Copyright Yuen Kit Mun 1999
The 35mm SLR, long the ultimate camera in amateur photography, is mortally wounded. It may take a few years to die but do not doubt its ultimate fate.
For those of you planning to buy an SLR, take heed. Buy a digital camera instead or end up with an obsolete system that is more inconvenient and expensive to operate.
Digital camera lenses are smaller, cheaper, and have higher performance. There is a 500mm f2.8 lens available. This is unheard of in the 35mm world. The standard 35mm format 500mm lens is a f8, which is 3 stops or 8 times darker, and costs as much as the whole digital camera and lens. A 35mm format 300mm f2.8 lens will cost tens of thousands of dollars and weigh a few pounds. And the digital camera's lens is a zoom, 38mm (f1.8) to 500mm (f2.8).
As zooms go, this is phenomenal. Most 35mm format zooms start at f4, which is 2 stops darker. And none cover such a wide focal range.
How is this possible? Format size. The imaging element of digital cameras are integrated circuits. A megapixel integrated circuit is tiny, a fraction of an inch in size, because the integrated circuit elements are smaller than the grain in photographic film. This means that much smaller lenses are required. And since the small lenses are so cheap anyway, you can make them with relatively large apertures too.
Of course, this means that the digital camera's lens isn't really 500 mm, more like 72 mm. But the field of view is the same. Stretch out your arm and raise 2 fingers. The width of the 2 fingers is roughly the field of view of a 500mm lens.
Even the teleconverters are better. 35mm teleconverters can double the focal length of a lens, but will reduce the brightness by 2 stops or 4 times. Digital cameras also have teleconverters but because the original lens is so small, they can screw on to the front of the lens, not the rear. This means no reduction in aperture size. You can get a 1000 mm f2.8 lens!
Digital cameras do 'cheat' a bit because the lenses can be designed to a lower resolution than conventional lenses - film still does have a higher total resolution. This lower resolution probably helps in making such high performance zooms. But most people won't notice this difference, so the resulting enormous lens price and performance advantage alone is enough to kill the 35mm SLRs dead.
Conventional photography can be difficult because it is not WYSIWYG. Photographic film has a lower contrast range than your eye. This means that in some high contrast situations, you can see details in the dark as well as bright areas, but take a photo of the same scene and the darker areas will be all black with no detail or the brighter areas will be totally white.
This can be overcome by metering the different areas and deciding which you want to sacrifice. Or leave the camera on auto and cross your fingers.
Most digital cameras come with an LCD display. Nice thing is that the contrast range of these things is close to the contrast range of the final photo. No more guessing or metering, just look at the display. Most of your exposure problems disappear, just like that.
You can even play back the picture immediately after you've taken it, to check if anyone blinked or if the camera shook and blurred out the picture.
Digital cameras download pictures as JPEG files straight into your computer. Sure, you can scan your photos to get softcopies too, but who bothers? You might at first but you'll quickly tire of it.
With JPEGs, you can easily email to friends or make copies for people. No more distributing ordering lists for people to tick, then laboriously sorting out the copies. Just copy the files to I:\TEMP\ and let everyone make their own copies. The convenience is such that creating photo essays for FSLNET is easy - 30 to 60 minutes work.
You will also be viewing these photos on your big computer monitor, not a 4R print less than a quarter the size. The total resolution is about the same but the greater impact of the larger photo is significant.
There are lots of programs out there (some free!) that help you manage your photos. They can create little thumbnail or index summaries of 20 to 100 photos on one screen, and automatically display the photos one by one like a slide show.
The JPEG file is both the original and the file that you view. Unlike the negative which is the original but is not viewed. Instead, you look at and keep, the 4R print and end up losing the negative. This won't happen with digital files.
Take my sister's wedding photos as an example. After ten years, she still hasn't gotten round to organising them or printing copies. They're all jumbled up in a box, growing mouldy. Some are taken by guests and she doesn't have the negatives. Actually she doesn't even have the negatives for the rolls that I and my cousin took. My parents kept those and they've lost them.
