Is digital comparable to film?

[Doug]

Now my dad loves to keep going on about how we are actaully going backwards in quality these days using these examples....

CD's better quality than MP3's
Film better quality than Digital
Planes getting slower (Concord out of service)

etc etc

Now I always argue that he is wrong, think about trying to carry 1000 CD's with you when you could just use 1 iPod etc.

But his argument about cameras is that he read somewhere that digitals need to get up to something daft like a thousand mega pixels (or something along those lines) before they can match 35mm quality.

How true is that?

 

[Gazza_DJ]

I have heard something similar to that as well.

Also, you can split quality into two different things - absolute quality and percieved quality. Yes, CD's are better absolute quality than mp3's as it is the original 16bit 44.1KHz wave, but a properly encoded mp3 (say, LAME V0) is completely transparent to the original, i.e. the percieved quality is the same.

 

[sprog]

I wish I had a quid for every time this topic came up.

Horses for courses innit... but obviously film is better.

 

[KeithH]

I thought it was accepted that by and large, 8mp is the equivalent to film.

Keith.

 

[Pippy_Neville]

I think your pa is right - it's the analogue v digital debate. In theory analogue is better as you have a wave, whereas digital you have a (large) number of bars that make up that wave and so you miss the bits at the corners. Although with digital you get less crud in the reproduction and better portability.
But CDs are only better than MP3s due to the sampling rate. The other argument would be that records (analogue) are theoretically better than CDs (digital).
Anyway, that's what I keep telling Mrs Pippy when she wants me to get rid of all my vinyl records and I'm sticking to it!

 

[Gazza_DJ]

But CDs are only better than MP3s due to the sampling rate. The other argument would be that records (analogue) are theoretically better than CDs (digital).

the sample rate of CD's an mp3's are the same - 44.1KHz - unless for some reason you set your mp3 converter to a lower sample rate.
The reason a low quality mp3 sounds crap compared to CD is compression - low quality mp3's apply a frequency cut-off, sometimes as low as 14KHz. mp3's compress by analysing the wave using various psycho-acoustic algorithyms that remove frequencies that it thinks you cannot hear / notice.

 

[robmiller]

But CDs are only better than MP3s due to the sampling rate. The other argument would be that records (analogue) are theoretically better than CDs (digital).
Anyway, that's what I keep telling Mrs Pippy when she wants me to get rid of all my vinyl records and I'm sticking to it!

Only if you use the audiophile's dictionary, where "hiss" translates to "warmth" and other vagueries

 

[pxl8]

But his argument about cameras is that he read somewhere that digitals need to get up to something daft like a thousand mega pixels (or something along those lines) before they can match 35mm quality.

How true is that?

Not even remotely.

As discussed recently in another thread recently. Digital is now at the point where the ability to resolve detail is down to the lens not the sensor or number of pixels.

There are plenty of websites that clearly show digital is ahead, not only of 35mm but also medium format film and google will turn up plenty of results. A lot of them are a few years old now - I suspect because the argument was put to bed a while back

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/shootout.shtml

or more recent:

Canon 5D
http://www.flickr.com/photos/prophotolife/2820021194/sizes/o/

Kodak Gold 200
http://www.flickr.com/photos/prophotolife/2819217103/sizes/o/

Warning - the last two are full size images but the difference is chalk and cheese.

 

[dazzajl]

Well oddly I stuck on a record before firing up the laptop and ending up in this thread. It's fair to say that my record player sounds pretty awful and even the lowest sample rate MP3's on my pod are far better.

I have a mate with some good music playing gear and his record player sounds superb and it's clearer than the cd player.

It's really all about how well the kit you have is suited to the task with any digital/analogue debate isn't it. A good scan of a medium format landscape or studio tranny is going to blow a 5d or 1ds II type camera into the weeds. Stack a 35mm camera with a roll of 400ISO loaded against a D3, shoot in low light and the digi will be leagues ahead.

The only way to win is to have it all.



or not care.

 

[a1ex2001]

I always thought the major difference bettween film and digital these days was dynamic range and not resolution?

 

[pxl8]

Even the dynamic range as caught up - digital is hovering around 8 or 9 stops now, which is around the levels of b+w film

 

[snoop69]

According to Doug Harman,he says in his book 'The Digital Photography Handbook'

"A single frame of 35mm film contains the equivalent information of around 30mp
of data,if it were translated across to a digital camera".

 

[Knikki]

Film has advantages over digital

Digital has advantages over film

MP3 has advantages over CD

CD over MP3

Vinyl has advantages over CD

CD has advantages over vinyl

and so on and so on.

At the end of the day does it really matter?