's equipment and ruin everyone else's photos as well as your own.
I don't know how paranoid the warning is, but that seems like it could be pretty bad.
> There are companies like Silbersalz (https://silbersalz35.com/) selling ECN-2 cinefilm stock in 35mm cartridges.
To be fair, anyone buying that likely knows what they're getting into. Tri-X was sold next to C-41 film in every store, so a lot of people would just grab it when they wanted B&W thinking it was the same thing to develop as color film. (Yes, there is B&W C-41 film as well)
> To be fair, anyone buying that likely knows what they're getting into.
True, I'm just dwelling on the possible consequences. I have some Silbersalz film myself that I haven't used yet, and I'm actively imagining everything that could go wrong.
> Yes, there is B&W C-41 film as well
Ilford XP2 - it looks a bit different from typical B&W film, with very flat whites.
I used to love XP1, which came out sepia when processed C-41.
I'm a little late to respond but the best story I have is from another lab supervisor I spoke to. Wet minilabs all have an effluent tank that fills up with the spent chemicals. This is after a cartridge to collect all the silver.
Remember we call one of the chemicals 'bleach'. It's a bad name. This effluent tank usually gets dumped out in a sink near the lab when it's full or at the end of the day. I say that bleach is a bad name because C-41 process contains ammonium ferric PDTA, which I believe is pretty close to ammonium iron sulfate. (not a chemist)
Anyways, the store I mentioned had a mess that needed cleaning at the end of the day, so the kids got out cleaners containing bleach and mopped up the floor... then proceeded to dump the cleaner down the same sink as the effluent. This readily produced noxious fumes (possibly mustard gas) that forced a store evacuation. Store was closed for around 2 days as hazmat crews made sure the place was safe to go into.
C41 minilabs won't generally let you in normal use. The Fuji machines won't allow you to put the replenisher cartridge in backwards due to mechanical blocks (poka-yoke).
The only way you could pull this off is mixing up the chemistry during a dump-and-fill (chemistry restart).
The Fuji machines might not have had this option, but the Kodak machines I worked with could all be filled with the wrong chemicals. This was fine if you filled once a day and did all of the daily tests: it wasn't so wonderful when they switched to fill-as-needed or if a new person got mixed up.
It didn't really improve when the place I worked upgraded their machines: The chemicals mixed differently, but you could still mess up developing film. The digital film scanning was pretty nice, though.
Tri-X is a tab-grain silver halide film similar to Ilford HP5. T-MAX is delta-grain and more like Ilford Delta. They don't necessarily need different chemistry but it's possible to get better results if you do.
Tri-X is still in production to this day, and still very popular. Same with the Ilford films I mentioned.
How much radiation would it take to flip a bit on an SSD? What about RAM (many people send their laptops through in a suspended-to-RAM state)?
I would assume that RAM is more susceptible, since we still store a single bit per RAM cell, while some SSDs now store multiple bits per cell, but I've never tried to do the math on "what would it take to actually make these problems start to appear?" Might be a fun exercise... has anyone looked into this?
An SSD cell could actually be more susceptible, since it stores multiple bits by using multiple voltage thresholds - it takes much less perturbation to change the value. Cell size might make a big difference though, and I don't know how those compare.
> The primary benefit of MLC flash memory is its lower cost per unit of storage due to the higher data density, and memory-reading software can compensate for a larger bit error rate.[5] The higher error rate necessitates an error correcting code (ECC) that can correct multiple bit errors; for example, the SandForce SF-2500 Flash Controller can correct up to 55 bits per 512-byte sector with an unrecoverable read error rate of less than one sector per 1017 bits read.
Making the cells smaller and cramming more bits per cell reduces the amount of energy/radiation required to trigger a bit flip, making the data more vulnerable. It sounds like they may also be increasing the energy put out by the scanners. Not a very good combination if you care about your data. Maybe they'll push the fraction of storage reserved for error-correction data even higher to compensate.
IIRC, radiation-hard chips often used processes with larger feature sizes and different materials in order to be more resistant to the effects of radiation.
I posted the same comment yesterday and for some reason got downvoted to oblivion. SSDs do not rely on bits being correct. Raw bit error rates in multi-level flash are generally over 1%. In other words if you read a 4K page you are guaranteed to get several wrong bits. The only reason a of it works at all is because of sophisticated error-correcting codes.
I posted the same comment yesterday and for some reason got downvoted to oblivion.
Probably because of the "90% bit error rate" part of the comment. Obviously SSDs can't tolerate anything close to 90% bit errors.
If that kind of error rate could be corrected in the general case, it would have profound implications for information theory in general, not just hard drive manufacturing. It would be equivalent to a data compression algorithm that could crunch anything by 90%.
Basically the only way this could work would be if the SSD's actual physical capacity were several times larger than specified, so that the vast majority of its space could be used for redundant encoding. I'm sure that's true to some extent, but I doubt a 100 GB drive is actually a 1 TB drive with 90% redundancy.
Based on publications from SSD controller vendors, it looks like current 3D TLC NAND has raw bit error rates on the order of 10^-3 or better when it's healthy. Raw bit error rates in the 1-2% range correspond to a drive that's either worn out its write endurance, or has been sitting on a shelf in high temperatures for years and has some data retention issues. It looks like most SSD controllers are designed to maintain some degree of usability with ~1% raw bit error rates (albeit with performance penalties), but 2% RBER is pushing the limits of even the last-resort layer of ECC.
Your logic is flawed and/or the statement misleading.
