Film vs Digital

I was feeling abit nostalgic recently, yearning for the days when I could take a photo and not worry about it until I got back from my holiday and then be surprised when I saw the results - I miss that feeling. So I jumped on ebay to see what my dream film cameras were all going for these days.

Olympus XA2

I've owned countless film cameras over the years, but i'll try and list some: Olympus trip 35, XA2, mju-1, mju-2, canon EOS 500, canon QL-17, contessa something, kodak starshot, various box brownies, 2x3 graflex, ziess Ikon 6x6 folder, Holga to name just the ones I can remember as I write this. My favorites of the bunch would be the XA2 and the folding zeiss, with the trip35 running a close 3rd, I got some great shots out of the contessa too. But my dream camera was always the Bessa rangefinder series from voigtlander.

Bessa R3a

Everytime I walked into the photo store in the city I would devote at least 10 minutes to looking at the bessa, it represented the best 35mm film camera I could hope to own and with each incarnation it seemed to get better and better. Last year I got to borrow a Hassleblad X-pan and that nearly drove me to buy the Bessa R2A.... until I got the scans back.

Those familiar with the X-pan know that its a proper panoramic camera, which means that even though the camera shoots on 35mm film the neg size is really medium format. I got the scan of my best neg from that weekend done on a flextight (highend professional film scanner) and for the $44 it cost me I would say that my panasonic LX2 comes close enough for me, my 10mp DSLR at the time (a pentax K10D) simply blew it away.

This was alittle annoying since I knew the larger neg size of the X-pan was better than the Bessa, so I put my dreams on hold and stuck with digital.

I have spent the last few days reading up on Olympus OM lenses, I've bought a few off ebay and am planning some definitive realworld tests which i feel are lacking out there. The OM series have a great reputation as brilliant lenses and so far this seems to translate to digital very well, my OM 21mm f3.5 is tiny and VERY sharp on my 5D, it's the perfect wide angle prime for travel, but if I travel with a set of OM lenses what am I going to use as a back up camera? - I can't afford another 5D, so an old OM series body seems to make perfect sense. Thats what got me started on all of this, so I dug around in my archives to see if i'd taken any film shots that had a digital version.

Turns out I did, on one of my trips to Tazmaina I'd taken a shot of an irrigation sprinkler with my XA2 as well as my old 6 mega pixel fuji F10 - the XA2 scan was done on a flextight so I could upload it as a stock photo to Alamy (it was accepted) - so it's pretty much the best image quality i'm going to see from that camera - which is well regarded as being a very good little one. I don't remember the film speed but it was proabably ISO 200 fuji, so not particularly grainy. I up-rezed the fuji shot to the same resolution and apart from a few jpg artifacts there really wasn't a difference in image quality. Down sizing the film image to match the fuji isn't the point but they looked the same (some colour differences of course).

So if a 6 megapixel digital p&s (i admit it's a very good one) can match a flextight scan of a 35mm neg, then a 6mp SLR should be the minimum I need to never shoot film again, 10mp proved better than the X-pan, so i'm wondering where my 5D stands - it's much better than my 10mp K10D was... so I know I can probably never be happy shooting film again in terms of image quality but there is something romantic about it that I just can't shake, the fact that you can't see what you've taken until much later. The leica M8 is the only thing close to the Bessa in a digital format (the epson Rd-1 is only 6mp, which makes it an expensive toy image quality wise these days) but with the size of the OM lenses it wouldn't be that much smaller to carry around than the 5D and 2 or 3 primes.

So for me, film is dead and the romance of film has a price, there is a Bessa R3M on ebay that i'm keeping an eye on - it's got a few days to go and is at $102 at the moment, when it finishes I should know how much i'd be willing to pay for the "romance factor"... keep tuned

UPDATE: My maximum price for the romance factor seems to be $400 for a Bessa R3a/m and 40mm 1.4 - i lost the ebay auction with ended at just over $700, guess I'll stick with my XA2 for now