Introduction
For Many years, 35mm film has been the standard choice for a generation of photographers. This chapter summarises my experience of negatives, slides and why it's now time to give it up.

Negative Film & Prints
This has been the choice for consumers for many a decade. Negative film is most easily converted to prints without resorting to expensive cibachrome or digital imaging techniques. The prints generally look good, although colour saturation and contrast aren't generally as good as slide film. However, it's easy to digitise prints with cheap scanners. These days most flat bed scanners are of a decent quality at a cheap price. Film scanners also do a very good job of scanning negatives, suffering none of the problems that they have with scanning slides.

Slide Film
Slide Film had been my choice of film since 2001. For contrast, dynamic range, colour saturation and smooth tones it can't be beaten except by the most expensive digital SLR cameras. When you look at a slide through a slide viewer, what you see is what you remembered. With negative prints, it was often the case that the results on print were disappointing.

The Nikon Coolscan IV

Slide film, compared with print film has fewer variables affecting the final result. With print film, both the film and the print/processing quality could disappoint. With slide film, E6 processing is a fairly standard job without too much scope for quality loss.

The downside to slide film, however, is the process of digitising it. In short, it's a pain in the neck. Even my dedicated film scanner, a £550 Nikon Coolscan IV, produces disappointing results straight off the scan. With a lot of photoshop processing, you can get a reasonable result - much of the information from the slide is there, and the pictures when seen on their own are pretty good. But when compared side by side with the real slide seen in a slide viewer, the digital images are of inferior quality being a bit dull, flat, lacking colour saturation & subtle tones.

A raw slide scan with no editing

The same scan after post processing

A full magnification portion of the raw scan

In order to get slides digitised properly, you need a drum scanner. They're not cheap, for about £6,000 you can get a bottom of the range drum scanner and I imagine it's only with proper calibration of the scanner that your results will truly stand out. You can get someone else to do the images for you, but at a price (from £5 per image upwards).

The main problem with capturing slides is the wide dynamic range that slides have. Dynamic range is the intensity ratio between the whitest white and the blackest black, normally expressed or a logarithmic scale (Dz). Prints have a ratio of about 100 (~Dz 2), Monitors vary between 500 to 1000 (~Dz 3), Slides go upto about 20,000 (~Dz 4) and the human eye goes further. Consumer slides scanners can capture a dynamic range of about log3 while the drum scanners can capture the full range of a slide. The eye, however, sees intensity in a logarithmic manner, so an image presented on a print can have the same tonal variations as an image on a slide. Consumer scanners however, have great difficulty resolving the shadow detail in slides as well as more subtle tonal variations.

The Demise of Film
In my old articles I provided a lot of detail about differences between flatbed scanners as well as image software packages. I also talked about what to look out for in films and film processing. All of this is now obsolete. Even my own flatbed scanner has been retired to the garage. In 2000, when the articles were first written, digital cameras were expensive, memory sticks had little capacity as well as being expensive, batteries didn't last very long and images on camera review websites didn't really convince me that digicams were a good deal.

A full magnification crop of the next image

Digital images: Sharp, clean and punchy

Now in 2005, digital has come of age. Cameras are cheap enough to consider buying one. Images are sharp, colours are vibrant, and very little noise is present. I'd say when you compared a 100 ISO film with a 100 ISO digital image, the digital image is much less grainy than the film. With my particular camera, I can fire off 170 images on a Norway trip and only use half the battery & memory capacity.

Best of all, once you've paid for the camera, it's all free. In the first 9 months that I have owned my camera, I have fired off 1600 images. To do that with slide film would cost ~£300 for process paid film. Considering my digital camera & memory stick cost that much, it's already paid for itself. In the future, digital will continue to improve, images will hopefully match slides for contrast, dynamic range, saturation and subtlety.