While storing more than a single bit with bit error rate >= 50% does require at least some error modeling, it does not mean profound implications on information theory¹.
Yes, normal SSDs would not have raw bit error rate anywhere near 90%. Still, I recall tales of flash media approaching raw 90% error rate - mostly shitty SD cards making use of the not-completely-trashed sectors of scrap high-capacity chips with heaps of ECC.
¹ unless you really do mean general (theoretical) 90% error correction, which would indeed imply things such as P = NP and P != NP, yet it cannot be applied as an argument on specific real-world errors.
Anyway it’s irrelevant because to the filesystem the SSD is supposed to look like it does not in fact have all these errors. ZFS doesn’t really care about the storage format apart from perhaps supporting TRIM.
The math is going to be back-of-the-envelope OOM analysis anyway, so you could work it out per bit or per unit area and multiply it out from there, given your particular configuration.
The statistics get more complicated when multiple bits are flipped (either by a single event, or over time) before an error correcting pass can look at the bits in question. In those cases, the particular flipped bits and where they are spatially will matter a lot more.
I've never run into any trouble getting film hand checked while traveling within the US.
Sadly it's a completely different story internationally. Indian security has been the strictest in my experience -- flat out refusal to do anything other than run the film through the X-Ray machine. I don't travel with fast film (800+ ISO) anymore. It's just not worth the stress.
I have simply given up after a lot of abuse by Heathrow and Stansted “security”. Just try reasoning with them about “pushing” film above ISO 400, guidelines by film developers, etc. They do not care and at best refer to some “testing” of the machines that allegedly is in some document that they neither know the name of or know where to find. It is insulting, it is tiring, and I said as much in my customer feedback form on the day I gave finally gave it all up at Heathrow. Here is what `passengersupport@heathrow.com` responded a few weeks later:
“Dear <NAME/>,
Thank you for getting in touch with us about your journey through Heathrow Airport, we have received your feedback card and read it.
I can understand your concerns about taking film through security. We can confirm, however, that independent tests undertaken by the British Photographers' Liaison Committee (BPLC) to establish the detail of any potential damage to film caused by baggage screening machines at airports have given the all-clear to the current hand-luggage x-ray inspection systems installed at Heathrow.
These findings confirm that hand-luggage security scanning machinery is safe for all normal film types (up to and including ISO 400). Current digital camera storage media can also safely be examined by these x-ray machines without sustaining damage.
If you are carrying professional film rated ISO 800 or faster, you can request the film be searched by alternative means, as I understand you did. We will accommodate this where possible but this cannot be guaranteed. I am not sure if you were travelling with one, but for your future travels please bring any documentary proof of the film rating with you. Damages of film rated ISO 800, through scanners, have not being confirmed though.
We also recommend that you leave extra time to pass through security as additional screening requirements may be required.
Thank you again for taking the time to write to us, we have passed the feedback to the relevant team for their review. I hope you will have a better experience on your next journey. I do recommend to have the document with you, if you do not have it already, because that would help processes through security and you certainly would not to have to give up film photography.
Kind regards,
<NAME/>
Heathrow Passenger Support.”
Pardon my French, but these people do not give a fuck. Also note the lack of a link to the documents I requested. I responded and asked for them again (along with point-by-point refutations and additional questions), that was more than two years ago and I am yet to receive a reply.
I decided to switch to digital for anything where I want to go over 400 ISO. My personal feelings are that the image quality of 800 ISO film is just terrible. YMMV based on personal preference, I know people who really like the look of fast film.
Leaving aside the work associated with chemical processing generally, you could “coax” ISO/ASA 400 B&W films up to 1600. Maybe 2400. But you definitely lost a lot as soon as you started pushing.
For a lot of photography, especially basic journalist event stuff, I find the fact that I can go to about 3200 without even thinking about it a huge benefit of digital.
Sure, you can push two stops if you like swaths of flat black in your photo. Same thing with TMZ, which says “3200” on the box but if you look carefully it doesn’t actually say “ISO 3200”, because its ISO speed is actually something like 800.
fast color film isn't my cup of tea, but I have shot Delta 3200 (in 120 format, 6x7 and 6x4.5) at exposures closer to 6400, and have gotten some great images. (developed in 24c Xtol.)
I use XTOL, which is the closest Kodak equivalent to Ilfosol 3. D-76 is a nice developer but it’s just not quite as good as the newer formulations like XTOL and Ilfosol 3.
You can call it “push” development, but ISO speed is actually measured with a specific developer, and you will get a different speed with different developers before you even push it. This is typically true for XTOL and Ilfosol 3. You basically get an extra half or two thirds of a stop just by using a better developer.
I have been traveling with a Filmguard bag. Sometimes they take it out and ask for a hand inspection, sometimes they don't they rarely insist on scanning the films themselves outside the bag.
Regardless never check-in your films. Nothing can protect them from the powerful scan for check-in luggages.
When a TSA x-ray operator sees an opaque bag on the screen, he/she just turns up the exposure until the contents are visible. Not much help there for your film.
Turning up the exposure on the screen does not do what you think it does.
With a line-scan X-ray, the bag is well out of the beam path by the time the operator sees the image. But it's probably coming in through a 12 or 16-bit ADC, so there's a lot more range than can be effectively displayed on screen (at least with a simple linear+gamma mapping). It's a matter of adjusting the display mapping to see inside denser objects.
The X-ray source power needs to be high enough to deal with the worst case scenario of large/dense luggage. If you can give your film a 10x lower dose while still allowing enough X-rays through that the operator can clear it, that sounds like a good idea.