Keeping and organising softcopies is so much easier. Imagine averaging 12 rolls of film a year (not that much considering you might take 6 to 8 rolls during a 1 week vacation). That's 120 rolls of film in ten years. Which is actually the situation that I'm in now. But 120 rolls of film will fit easily into 10 Zip disks or MO disks. Problem solved.
The dirty little secret of 35mm photography is that the 24 hour minilab that you send your film to for processing, has more effect on the final quality than almost anything else. A mediocre lab (and a lot are) can make your flawless technique and expensive glass produce nothing better than a cheap automatic camera.
The minilab can affect the final print in many ways:
Don't believe me? Just print the same negative at two or three different shops and compare. Scarier still, print the same negative at the same shop at different times. I strongly urge you to try this. It will put you off conventional photography forever.
The situation is so bad that serious amateurs prefer slide film. This way, the printing stage is removed. But slides have their own problems - expensive to print if you do want hardcopy, and they fade every time you project them! So these fanatics don't project their slides, but look at them over light boxes using 10x magnifiers. Only for the really dedicated.
The incremental cost of digital photography is low. One photo costs less than 5 cents to store (20 dollars for a 100 megabyte Zip disk, 200 kBytes per photo). So cheap as to be practically free. A conventional photo costs 50 cents, counting negative, processing and printing costs. I've already saved a few hundred dollars in just six months.
I used to limit the number of photos I took, telling myself 'It's 50 cents every time you press the shutter, are you sure you really want this?' Now I don't care and take as many as I want. If I don't like the photo I just erase it and reuse the storage space. Simple and guilt free.
I really hated this about film cameras. You have to finish the whole roll of film before you can process it. Digital cameras make photography a more real time event. Take a picture and see it on your computer minutes later. Instant gratification!
It's also convenient to lend to friends. No problems with having a half finished roll of film inside.
I used to keep a spare roll of film at all times, so I wouldn't find myself out of film. But I didn't dare keep more than one due to the expiry date. Now I just keep a box of diskettes handy at all times, and I don't have to worry about expiry dates.
Photographs are memories. Memories that we want to keep for decades and even pass on to our grandchildren. So, long term storage is an important consideration.
Film colours fade. Digital photo files don't. My brother in law was so concerned that he asked his sister to use black and white film for his wedding as this would last longer than colour film. Various techniques such as sepia toning have been created to preserve black and white prints. Colour prints are soaked for hours to leach out all chemicals, shielded behind glass to reduce ultra violet light exposure, laminated to reduce oxidation. It's a complex subject. Archival experts even worry about damage to negatives from natural background radiation .
Digital photos can be easier to store but are not fuss free.
The most important thing is backup. If you are not willing to make backups then don't start on digital photography. If and when your hard disk crashes, that's it. I keep the main copy in my local hard disk and make two backup copies on Zip disks.
After a few years, the storage media will change. In that case, just copy out your files to the new media. Due to the large amount of data stored in the old media, PCs will be able to support both media during the transition period. The market will demand it. Remember that computers are general purpose devices. It will not be as difficult as transferring all your LDs or Betamax tapes to, say, DVD. It will just be copy star dot star.
File format changes are trickier, e.g. if there is a file format to replace JPEG. Again, the huge base of existing JPEG photos should mean that conversion programs will be widely available.
As a bonus, some digital cameras come with a limited video facility. This is stored as a MPEG file that is transferred to your PC, more convenient to distribute than the tapes that video cameras use. Most PCs can play MPEG files without additional hardware or software.
You get maybe 15 seconds of colour video at 320 x 240 pixels resolution. Not as good as a real video camera of course, but a useful addition. 15 seconds may not sound like much but it is sufficient to capture the flavour of the situation - kids laughing and running around, people gathered round a birthday cake, friends chatting. Think of the amount of information in a standard TV commercial - a whole story in 30 seconds - with individual shots less than 5 seconds long.
