Film or Digital

Opinion piece: I hear claims about how the best camera for shooting panoramas is a digital camera. I disagree--I think the choice between a film camera and a digital camera has to be evaluated for each situation. The budget you have for acquiring VR gear, the quality level you want to attain, and the time-to-build a pano are three critical factors for deciding between film and digital.

Yes, it seems certain that within a couple years digital cameras will exceed film capabilities at most price points. But today, it takes an US$8000 (or perhaps a $4000 Kodak 14n) camera body to equal the resolution of film (see Norm Koren's analysis and comparison table). There's a lot of controversy about whether the next level down of digital camera ($1500-$4000) are equal to film. I don't think the verdict is in yet, so I'll base this opinion on Norm's chart for now.

Why use 35mm film as the benchmark? Because many people already have film cameras, so the incremental cost to start shooting panoramas may be a lot less. Excellent quality 35mm film SLRs can be bought for under $1000, and very good SLR bodies can be found for less than $500. Photographers have a long history with film and understand its limits. Most 35mm SLR lenses provide better optical quality than the tiny multi-element zoom lenses in most digital cameras.

And isn't it a waste to pay for a $1500 lens like a Nikon 18mm, and only be able to use part of the lens (and effectively be using a 27mm lens, which would cost a lot less for a film camera)? Many DSLRs like the Canon EOS10D or Nikon D100 do not use the entire 35mm lens area because their sensor is smaller than the size of 35mm film. Consequently you have to shoot with a much wider angle lens than the amount of field of view you want to shoot with. In the case of the D100, Nikon is coming out with dedicated D100 lenses, but that leaves a lot of DSLRs having to use 35mm lenses.

And consider this: let's say you shoot some panoramas of special places with your digital camera, build them, and post them to the web. A few years down the line, you want to rebuild them as larger panos because now everyone has 4000 pixel wide LCD screens, fiberoptic Internet hookups and huge filesizes are now in demand (or you are making a giant print for a show). So you go back and look at the original images -- whoops, you can't improve the pano size because there's no more pixels to be found there. Just ask anyone who shot panoramas with a QuickTake 150. Those panoramas are frozen in time and resolution. But had they been shot with film, you could go back and rescan them using state-of-the-art improved film scanners, and create a monster sized panorama. Some people say "oh, no one scans their film at maximum resolution." Well I scan my film at 4000ppi. So for me to make the highest quality panorama I can with a limited budget, I choose film.

There are many attractive digital cameras available for under $1000. My experience with a couple of them is that they are decidely inferior to film. Norm's chart suggests my current digital camera provides 60% of the resolution of film. Then there is the "cyan washout" that occurs anytime the sun is in the picture. [addition 5/12/03: A reader reminds me of the speed issue: that most digicams cannot shoot a full panorama as quickly as a film camera because of buffering limitations]. And the other drawback is that any shots taken with its wide angle lens requires a lot of fiddling in Photoshop to remove barrel distortion. Even then neither myself or a Stitcher expert has been able to build a high quality cubic from shots I've taken with it. I've kept a digicam around for shooting some cylindrical panoramas and single shots.

There is no question that digital cameras enable you to get images into a computer quickly. You may think that that gives digital a tremendous edge. Well not if you have to do a lot of post-processing on RAW files, just to convert them into something a stitcher can recognize. And not if you have to spend a lot more time removing barrel distortion. I started shooting RAW files, then it ended up taking an hour to convert a CF card full of images from RAW to TIFF. Another hour to remove barrel distortion with LensDoc. And then how much time are you going to spend adjusting the white balance? So the time advantage can dissipate quickly from its theoretical maximum.

There are times when you are travelling and cannot empty your CompactFlash cards or recharge your batteries. For instance, in the last few years I went on 6 week-long backpack trips. Any digital camera would have ended up weighing more due to the insane number of batteries I'd have to carry. And no one is complaining about the quality that film produced.

But what are your needs? Are you making a throw-away panorama that no one will look at in five years? Then digital is fine. Is making a panorama in ten minutes giganticly important to you? Then digital is preferred. Do you have $10000 to spend on a VR camera? Then digital is clearly the way to go. But if price/performance matters, then you need to make a careful evaluation. If you are trying to make very high quality panoramic images, then depending on your budget, film may be better.

Last update: 1/6/06; 2:41:58 PM.