It just has to be traded off against the fact that deliberate shielding is likely to be frowned upon, and they may take the film out and run it through "naked" anyway. Seems worth a try, but I'd definitely use a commercial product marked for the purpose and resist the temptation to DIY it.
ILFORD is still selling photo paper in rolls with the specific chemicals required for regeneration of baths. It does allow a skilled lab operator to use Durst Lambdas or even a 1hour laser-based minilab like a Noritsu QSS or Fuji Frontier to print on real b&w paper!
However, the same skilled operator should be able to calibrate her minilab in order to obtain decent looking b&w prints on color-based paper (RA4 process - used by Noritsu & Fuji).
>However, the same skilled operator should be able to calibrate her minilab in order to obtain decent looking b&w prints on color-based paper (RA4 process - used by Noritsu & Fuji).
It's actually a fairly good way to test if your lab sucks ass. B/W is not forgiving to poorly calibrated equipment or chain stores that are cheaping out on replenishment.
small nitpick: RA-4 is a Kodak process. The Noritsu minilab I ran used Kodak chemicals. Fujitsu labs typically use a 'compatible' version of their own that can't be called RA-4. While the two systems work, we always found C-41 Fujifilm looked inferior printed on the Kodak processes and vice-versa.
Slight nitpick, if memory serves the Fuji process is CN-16S (though I may be wrong - it's been many years since I ran a Frontier minilab!). To all intents and purposes it's regen RA4 though.
The big problem with Frontiers was it was near impossible to fully eliminate the colour cast on B&W prints. You can kick the machine into B&W mode manually, but there are still limitations the RGB laser exposure engine and process puts on you. Practically that means you can't get a true black like you can with silver-halide processes.
They are still fabulous machines though. Awful user interface, but the technology behind them is pretty incredible.
I'm not in a place where I can watch the video right now, but are they doing this via like.. an LCD-equipped enlarger? This would be pretty cool. In the early 2000s I did a lot of experimentation with printing digital negatives to transparencies and printing them in a traditional darkroom or using alt processes.
Good question, I don't think they talk about the b&w digital prints in the video afraid. https://www.harmanlab.com/ is the website for that, which I'm just looking at, but can't see the machine they use at the moment.
> They also have a lab that do b&w prints from digital files on photo paper interestingly.
Not new or uncommon.
The “last generation” of photo finishing (think drug store 1 hour photo mats) since the early 2000s mostly used digital printers. They called them laser printers no less (not a xerographic process, but direct exposure)
The developed film was scanned and this of course allowed them to give you a CD cheaply. Also of course allowed printing digital media easily.
It wasn’t super uncommon in the past, because you could just use the same equipment with different chemistry. When I say “not super uncommon” what I mean is that you might have a couple different shops with a B&W (non-chromogenic) option in the same city.
Genuine question: Why do people still use film anymore? I know some big movie studios do sometimes use it (The Hobbit comes to mind), but I don’t understand why anyone would use film when we have DSLRs that can have resolutions over 30 megapixels.
Another is that film genuinely has features digital cameras can't match. For example, if you overexpose most film you aren't left with massive pure white patches - there's still differentiation in those areas. This is particularly the case in colour negative film, other formats are more sensative. A lot of people prefer films grain to digital sensors noise and artifacts.
A huge (literally) benefit of film are the extra formats. Medium format film photography is accessible, but digital medium format cameras are mind-blowingly expensive. Even then, it's not the resolution. Larger formats require longer focal lengths, which means narrow depths of field are possible at long range. See David Burnetts superb portfolio from London 2012 - shot on 4x5 (inch) film. https://www.davidburnett.com/gallery.html?gallery=London%202....
You've also got all sorts of other odd formats, such as the 6x16 (cm) panoramic medium format (not cheap though).
But really, it's just a lot of fun. Nailing exposure using a light meter, rather than just trying again until you get it right. Not missing photos because you were looking at the screen. Watching b/w prints form. The long and tense process for turning b/w negative film into positive slides.
Another point in film's favor is that it has extremely high resolution per dollar.
I just bought a Rolleicord TLR camera, which shoots 6 cm square negatives. It cost me $250 on eBay. If shot with good quality low grain film, and scanned with a professional grade negative scanner, the equivalent resolution I get from it should be on the order of 100 megapixels, and possibly more in good lighting conditions.
Even regular 35 mm film shot in a decent SLR will give you 30+ megapixels. You can buy good used 35 mm cameras all day long for less than $100. You can buy a Hasselblad 500C, the very same camera the Apollo astronauts went to the moon with and that Ansel Adams used for shooting his iconic photographs of Yosemite, which uses the same 6 cm film as my Rollei, for less than $1000.
Buying a 100 megapixel digital camera would cost me ten thousand dollars minimum.
in fact, you can get black and white film (Adox CMS 20 II) that will out-resolve just about any lens you can get (800 lp/mm) unfortunately, its really hard to shoot and develop.
There's a great documentary called "Side by Side" produced by Keanu Reeves where he goes through the history of the movie industry moving from film to digital. There are still a lot of major Hollywoo releases that are made on film. It's producer/director preference a lot of times.
In the past, stuff on film meant you could rescan the originals and remaster them in 4K, which you can't do with 1080p digital recordings (like Star Wars ep1 .. they used other digital techniques to upscale them). But there are limits to that. Trying to rescan old film at 8K often results in a lot of noise, and you don't gain much even after trying to clean it up .. so there are limits to the resolution of the analogue medium that we are just now surpassing with digital sensors.
