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Digital vs. old style

3 comments on Digital vs. old style

Digital vs. old style
: Glenn Reynolds does the pro-con boogie with digital vs. film photography.

At the MIT Media Lab event last week, I sat next to the person in charge of design and photography at Newsweek and asked her how much of her photography is digital these days.

She said at least 80 percent (more than I would have thought). Mostly what she gets done in film is special studio shoots (though she also noted that when she needed some extensive work done quickly over the Thanksgiving holiday, the British photographer who did it used digital and she was delighted with the speed).

As Glenn notes, digital is certainly leading in news (witness Zeyad). The rest will follow.

3 responses to “Digital vs. old style”

  1. Bruno Avatar
    Bruno

    what about new vs. old style in books?
    http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61550,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

  2. fred Avatar
    fred

    I work at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center Imaging Services and we have been totally digital for the past couple of years. Our normal cameras are Nikon D1Xs and I have no problem printing very nice 30″x40″ prints from the raw camera files. The only traditional film we now shoot is high speed (up to 10,000 fps) 16mm or 70mm motion picture film on engine tests and all of that processing is outsourced and transferred to DVD. We are looking at digital video, but the technology just isn’t quite there yet.

  3. Sam Avatar
    Sam

    There really isn’t all that much reason to shoot 35mm film these days if you shoot more than a few rolls a year. 35mm was never about high quality, it was about speed, cost, and convenience at reasonable quality, compared to medium and large format. Digital basically beats film at all of these at 35mm and smaller formats, just the initial cost for the camera is significantly higher than for a film camera. And if you shoot a lot, that advantage is eaten up pretty quickly. Since I first started with a digicam 6 years ago, I’ve taken more than 10K images, most of them cr*p, but some quite good. I’m a much better photographer today than I was at the start, and I wouldn’t have been able to afford to shoot that much film to learn.