Another entry in the film vs. digital debate.

"Both 110 format and disk film suffered horribly due to their absurdly small image area along with Kodak marketing"

 

Movie film didn't seem to suffer wonder why that is ?

Because it's flipping by at 24-30fps and nobody gives a flip as much about spatial quality when it comes to moving film. Freeze the camera to one still and you have the same problem.

Before anybody here starts bragging about how motion picture film stocks are superior to pro/sumer color neg stocks let me remind you how dismally that failed when they tried to *give away* MP film in the 80's and early 90's. Stuff was trash.

Highly compressed digital video formats have the same problem. Freeze the frame on a heavily compressed 4:2:2 video and it looks like crap. Run it by at full motion and the per frame chromatic compression doesn't bug you as much.

I also tried a very nice half frame Olympus Pen (not the digital ones) and though the lens was very good, I found it hard to crop at all and 5x7 was mostly what I thought I could print. 8x10 was a stretch. Now we have sensors that small that CAN achieve good 8x10s and even maybe beyond. Could be I needed a finer grain film and a tripod though.

Even with finer grain film you still have to contend with degree of enlargement factors, and that get's ugly. Now, if you shot slide back then nobody tended to notice when you projected them other than the frame was smaller. If you had decent glass the micro form factors had a better time of it with tranny film than print film. Also with slide film you didn't have to contend with under exposed print film degrading so fast when printed.

If you look at single frames from movie film, the image is usually really awful. It's the ability of the eye/brain to integrate the images that makes it seem sharp.

I don't agree. I've seen single frames from pushed 7219 (16mm VISION 500T) and they look very good. Not medium format sharp, but good nonetheless.

The reduction in consumer film sizes was a process the industry went through many times, from 120 to 126, then 110, then disc. And finally from 35mm to APS. All no doubt to increase profits. The argument that finer emulsions made smaller sizes possible defeats itself, as if these finer emulsions are available, they can be used to provide even better quality in the larger format.

 

(snip)

 

No.

Given depth of field needed, and shutter speed to stop motion

(for handheld cameras and ordinary usage) smaller negative, and

appropriately smaller grain is an advantage.

Or, the other way, for medium format to get enough depth of field

and fast enough shutter speed, you need a faster film, with

larger grain.

Medium format only helps if you can avoid one of those constraints.

Large strobe lights used for studio photography help.

A tripod to reduce camera motion helps.

If I remember from the time, disk cameras were the first use of

an aspherical lens in consumer oriented cameras.

The rationale behind film sizes varied in time. 4x5 was popular for news work into the lat 1950's, because you could crop a large negative severely and retain enough quality for publication, remembering that most photos were published at 2 columns or less (about 3-1/2") in width. You could get 36 exposures from a roll of 35 mm film for about the same cost as 12 exposures from medium format (15 for 645). Even today, very few amateurs have prints made larger than 4x6". In my day, 8x10" from 35 mm film was a large print, often of questionable sharpness by today's standards.

Disk film was an attempt to simplify loading and viewing by the same people who fine a smart phone challenging today. Oddly, disk cameras saw a brief rebirth in the early Sony digital cameras, which recorded to a floppy disk, later a mini-CD. A full CD at the time would hold 640 MB of data, and I wondered why anyone would need something large enough to store the contents of the Library of Congress (it wouldn't, obviously).

Today, digital is superior to film in every way.

The only thing digital can't do that I know of is colour infrared photography, with Kodak Aerochrome. Of course, that has been discontinued.

I think there were SOME 110 and 126 cameras that kept the film flatter and had much better lenses. Even then, that film size would be a challenge, but it could be with better lenses and better film flattening, it was possible? I'm thinking of the little 110 Pentax camera maybe?

I have a Pentax Auto 110 and three lenses.

The optics are as good as you find, and I don't know that anyone will debate this.

No 110 camera can deal with the film flatness, though. It's inherent to the cartridge design that the camera really can't affect the film flatness, as there's no way to integrate a pressure plate. You are at the mercy of the cartridge.

I can't locate the scans at the moment, but I shot one roll of fresh, in-date Lomo "Tiger", which is a 200 ASA color print film that is supposedly made by Lucky in China. The Pentax doesn't have any kind of exposure control-it can only work within the "high speed" and "low speed" coding of 110, which on the Pentax is ASA 80 and ASA 320. The Lomo film is "low speed" coded, which means that it gets overexposed by 1 1/3 stop.

In any case, the grain CERTAINLY is a limiting factor in what can be done with the negatives. BTW, I scanned it directly on the bed of my Epson under a sheet of anti-Newton glass.

One last thing-I've made my opinion on the use of the word "analog" to describe film known, and I'll stay out of the debate other than to say that calling it that shows ignorance of how film works and also is term that raises my ire because it seems to originate mostly from folks who want to "sound cool" and think they're doing something novel and different but only do it for that fact(i.e. hipsters). Both on those grounds, and the inaccuracy of the use, I will continue to vehemently argue against calling film photography analog photography. Call it what it's been called without issue for the last 100+ years-film photography.

I have a Pentax Auto 110 and three lenses.

 

One last thing-I've made my opinion on the use of the word "analog" to describe film known, and I'll stay out of the debate other than to say that calling it that shows ignorance of how film works and also is term that raises my ire because it seems to originate mostly from folks who want to "sound cool" and think they're doing something novel and different but only do it for that fact(i.e. hipsters). Both on those grounds, and the inaccuracy of the use, I will continue to vehemently argue against calling film photography analog photography. Call it what it's been called without issue for the last 100+ years-film photography.

I agree completely, but even Kodak calls it analog.

I agree completely, but even Kodak calls it analog.

They are revived by a market that uses that term.

They need to communicate to that market.

Even 126 film (which was much larger than 110) was limited by the quality of the cartridges. At least a camera like the Olympus Pen could produce a half frame negative that was well exposed and sharp, but that just wasn't enough. Oh I think Minolta tried to make a "high quality" 110 camera too, kind of a strange looking SLR that looked like it had been flattened with a press.

Now wasn't the Minox subminiature format supposed to be a bit more successful at producing 5x7 sized prints? Never used one myself. But I've done all kinds of 8x10s from even old 35mm cameras with no problem -- Leicas, Voigtlander Prominents, Zeiss Contax IIAs, Kodak Retinas, Minox 35s, and so on. And at the top end with Leica or Zeiss lenses driving high quality 35mm cameras, 35mm seemed like more than enough if you didn't want to print too big, say larger than 11x14 (or better depending on viewing distance). I only tried one medium format camera but I couldn't afford a medium format scanner so I stuck with 35mm.