Once you get into 70mm film or 70mm IMAX, you're better off just leaving it alone and projecting it directly. I think 70mm could be scanned to 8K, and I'm not sure there's even a equivalent for 70mm IMAX yet.
That's why Nolan still screens his films with 70mm IMAX projectors. He might use digital for effects, but I believe he preserves the analog film in the final prints instead of using a digital intermediate.
I don't see any objective reason for choosing 70 mm analog over 4K digital. Sure, the resolution of 70 mm is higher, but does it really make a difference? A lot of digital cinema is "only" 2048×1080 and you usually don't see the pixels at normal viewing distances. On the other hand, when it comes to linearity and color reproduction, analog film doesn't stand a chance against a digital sensor. 2001: A Space Odyssey might look sharp, but the colors are definitely off.
I guess the real reason why Nolan and Tarantino still use 70 mm is not quality, but personal preference and a bit of self-marketing.
You’re getting all kinds of answers but a key one, for me, is that film is unavoidably slow and expensive. Digital cameras teach you that each frame is cheap and throwaway. That encourages some kinds of photographic/artful thinking while obscuring others.
Old masters of large format film photography have a workflow and thought process that’s vastly different from modern digicam shooting. When you have just one or two potential exposures and maybe only 15 minutes of perfect light to pull it off, you must research and plan and conceptualize deeply.
Ansel Adams is the grandmaster here. He has three books on exposure, shooting, and development which read like alien artifacts to someone who’s used to digital. They also convey amazing conceptual clarity.
Picking up an old film camera is a good way to get a little bit in touch with that ethos.
This, this and this. I've consistently found my keeper ratio to be much higher when shooting film, as the memory cards are small and single-use only.
That forces you to think your composition through, take an extra second or two to ensure the exposure is good - it basically enforces self discipline.
(Which reminds me I've got a few rolls to develop after my latest outing with the Texas Leica - a Fuji G690BL; the 6*9 format gives me eight exposures on a roll of 120 film.
Besides the enforced self discipline, I spend all of my working time in front of a computer, so I find it a bonus to have a hobby which does not (necessarily) involve one; I do shoot digital, too, though - I just mostly prefer the analog workflow for recreation.
I personally find the act of throwing away the garbage shots to be paralyzing with digital. If you have 8 nearly identical shots, which do you keep? And the act of examining and comparing to make a choice based on some minute detail drastically slows down the whole cataloging and editing process.
It's the paralysis of choice. Less is literally more, and I personally don't find an evening of spending a couple hours paralyzed by choice and analyzing minute details to be enjoyable. At all.
And yes, film makes you think a concept through fully and optimize everything before you press the shutter. My 'hit' rate is much higher with film than digital.
I have so many cameras I don't have time to use them all, but my Fuji cameras and LF lenses are definitely among my favorites as well. Very underrated, Fuji didn't do a good job of advertising in the west at all. My general purpose camera is a Pentax 67 though. Looking forward to trying a new Polaroid rangefinder that was converted to 4x5 as well. Just bought some Velvia for a cool $2 per frame.
-I had the same problem - too many cameras - as there was a time when you could buy film cameras for a song. I have since pared down a bit (not sufficiently, though - the collector gene is strong in this one) - Nikon F (various bodies both F and D, and more optics than I care to think about), Leica M (primary body being the camera Leica ought to have made - the Zeiss Ikon ZM, but also an M4 for the times when old school is the order of the day) - 35 and 50mm Summicrons, 90mm Elmarit) and Fuji G690BL (65mm f/8, 100mm f/3.5 and 150mm f/5.6 lenses)
The Pentax 67 is a beast, though - I had one for a couple of years and loved it to bits, but in the end it lost out to the 690 as I find myself preferring rangefinders more and more. Wonderful camera and optics, though.
RFs are nice and especially if you like to shoot wide lenses they tend to be more accurate than SLRs (although
I do have a split prism screen for mine, which helps a lot). The P67 is nice for portraits though, longer lenses are tricky on rangefinders. If you are a masochist and like to shoot wildlife/etc on MF/LF, the P67 system is by far the most comprehensive and affordable.
Portability is really the problem with the P67. I find myself drawn to cameras that pack a big punch in a small package and the P67 just is a physically very large camera. I like my Fuji GS645 folder for travelling and would like a GF670, I snagged a 120-converted Kodak Medalist (heliar-type lens), and I have been trying to get set up with a compact 4x5 setup. I just got that Polaroid and I have some Grafmatics for it, maybe someday I'll grab a Pocket Gowland to go with it.
I wouldn't mind a G690, but the lenses are fairly scarce and expensive. It is also a surprisingly big camera (assuming it's like the fixed-lens versions). Like, it doesn't look that big in pictures, until you realize that the camera body is about a 50% larger diagonal than your iphone plus. It is actually comical in person, not much smaller than a P67 at all. But, much lighter than a P67, which helps.
Leica is too expensive for my blood although I do have a Nicca body and a Nikkor 28/3.5 LTM for it. I particularly liked that lens on the Nikonos and wanted a copy that didn't have the underwater mounting/scale focus. For really low light shooting I like the Yashica Lynx 14E and the Olympus XA with film pushed to 1600. The 14E is the fastest lens on a fixed-lens RF ever and has a leaf shutter to reduce vibrations, while the XA has a wide lens, a piezo release, and a leaf shutter. Both do well with handholdability at slow speeds. The Olympus XA can be modified to support 1600 by spinning the paper disc over the meter one stop further so that all speeds read one stop faster, the 14E is full manual.
