"Photographers who are just getting started with a new studio would be torn between digital photography and film," says renowned digital landscape photographer Stephen Johnson. Johnson made waves in the early '90s with his pioneering use of digital cameras to capture stunning landscapes, and has published books and held shows to display the artistic possibilities of digital cameras.

The choice between digital and film cameras is a difficult one for the new professional photographer to make: the print and publishing industries are increasingly demanding digital image capture, and scanning of color images from prints or slides is dying out in North America. Commercial photo studios and catalog publishers have adopted digital photography wholesale. But for the new photographic enterprise, the dilemma is still in the cost differential: the digital photographic workflow is certainly more efficient and will save money in the long run, but the upfront capital cost is many times higher for digital as opposed to film photography.

"Commercial photographers have finally and almost uniformly embraced digital camera technology," reads the latest TrendWatch Graphic Arts report on digital photography.

According to the TrendWatch Graphic Arts research organization, 82 percent of all commercial photographers in the United States report using a digital camera of some kind, and so do three-quarters of all creative professionals. The most popular type of digital camera in the commercial or professional field is the professional one-shot device, with 51 percent of photographers reporting having one—and 52 percent planning to purchase one, or an additional one, within the next 12 months.

It seems that digital photography has finally won out over film. Not only have prices come down—as they have every year since digital cameras first hit the market—but also vendors at the high end of the market claim to have eclipsed film in pure technical terms. Digital cameras are being used for every style, use, and final destination of image capture. In fact, TrendWatch reports that not only are digital cameras taking significant amounts of work away from scanners, but film processing labs are being affected, too. "The lab that I used to frequent phoned me one day and asked 'Visko, is something wrong? Have you gone to another lab?'" says Visko Hatfield, a New York professional photographer who has used a number of different digital cameras. "I had to tell them, 'Sorry, I just don't shoot much transparency anymore!'"

On the consumer side, too, entry-level digital cameras were the electronic gadget to get for Christmas last year. With prices as low as $289 for a Pentax 330 GS, which has a 3.2 megapixel sensor, digital cameras that approach the quality of a 35mm film camera are well within prosumer range. Could this be film's swan song?

The state of the art

By many standards, the very high end of the digital camera range has surpassed the capabilities of film—at least at the entry level, and at very affordable prices. However, it's almost impossible to clearly draw a line where digital camera resolution delivers better images than film does.

"The minimum level for a professional photographer would be a 3-megapixel camera for small-format output, comparable to 35mm film," says Vince Naselli, director of TrendWatch Graphic Arts. These can be had for less than $2000, including optics, and there is a wide choice of models from such known brands as Kodak, Nikon, Olympus, Canon, Fuji, and Agfa. Even the consumer-level cameras, available for less than $500, are capable of multi-megapixel capture and are useful in less-than-critical applications.

But for the most part, professional photographers are looking for digital cameras to replace their medium-format and large-format film cameras, such as the 2.25-inch, or the 4x5-inch systems or larger-format view cameras. For this purpose, they need to look at digital cameras whose image capture array, or CCD back, can capture images up to 6 million, 11 million, or 16 million pixels, respectively.

What actually captures the image in a digital camera is an array of light sensors, called charged couple devices, or CCDs. These react to light by emitting an electrical charge or signal. Kodak's latest CCD chip has an array of 4080x4080 sensors, which results in an image file that's 16,646,400 pixels, or 16 megapixels—until the end of 2002, the state of the art in digital image capture.

Still, it's impossible to make a direct comparison between the various formats of film-based and digital systems. Single-shot digital cameras—the SLR type—capture RGB images in one shot or scan. Each pixel sensor captures red, green, or blue light, and then software combines them into a single image. The higher-end, more sophisticated systems take three images—red, green, and blue—and then software integrates the three shots into a single RGB image. By interpolating between the pixels of each color, some manufacturers explain that their triple-shot systems actually yield a resolution of three times 16 megapixels.

Other systems, from high-end manufacturers such as Phase One and Better Light, use 4 (RGB, plus another green) or 16 shots (four RGBG captures) for a single image, resulting in, arguably, even higher image quality—although most start with a smaller CCD array. Of course, since these cameras are capturing multiple images, they can be used only for still subjects and thus are found in studios that do catalog and product photography—not portrait, fashion, or event photography where subjects might move.

Resolution isn't measurable until an image is printed or output somewhere; the physical size of a pixel is indeterminate until it is placed on a physical surface. This is why the image quality of digital cameras is measured in thousands of pixels, rather than in spots or dots per inch or centimeter.

"You have to ask, first, where the image will be used and at what size—whether it's going to appear on a web page, in a magazine, or on a poster or billboard—what kind of resolution you need at that size, and work backward to determine the number of pixels that requires," explains Visko Hatfield.

Says Mike Tangreti of Sinar-Bron, the U.S. distributor of Sinar digital camera scanning backs, "There is no question in the professional photographer's mind that digital image capture is superior to film in regard to resolution, film grain, and variations in emulsion."

