Film vs digital

I've been saying for years that digital was now ahead of film in most areas, but I've not seen many direct comparisons and I did not realize how big the difference is. Look at this, holy cow! (Be sure to download the full sized samples.) And we complain now if digital is noisy at 1600 ISO!

This comparison did use an "amateur film", Kodak Gold. I've no experience with pro films like Velvia, so I don't know how much it would even things out. But for sure you'd be stuck with low ISO (100 I think), and usage costs would be high. The guy has promised to test something like that, this week.
To be frank I don't recall color negative film being this grainy. Perhaps scanning is less forgiving than traditional color printing. Which doesn't help us if we need the pictures in a digital form, and who don't these days.


(BTW, I've started using raw .png screenshot files for some of the illustrations. Does anybody get browser problems or delays because of this?)

That site has a Flickr discussion group which seems good. Better signal/noise ratio than, say, DPreview forums.

And an article about the appeal of the 50mm lens. (Small, fast, cheap, sharp, good backup.)

And many other fun videos, mostly for relative beginners, like this one on grey values and the camera. But even if it's stuff you know, it's often fun to see it spelled out. Like I said before, in this world the basics are almost always assumed to be know and are therefore not taught, which creates an underlying uncertainty when you're learning something.