I mostly don't do 35mm SLRs anymore. Digital does that stuff better, so I do digital for that (I can adapt old lenses to my NEX camera) and MF/LF for fun. Easier to scan too, 35mm really needs a pretty decent scanner to get full quality, or wet printing. Trying to get set up for a basement darkroom, too many projects too little money.
I don't mind GAS. I admit I like the collecting too, it's a hobby. And I don't mind having "special purpose" lenses or cameras that do one niche thing for me. It's nice to have the right tool for the job.
Yeah, the late 2000s were a wild time for cameras. All the pros were dumping their film gear for digital, the financial crisis caused people to dump grandpa's old camera junk for a song and meant little competition, and hipsters hadn't latched onto film gear yet. I picked up my first 6x7 (non-MLU) for $300... with a meter prism and three lenses. That stuff has roughly tripled in value since those days, I think.
You can really skip The Camera if you like, it's 1930s era large-format-camera buying advice and isn't very relevant anymore.
The Negative is absolutely indispensable and should be read by every shooter, film or digital. The Zone System conceptually works the same for everything, whether B+W or color, film or digital. It's a generalized system for placing an exposure level onto the sensor's available range.
I suspect The Print is probably not entirely relevant anymore to most people who are doing hybrid-digital workflows (scanning their negatives), but may be of interest if you want to do wet printing. Which you should, it's super fun and rewarding and I can more easily deliver a better print than I can digitally.
One thing it doesn't cover is split-grade printing, which is very easy to produce high-quality results, but requires "modern" variable-contrast emulsions which didn't exist in his day.
I would think of imaging as broken out into three very high level categories.
Consumer, Commercial, and Industrial.
For consumers it is mostly about nostalgia and a process that is enjoyable to use.
For commercial (I am including high level hobbyists, still professionals, cinema, etc) there are technical advantages such as the size of the image produced (film area vs digital sensor area) and other factors which have a meaningful impact on the final product.
For industrial (I am including things like research) there is no (cost effective) digital equivalent. I remember reading about an experiment where they would fill a chamber with large blocks of film, and then track particle paths through the film.
You can go super deep in each area to find the technical differences that people in each one care about.
When switching from film to digital, we took a lot of steps back and are slowly catching up to quality. I guess around the 2010s, theaters started switching to digital projection, which I believe started with 1K (similar to 1080), then 2K, with a small amount of theaters showing 4K projection. Most high-quality 35mm film is equivalent to 4K resolution. Unfortunately, a lot of movies were shot and mastered at 2K or less, like Mad Max fury road, so there's no point of having them at 4K because the information was never there. With old 35mm, it was probably scanned for dvd or vhs at some point, but studios are going back and scanning movies to 4K with great results. Megapixels aside (an irrelevant number btw), dynamic range was pretty bad compared to film in the early days of digital, but it's starting to get there. The revenant was shot on digital and looks amazing.
Once you start watching on streaming though, you're losing so much to compression. Even with 4K HDR blu-ray, you're only getting 10 bits of color compared to 12 bits with DCP (digital projection).
Nitpick: 1920x1080 is approx. 2K, 1K is more like 1024x768. The "4K" resolution syntax refers to horizontal resolution, while the "1080p" syntax refers to vertical resolution.
I shoot on a film camera for fun. There's something indescribable about an image shot on film vs digital. The colors, texture, and vibrance of certain films are not easily achievable on a DSLR.
Also, you only get 24 or so shots per roll, so it forces you to be more thoughtful about each shot. It's not for everybody, but neither are vinyl records, and that business is thriving.
I actually stopped using my DLSR entirely in the last year and picked up a pristine Canon EOS 3 for super cheap since I knew I'd be comfortable using it pretty quickly. I always found (now continued) kodachrome film to be incredibly beautiful, and when I realized there were still other color reversal films out there I took the plunge, and have been very happy with Fujiflim's Velvia[0]. and I end up putting much more thought into photos I take. It feels really different.
Here's a pretty lengthy breakdown comparison[1] of digital and film from a few years back if you wanted a read.
Why do people use hand saws and chisels when powered table saws, compound saws and biscuit joiners are available to us?
As someone who shoots film, there are a number of reasons, one being the asthetic you get from film that you can't (even with x hours in Photoshop) get from digital. I shoot large format and there are no (within my budget, at the very least) 8" x 10" digital sensors.
Film also more or less forces you to make prints. I would hazard a guess that a small percentage of digital photos ever make it to print and half of a photograph for me is a tactile thing you can hold in your hands and give to someone else.
Lastly, it's the process. That's something I can't explain.
> Why do people use hand saws and chisels when powered table saws, compound saws and biscuit joiners are available to us?
That analogy breaks down a bit because in the former case, there are very many circumstances where the small unpowered tool is the best fit for a job (touching up an area, finishing off a mortise, trimming off something by hand where a power tool would not be able to give the proper feedback).
In photography, the preference is a lot more subjective, at least when it comes to 35mm formats.
Most carpenters will carry hand saws and chisels with them even if they have all the top of the line power tools because they remain relevant and immensely useful.
> I shoot large format and there are no (within my budget, at the very least) 8" x 10" digital sensors.
You can make a scanner back out of a normal CCD film scanner. It comes with a lot of downsides since you have a giant "rolling shutter" that works on the scale of 10s+ but it does give you an image.
Not a single wafer, but the sensor built for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is a ~64x64cm 3.2-gigapixel CCD, made of 189 4x4cm chips on the same sensor bed[0].