While there is no simple comparison, most professionals agree that for professional-quality images, a photographer needs at least a 5-megapixel camera back. "It's a little like voodoo economics—everybody measures it differently," says Hatfield. A 5-megapixel Minolta 7Hi single-shot camera will cost about $1300, plus accessories, while Kodak's newest DCS Pro 14n, which has a 13.9-megapixel sensor, costs about $5000. Compare this to a Hasselblad medium-format SLR camera kit with lens for less than $3300 and it's easy to see that justifying the move to digital must be done carefully.

According to Ed Lee, digital photography analyst with Lyra Research, prices have dropped significantly over the past year. Today, digital camera systems fall into three ranges: 6, 11, and 16 megapixels, costing for a complete system $10,000, $15,000, and up to $25,000, respectively. Again, this is considerably more than the cost of high-end studio film view cameras, which probably top out around $12,000 to $15,000 for a large-format view camera with optics.

The newest announcements from the manufacturers keep pushing the state of the digital art higher: Better Light's newest scanning back system, the Super 8K-2, produces images at 12,000x15,990 pixels; this results in image files that are 549mb in size at 24-bit RGB, or 1.1gb in 48-bit color. Its suggested retail price is just under $25,000.

At the Photokina show last September, Sigma Photo made a stir with the announcement of its new SD9 digital camera, the first in the world to use a new kind of digital camera back from Foveon Inc. Foveon's X3 digital sensor takes a different approach to image capture: each pixel captures red, green, and blue color information—in one shot. In contrast, most single-shot digital photo sensors capture just one color: red, green, or blue. Software then combines this "mosaic" effect into a more or less smooth image.

The X3 sensor yields much smoother, richer, and sharper images compared to other single-shot digital cameras with the same number of pixels in its array. So, while Foveon's X3 sensor has an array of just 1344x1044 pixels, for an image size of 1.4 megapixels, each pixel is actually three pixels deep. According to Foveon, it's comparable to other 4.2-megapixel cameras, or better. "If you look at the images side by side, you'll see more color information in the Foveon image," says Johnson, an early evaluator of the device.

"The color seems to be hyper-saturated. It's beautiful," agrees Hatfield, who has tested the Sigma SD-9 camera with the Foveon back. "There's no burnout in the highlights, which is where digital cameras tend to lose detail."

And Foveon has accomplished another breakthrough: the price of this camera back is only $1800—compared to $3495 for Kodak's last-generation 720X, with a 2.1-megapixel sensor, or $4150 for Nikon's D1X, with a 5.47-megapixel sensor.

Going digital

The question today is whether digital has become the "default" choice—what professional photographers first think when they decide to invest in a new camera.

The TrendWatch Graphic Arts report suggests that this is the case among established photographers, and particularly with the larger studios, catalog houses, and studios that are part of printing or graphic arts businesses. Among the smaller or newer shops, however, the cost justification is still something of a dilemma.

"A lot of professional photographers have switched to digital photography to meet the needs of their customers," says analyst Ed Lee. "It's driven by customer demand, when clients are asking for electronic image files. Most professional photographers in North America now have digital photography in their mix."

"I found myself losing work from clients that I had close relationships with because they wanted digital photography," says Brian Urkevic, a professional photographer with his own studio in Boston. At the beginning of 2002, he invested in the Sinar H23 system, a digital camera that operates in both single-capture and multicapture modes. This gives him a lot of flexibility in shooting people as well as products. "The clients like [digital photography] because it's cheaper for them—there's no film, no couriers, no need to get color separations, no waiting for processing."

A new WYSIWYG

Most photographers who use digital systems praise the "instant gratification" of seeing the full image on the computer monitor instantly.

"The live feed is great—you don't have to wait for Polaroids, then make sure the color temperature is right, shoot, bracket, and wait again," says Urkevic. "With the system I have, I can operate the whole camera right from the computer, including exposure, f-stop, metering, and so on. I'm actually spending more time doing photography and less time coordinating with labs and clients. It's a lot easier now to say 'let me try this,' and not worry if it doesn't work out."

Sinar-Bron's Tangreti says that the digital workflow also leads to new opportunities for photographers to offer new kinds of services in digital imaging. "When shooting film, the photographers' job and their billable hours ended when they delivered a negative. Now, they deliver finished digital files, and if the image needs to be resized or retouched to be reused as a billboard, that's computer time the photographers can charge for. They don't have to re-shoot the images in different formats just because they're going to be enlarged."

With digital images from the start, the photographer can do all the necessary retouching and sizing, and even start the prepress work so the files are optimized and ready to go to press. With film, the photographer was the only one who really knew what color he was going for, and that meant that he had to coordinate with the prepress department and the printer to get the color right—and that wasn't billable time. Now, all that information can be stored with the digital file instantly. "The photographer becomes the retoucher and separator," says Urkevic.

And, yes, photographers are able to charge for their computer time. "I hire someone to come in and do the computer work and I charge the client for that," he adds. "It makes more sense for me to do it that way. In the end, I have the opportunity to make the image better, and I'd be crazy not to take it."

"Film is not dead yet," Naselli says. But it is important to note that a digital camera is now the second choice for most professional photographers and growing numbers of proficient amateurs, and that trend is rising fast.

Scott Bury, contributing editor, is a journalist and educator based in Ottawa, Ontario.

Electronic Publishing February, 2003