So, you know your in the market for a brand new Single Lens Reflex (SLR) style camera. You've decided you want to get into photography seriously and want to get a superior quality camera. You've been shooting extensively with either a Point and Shoot digital camera--most likely these days--you were into shooting once upon a time and loved the look you got with one of those old Pentax K1000's, or you were actually shooting with a Point and Shoot film camera and now want to expand your horizons.

But, something surprising happened on the way to the camera store. Technology has taken over like it never has in the photography world and now you have a serious if not complete substitute for a standard film SLR. No surprise to a savvy shopper like yourself, I'm talking about digital. The recent revolution on how you capture images has created a kind of excitement with photography that hasn't been felt in all my 30 years of shooting. Visit the magazine rack at your local Barnes & Noble, you'll find a huge selection on periodicals related to digital photography. Where you once saw titles exposing the benefits of one fine grained film over another, you now find articles citing the differences between one sensor and another. Does 8 mega-pixels make a difference over 6? For that matter, what's a mega-pixel? I'm not going into that right now but I will cover some of the differences and pros and cons between film and digital SLR's so you can make an educated decision when choosing a camera.

What are we talking about here anyway? We're talking about the primary tool you'll use to capture images. I'm sure you surmised picking either film or digital as your format of choice will have a significant affect on almost every aspect of your photography experience. I'm not trying to add any pressure here, in fact I'm trying to help out with some of my experience and few comparative aspects of the benefits of film and digital.

Let's get started

Image Quality - not only is this the most subjective and variable aspect on the raging debate between the two mediums, image quality is probably the single most important consideration when choosing a medium. Of course, the larger the sensor file, the larger the film, the larger... the quality is usually better. Just so we know where I'm comparing between the mediums. I'm comparing the images at their first stage of reasonable viewing. In the film world that means having the slide spread out on a light table with your Rodenstock 10x lupe in hand. For digital captures, I'm talking seeing it on your computer using your favorite image browsing software.

Simply looking through a high quality lupe at a Fuji Velvia shot of a magnificent landscape is enough to make anyone quite their day job and take on the wild and woolly world of photography full time. There's a distinct appeal to seeing an outstanding image that just makes all the hardship worthwhile. Does film deliver quality? You bet it does and it does so in spades. All things being equal--good exposure, outstanding composition, all those variables--images on high quality slide film define quality.

What about digital images? Sure they do but... While convenience and ease of use are a separate characteristics to consider between the formats I'll mention that all in all, digital files are much more finicky than slides. Usually some form of post production tweaking is required to match the same "quality" that a positive or negative image has straight out of the camera. That being said, do you get great imagery based on digital captures? You bet. In fact the quality can be absolutely stunning perhaps even exceeding film in some aspects. Its just that the road to those incredible images is bit more bumpy.

Advantage - Film

Storability - Here I'm talking about the problems dealing with your image medium prior to shooting. Post production is an entirely different subject matter.

Film, especially professional grade, is susceptible to extremes in weather. Special care has to be taken to make sure your image material isn't aging. Being a chemical based analog medium, film will degrade in some fashion if it's left out in normal temperatures. This just gets worse the hotter it gets. I'm sure you've seen the results of a family members mistake of leaving a disposable camera on a car's dash board in the middle of summer. It's not pretty. I committed a significant portion of my refrigerator and freezer to storing film back in my film days. Now add the problem of going somewhere remote, you're problem just gets worse. Okay, this issue is mostly a problem for the most finicky. Leaving film out at room temperatures for days on end honestly isn't that big of a deal. But, it's always something to consider.

The biggest thing you have to worry about with digital photography is having enough memory space on your Compact Flash (CF) cards and on your hard drive before beginning a shoot. Once you shoot your images, you have to put them somewhere. Eventually, you'll fill your expensive CF cards and want to download the images onto something much larger. After the images are safely stored away, you can now get back to the task of shooting. So, unlike film that uses a disposable cartridge for every film roll, digital requires you to care and feed a fairly small number of digital storage devices like your CF cards. Honestly, this isn't all the difficult but like anything, if you fail to do the basics, you'll regret it later.

Advantage - Digital