I suspect the cost was in the millions of dollars for the one-of-a-kind sensor, but I bet you could get a great deal on a second one since they've already done the R&D!
The LargeSense LS911 features a single shot 9×11-inch monochrome CMOS sensor with a 75-micron pixel size, a high base sensitivity of ISO 2100, and a maximum sensitivity of ISO 6400.
You can turn any black and white camera into a color camera by taking 3 pictures with a red, green, and blue filter. Obviously only works with a static subject.
I must admit 12MP is lower than I expected. It seems the intent was to use large pixels to get huge tonal range rather than small pixels for resolution.
They might be going for people who shoot and print at 8x10, so 12mp is ~400dpi... "probably" high enough for that. Or maybe the color resolution and response is amazing. Or maybe it's all about the lens you'd use. Not sure exactly what the market is for this, even after perusing their site.
There is a mathematical relationship between the sensor size and the optical properties (particularly focal length) of the lens that affects the result.
Bigger sensors tend to have shallower depth of field for a given aperture, which requires stopping down the lens further or using lens movements to compensate to keep the subject in focus. But that can be desirable where you want to isolate a subject or otherwise create an effect.
However, stopping down further also tends to cause an increase in diffraction as the Airy discs become larger and start to engage each other in constructive/destructive wave interference which reduces the theoretical resolution of the system. This particularly affects smaller sensors but since you stop a larger lens down farther it also affects them as well.
And in contrast - smaller sensors need wider apertures for a given amount of subject isolation, but they are also subject to diffraction at much wider apertures. This means you need a lens that can deliver maximum resolution at very wide apertures. This is why your cellphone camera has a f/2 or f/1.8 lens, the sensor is tiny and it needs a very wide aperture or diffraction will rob the image of all sharpness. It's also why, for the most part, cellphone cameras haven't gone much above the 10-12mp range.
(I've always suspected there is probably some asymptotic limit to the amount of resolution that can be extracted for a given amount of depth of field, even with an infinitely large film/sensor size. as you increase the sensor size you have to stop down further and the diffraction becomes stronger and limits the lp/mm)
Yes for me when making large prints. You don't get good prints at less than 150 dpi enlarged, generally, and 300+ dpi is preferable and more comparable to a large format negative, so you'd like a ~75 megapixel camera just for poster sized prints, and more for prints larger than that.
Note some people use large format negatives for ultra-sharp small prints, in that case you might be looking for 1000 dpi or higher to match the fidelity of a large negative.
Diffraction and airy disks have an impact as mentioned by a sibling comment, but the simplest explanation I've used is that ultimately you're capturing photons, and if you have a larger sensor you can capture more photons. More photons are better. Of course you need a larger lens with a longer focal length to match the same field of view, but that's the basic idea.
I don't know that I believe this is a "genuine question", because it's quite easy to look up that yes, people still use film, and the article itself is a clear indication that Kodak still produces and sells film.
As far as not understanding, there are things about film that are different than digital. It's may not necessarily be a technical discussion any more (though others may disagree with me), but artistic choices such as the choice to use film are still valid.
> I don't know that I believe this is a "genuine question"
Because you're being pedantic i.e, if there's one person left shooting with film, then "people" are. Look past the literal words and understand the sentiment "What advantages do people see with film over digital?"
> there are things [...] not necessarily be a technical discussion [...] others may disagree [...] artistic choices
Things like what? Artistic choices such as?
I don't think this is a genuine answer. Certainly there must be good reasons people shoot film. But nobody can disagree with you here because in so many words, you said nothing to answer the question.
edit:
It's frustrating to see gp's question downmodded because we reserve that for "Doesn't add to the discussion". It was not impolite and it allowed many of you to surface your passions about shooting with film. How was it unhelpful? Don't interpret gp's inquiry as a dig on your choices; no one need be insecure about sentimentality.
Kodak Alaris != Kodak (ie. the original Eastman Kodak)
The later went into bankruptcy in 2012, selling off most of its remaining assets (though I think it still makes film for movie production). The reason for the bankruptcy is that the market for film died off in the 2000's. That, incidentally, had a huge impact on Kodak's (and my) home town of Rochester, NY. So yeah, I can see why people would be quite surprised that there's still this much interest in using film in 2020.
Its my understanding that the company you think of as Eastman Kodak is still the one who is actually making the film.
Meanwhile, Kodak Alaris is handling the marketing and distribution side of things for still photo film (while the Rochester company does still handle this for motion picture film.)
Its an awkward split, and one I often see re-explained whenever one or the other makes a press announcement.
It's certainly confusing. My understanding was that Kodak had gotten out of the consumer film business entirely, so I was surprised to find out about this Kodak Alaris, which is based in the UK. I suppose that if Kodak is still making film for motion pictures here then they could still be making small quantities of film for still photography as well, but as far as I know most of their main production facility is being rented out to other companies/startups.
It was a genuine question despite what you think. I genuinely did not understand why, with the many advantages (IMO) of digital why people would choose analog.
The poster I responded to edited his statement after my reply to change his "genuine question" from "do people still use film anymore" to "why do people use film". Like the original question, the poster's edit was dishonest, or at least done in bad faith.
Was it dishonest though? Because as the poster of both that you've responded to, I can assure you that it was a genuine question. You can keep claiming I'm being dishonest, but you're not correct.
I see the comment I replied to was edited. It originally started off with "Genuine question: do people use film anymore" or a very similar statement. I don't believe that was a genuine question, because it is very well documented that people do.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.
