Topdog1 said:
Why? 😕 Is it the convenience, quality or what? I'm just curious about what happens to people when they get a good digital camera in their hands and then forego film.
The way I see it, the appeal of a digital camera is not so much that it lets you say goodbye to film -- it's that it lets you say goodbye to
scanning.
In other words, I think we need to distinguish between film > printed via conventional wet process and film > scanned for computer applications.
If you want to make nice prints to hang on the wall, especially in b&w, film > wet process is still about as good as it gets. There are people who will argue that you can get results as good, or almost as good, from digital output, but it's hard to beat the wet process for its range of expressive potential. It's also quite a bit more fun than sitting in a chair waiting for a print to crawl out of the inkjet.
Once you need a digital end-product, though, film starts to be more of a problem. You have to scan it, or have it scanned, or make prints and scan those. Scanning film yields more detail than scanning prints, but it's hard: A scanner is much more sensitive to dust, scratches, etc., than the average enlarger, and the way most CCD scanners work also raises the issue of grain aliasing, especially with higher-speed b&w films. Fixing or dodging around these problems makes it very time-consuming to prepare a film scan for really high-quality results.
Scanning prints largely avoids those problems, but you sacrifice fine detail and basically double your workload, since now you have to do the entire analog process and
then do the entire digital process.
None of this is a problem if your approach to photography is to invest a lot of time producing one really great shot... but if you shoot a lot, the scanning process turns into a millstone around your neck.
That's why, for people who want to produce digital output, a digital camera is so liberating. I used to say that taking a picture was like making a baby -- the fun part comes right at the beginning, and then you've got to endure a lot of messy, uncomfortable stages before you can see how the results turn out. Shooting digitally drastically reduces the "gestation period" compared to a hybrid film > scan > file process.
Again, this isn't relevant to the person who sticks to the wet-process workflow all the way through: shoot film, develop it, go into the darkroom and make a print. That's still a very efficient, productive, and artistically effective process.
But if you want to end up with digital files that you can manipulate on a computer, put on DVDs, post on a website, etc., cutting out the scanning step saves a lot of time and energy that you can use for something else - taking pictures, for example.