Actually, the short recording time is an advantage. Twelve years ago when my cousin got married, video was all the rage so he hired a company to make a video of the wedding. The final tape was over one hour long. How often would you watch something like that? A few 15 second snippets would be more accessible. Less is more.
Hardcopy is the digital camera's main weak spot. You can buy colour printers but some people say that the colour fades after a few months. Thiam Chai says that his doesn't so you can ask him about his setup.
Good prints also require special glossy paper, which is expensive. You can print on normal paper but it won't be as good. There are a few shops in the US where you can bring floppies to the shop and they will print the JPEGs on to normal photo paper. But I haven't heard of such a service here. Maybe in a few years.
If hardcopy is important to you then digital isn't for you, yet. I've taken over a thousand digital photos and haven't printed a single one. And I don't mind one bit.
Being digital electronic equipment, digital cameras will keep on getting better and cheaper. It's only a question of when you should jump in. You can't wait forever.
I think the time is now. Megapixel cameras give sufficient resolution for most purposes. How many people actually print 8 x 10 inch photos?
I don't know for sure but I would think that 35mm SLRs are more rugged and reliable. I expect my FM2 to last 20 to 30 years. I'm keeping it as a backup in case my digital camera fails. I'd be happy if my digital camera lasts 3 to 5 years and am willing to accept having to buy a new one every few years, just like a PC.
If you're a professional photographer, banging your equipment around everyday, shooting in sub zero temperatures, then you need the ruggedness of a SLR. But normal people like us don't.
The 35mm SLR bodies are highly developed. You can shoot 5 to 10 frames per second, with shutter speeds up to 1/8000 seconds and as slow as a few minutes or hours for long exposure night photography or tricks involving lightning and fireworks. You can use different film types and add on monster external flashes.
But again, normal guys don't need these features. I'm willing to give them up for the advantage and convenience of digital.
A good digital camera will cost about S$1,500. This is certain to drop as the electronics inevitably mature. A reasonable quality SLR will cost only half of that. But remember the amazing performance of the digital camera's lens. An equivalent 35mm set of lenses will cost thousands of dollars and they still won't even come close to the digital's performance at the telephoto end.
All in all a good buy.
Right now, floppy disks are the only practical storage for digital cameras.
Some cameras use RAM chips but these cost hundreds of dollars for a few megabytes. A floppy disk costs less than a dollar per megabyte.
The difference is important during situations such as long vacations. You can easily bring a few boxes of diskettes along, and even buy more wherever you are if you run out. But if you use RAM, well, you won't be able to afford sufficient RAM for a few hundred photos. You could bring along a notebook computer and download regularly but that's still a pain.
Actually the whole downloading business is a pain. You need to run a special downloading program and connect the camera to the PC's serial port, then wait a few minutes for the transfer. I've tried it before and it is very lecheh compared to just popping out a floppy and slotting it into the PC.
IBM announced a tiny 100 megabyte hard disk that is plug-in compatible with some camera RAM (Smartmedia) but I haven't seen anyone selling them yet. When they are available, then only will floppies cease to be the only practical choice. But even then I'd be worried about the hard disk crashing. If one floppy gets damaged I just lose a few pictures, not all of them.
Unfortunately only Sony makes cameras with floppy drives, so you don't have much choice. Nice thing is that because the floppy drive makes their cameras so large anyway, having a large lens won't add that much to the camera's size. So it is Sony that makes those superzooms mentioned at the beginning. Guys like Nikon, Olympus and Fuji who make digital cameras the size of cigarette boxes, have more modest (but sharper) lenses. Yeah I know, small cameras are cute and easy to carry around, but really, floppies are the only way to go.
There has been some talk about Sony coming up with a new camera that uses Zip drives or Sony's own equivalent. But these aren't out yet and it will be years, if ever, before they are as ubiquitous as the humble floppy drive.
As it is, if you're buying now, I would recommend the Sony FD91 or FD88 (less capable lens but smaller and higher resolution) to most people.