It's fun and it looks good. Sure, if you only look at the technical specs it's inferior in almost every way, resolution [0], no image stabilisation, poor autofocus, slow shutter speeds, poor high ISO performances, 10 to 36 shots per roll &c.
I bought a d3400 to get into photography, never really liked it. One day I visited my parents and my dad showed me an old Nikon FE, the one he used to take my childhood pics with. Slapped two batteries in and it worked just as good as 30 years ago, I haven't shot digital since then.
Good luck shooting medium format digital if you don't have $15k+ to burn. I got a bronica SQ + two lenses for less than what you'd pay for a good aps-c digital camera. If you dev and scan yourself it's good fun and not too expensive, you can experiment with different film stocks, different developers, different techniques. I personally find it much more rewarding, you can't spray n pray, you can't fix a 2 stops under exposure in post prod, you just have to know what you're doing and get it right. It's more of a creative process in a way.
There are also many quirks that you can't really replicate :
You can still get the good autofocus, good metering, good shutter speeds, and image stabilization with 35mm film.
You just need to pick up a Nikon F100 or F6, and slap on a modern F-mount VR lens.
Of course to get better resolution, you need to go up to medium format. (where those niceties become harder to come by)
You can technically (depending on film) fix a 2 stop underexposure - e.g. with Tri-X there's no problem pushing it to EI 1600. But you can't really do it on a picture-by-picture basis, only for a whole roll.
MF is cheaper to acquire in film. Because of the big negatives, u do can make high resolution digital copies from them.
Uninteresting for most photograhic fields, because of the big and hefty equipment to a APS-C/FF system, but it could make sense for someone doing landscape or architecture. Those bigger lenses have less of a problem to keep the "resolution" high before it hits the sensor/film, that gives small things in big pictures more detail.
That a very excellent point that emphasizes how technology is often about trade-offs, not linear advancement. With film, it's far cheaper to increase the sensor size because the sensor is literally a consumable item. With digital, the sensor is an sophisticated electronic component that it's much harder and expensive to fabricate the larger you make them.
Yeah, basically for nostalgia and no other reason I prefer to shoot with full-frame sensors (like Nikon FX) rather than on the crop sensor (like DX). The larger-sensor digital bodies are considerably more expensive, even if they're years old and used.
1. People enjoy the craft and experience of doing it. Why knit? Why paint on a canvas when you could do it in Photoshop? Why do people still buy records when Spotify etc exist?
2. Medium and large format film still look as good or better than digital 35mm, and are still affordable for hobbyists
3. The look of BW film can’t be replicated by current color digital cameras without an expensive (in time or money) modification to the sensor
Looks like I responded to the wrong comment. I thought I was responding to someone who said they were worried about walking through scanners that would damage negatives.
Personally I enjoy the mystery of taking a photo and waiting to see how it turned out, there is a charm to film photography that isn't captured by digital for me. Getting photos developed is equally exciting, and having the physical copies to hand out or place in an album is nice. It's a dying art, but being held together by enthusiasts.
For me it was the opposite - my photography improved greatly once I didn't have a huge delay between taking the shot and seeing the result. Physical copies are still easy to do too.
P.S. forgot to mention that not paying for film or processing has left me a lot more free to practice. I can take as many pictures in an afternoon as I used to take in a year with film.
To me the greatest magic in the film world is placing (in darkness) a nondescript grey sheet into a tank, flushing a few chemicals through the tank, and pulling out a full color transparent positive image (E6 slide processing). Technically I understand how most of it happens, but seeing a positive in a large size like large format sheets or medium format rolls is an amazing experience. Even if I don't have a slide projector to shot them, a loupe on a light table is enough.
(While I shoot negative much more often, it doesn't have the same visceral impact as positives.)
For the same reason some people still listen to vinyl records now that lossless music formats exist or who play NES games now that VR exists: it's about enjoying that particular technology for it's own sake, or the ceremony, or the memories and associations it provides.
Lossless audio formats still have a sample rate and a bit depth that limits the maximum fidelity, while vinyl is always improving, or I should say record players are still improving. For instance, records made in the e.g. 1940s sound much better on modern equipment than they did when they were new, and in the future might sound even better. On the other hand, digital formats (audio and visual) have a fixed resolution and will never supply more detail than they do now.
So, it's not "for its own sake," but because it does actually sound different. Sure there's a little bit of "for its own sake" in the acts of handling a record and operating the equipment, which I think is what connects with NES: sometimes you just want to sit on a couch with a little controller. But at the same time, there are games that don't exist outside of NES, or are emulated in distasteful way, or something else that makes playing the actual device the best way to enjoy a game. Vinyl has this also, there is lots and lots and lots of music that has not been digitized, neither for CD nor File, and having a turntable is the only way to experience it.
I still use and travel a lot with film, including ISO800 and ISO3200 film the latter of which is totally destroyed if it goes through the scanner, even in an film protection bag.
Megapixels are unimportant, there is a look to film you can’t reproduce no matter how many VSCO plugins you use :)
To be clear, film protection bags don't work for scanners at all. And if the operator sees a blob he can't image, he is likely to back up the belt and increase the power until he can.
Film protection bags are to protect against fogging from radiation at higher altitudes, not the scanners.
The reason why people still shoot on film (or record vinyl records) is the same reason why people still make ukiyo-e woodblock prints: it's an art form, and both the process and the results are interesting.
Besides any modern negatives, there are historical ones that need preservation (my grandfather-in-law's WW2 negatives for example). We've been meaning to digitize them but time is always an issue.
It doesn't. Once film is fixed it's insensitive to further radiation, by design. Light is just radiation at a different wavelength from x-ray, if the fixing didn't work then the negative would fade out very quickly from ordinary light.
Yes, at some scale, if you put it in the jet of a black hole the radiation is going to destroy the image from physically blasting it off. That's not a reasonable concern to raise about film stability. Having your developed negatives x-rayed will not harm them, full stop.
The exception is that you shouldn't project slides for days and days on end, because the color couplers aren't as stable as grandpa's black and white negatives and do fade out eventually. Early color negative films had some problems too and would fade out over time regardless of radiation. But still, flying with a developed slide is not a problem, we are talking about the difference between a few mw of energy and sticking it right next to a 200W projector bulb.
Analogous to the "don't project slides for months on end" - I would not stick it on the radiation source and leave it there for months, but it's not an amount you need to worry about for a reasonable number of trips (let's say less than 100) through the scanner.
For fun? My SiL and I sometimes shoot in b/w and then go into a dark room in our in-laws' basement and develop it. She knows how to, I'm more of an apprentice.
So I know someone who is very much into photography but is of modest means. Turns out you can pick up a second hand analog camera and film for it for very little money, and achieve quality that you'd need something like a Canon EOS 5D for otherwise. Obviously there are things you can't do with the analog that you can with the 5D, but not everyone is made out of money.
The hashtag #shootfilmstaybroke exists for a reason.
Film's initial cost may be cheaper than digital, but after 10-20 rolls of film, digital comes out to be cheaper when accounting for film + development costs.
A used Canon 5D MkII kit can be had for under $800 these days.
I shoot photos for the memories and film just makes me feel more (the look, the grain, the process). Old lenses have a character I prefer. Old cameras feel great and are fun and low-risk (take it on the water w/o worrying about losing it, for example). I enjoy digital but just like cycling, the industry has gone mad equating technology with quality.
I like doing landscape, architecture, and portrait photography with view cameras. Scanning backs are rare, expensive, and not suitable for anything that might move. Backs that work like film are even more expensive (likely more than I'd pay in a lifetime for film and development supplies) and they have a very low resolution.
In addition to the other points, film X-ray machines are still in widespread use because unless there's a specific need for a digital one it's hard to justify the enormous expense of the upgrade (and some people prefer looking at film output over digital as well, if it's what they're used to).
I don't get why techies can't understand why people might not choose to do things just like they do
As other comments have alluded, film still is very good for things. Even the best digital camera sensors can't match the dynamic range of film. Digital photography is so much more than just megapixels
To my mind, the hypersaturation of colors in digital photography is the same as the loudness wars on CDs (which ironically loses one of the great benefits of CD, the huge dynamic range which is now effectively unused outside of few jazz and classical recordings), and the televisions/monitor defaults that emphasize red and high contrast.
Consider, too, with CCD and the lens systems, there are shifts toward certain hues, and further post-processing (e.g. photoshop) is used to distort the color balance.
Of course they probably said the same about Kodachrome's vibrant, but unnatural colors "back when..."
But why? It's done, because we can. And it's noticeably different. And it's sometimes not a matter of being better, just different, since in a saturated world of media (no pun intended) differentiating one's work from the millions of others is often enough of a deciding factor to trigger a choice. Which brings me to the topic of the fashion industry...
There are usually a bunch of color profiles you can set to control the colors. He defaults are too “vivid”. High end cameras can shoot “raw” images and have more control over color as you need software to “develop” the raw into a more useful format(jpg/tiff...)
Ilford has been warning about this also. Previous generations of scanners were generally okay for film up to about ISO 800, but these new scanners are believed unsafe at any speed.
If you're working on a cure for cancer you should have double, triple, quadruple backups on and off site and not fly around with the only copy of your data.
I bet GP meant it to ironic. That said, having a backup and knowing that the data was just corrupted are two different things. In a word without storage level CRC checks, it is possible an otherwise successful test is overlooked and we move on to 'n + 1' in the iteration.
But that said, hopefully all filesystems have some sort of error to show the file has been damaged.
It's for carry on. Checked luggage goes through WAY more radiation and you should never put undeveloped film or anything else that's radiation sensitive in your checked luggage.
For reference, 300-350mrem is a decent estimate of your annual dose of radiation. If you fly a lot, smoke, or live in areas where the ground releases significant amounts of radon, your own annual dose can be twice that.
What about those full body scanners? I always opt out due to health concerns. Does anyone known anything about the actual radiation levels involved in those and the safety standards the machines must live up to?
I know a lot about them; I researched them extensively even to the point of talking to designers.
I came to the understanding that they're quite harmless; even considering the radiation doses you get while flying after (because, radiation is additive of course)- However using them many times per day can cause damage to the skin over long periods of time.
Regardless, Opt out anyway; if people choose to opt out the economics of the devices will stop making sense and perhaps they'll be a little less invasive in future.
I will always opt-out, even when I'm being threatened or condescended to (as was the case in Gatwick airport some time ago).
If you assume the dose is absorbed by the "whole body," then it isnt of any concern. However, in reality the energy is so low that almost all the dose is absorbed by the outer portions of skin, which could be more hazardous. Public-facing literature i've come across doesnt address this, so erring on the side of caution isnt a bad idea. More importantly it disincentivises use of these devices for security theater.
The worst overall damage we had at that lab was when high school kids would run customer Tri-X film through the C-41 lab. That would completely wipe the film, no recovery whatsoever possible.