B&W Film Verses Digital ramble

[9designs2]

Had a chat and compared pictures in the office today with another keen photographer, he is of the "medium format, film, and fibre based paper" mould, and it was torture for him to look through some of my B&W pictures I had dared to inkjet print....... I also had a print I had done twice, once in the dark room, and again scanned and ink jet printed.

I have to say I was struggling against his point of view... the more we debated, the more his passion for film was urging me to run to the Alps with a few rolls of Pan F !!!

For sure if you view only on screen digital black and white is as good as digital colour, but when it comes to printing, what is the solution?
Do the very latest multiple black ink printers prove good enough, can you get a chemical print done from a digital file, as can be done from colour.
Or as my colleague protested you need to use film and a dark room.

His issues were digital can not convey a 3D depth and scale to a picture like film, colour casts when trying to print, poor mid tone, and no fine highlight detail and graduation.

When you compare side by side, digital B&W does seem to have some way to go....

But then show people the pictures in isolation, and the reaction is always positive.....

Sample pictures we looked at were printed to A3 on a Canon S9000, either converted from a colour D70 file, or scanned from Delta 100 film at 4000dpi. (around 20MP !) .....

Any B&W photographers here, what's your favoured solution ? (and don't say ID 11....LOL)


9d

Sorry, not another spec me a DSLR for 50 quid thread...

 

[mrgubby]

I don't know the "depth" of the greyscale range of a printer but I would imagine that it is nowhere near the resolution of a chemical reaction based system.

But I'm not sure anybody could tell the difference looking at a print from a few feet under standard room lighting

 

[Howski]

From what I've read inkjets are not the best for B&W printing. To better test you really need to have the prints done properly. Not saying your wrong just the test is a little biased.
-How.

 

[9designs2]

I have a dark room, and an Inkjet printer

 

[Howski]

Sorry by prints I mean both the digital and the film. Not having a go but like I said Inkjets have a bad rep with B&W.
-How.

 

[Raymond Lin]

The whole process of B&W printing is wonderful, if you never tried it, give it a go. The whole dodging, burning on the enlarger is very organic and to see it from a blank sheet to print in about 60 seconds is wondering. (no I don't use chemicals anymore, all done in a machine)

I suppose a home bubble jet printer does have its limitations but a vendor that prints large prints should be ok.

 

[ranarama]

I do a lot of B&W in competitions at club level and they are all from digital. Almost every judge has said 'this looks like a real photograph' when they look at my prints.

Everything I enter is printed at Photobox and that is the difference. The blacks are black. Every home print I've ever seen the blacks are some shade of blue or magenta and when they are side by side in the club competitions under 'daylight' bulbs the difference is immense. Resolution has nothing to do with it.

 

[9designs2]

I do a lot of B&W in competitions at club level and they are all from digital. Almost every judge has said 'this looks like a real photograph' when they look at my prints.

Everything I enter is printed at Photobox and that is the difference. The blacks are black. Every home print I've ever seen the blacks are some shade of blue or magenta and when they are side by side in the club competitions under 'daylight' bulbs the difference is immense. Resolution has nothing to do with it.

Ahh yes exactly, the curse of inkjet printing !!!
So Photobox offer a digital to chemical print service for B&W ??... sorry I've not given them a look.....

 

[Raymond Lin]

Ahh yes exactly, the curse of inkjet printing !!!
So Photobox offer a digital to chemical print service for B&W ??... sorry I've not given them a look.....

Give them a go and see if you can fool your friend.

 

[freebooter]

Quite simply, I think he is almost certainly right. Film does still have greater highlight and shadow detail and if he shoots medium format then he is starting with far geater resolution than even mf digital backs let alone dSLRs. Add to that the problems of home inkjets that have been mentioned. I doubt whether photobox will do as good a job as a proper pro film lab either.

The question is, how much time, effort and money is that extra quality worth to you? If you want to shut him up you could always point out how much more detail he could get by using a full plate camera instead of those low resolution medium format p&s cameras

I wonder what sort of quality it is possible to get from an inkjet if you were willing to spend time and money on it. As has been said the new ones with several blacks are supposed to be better. Also I think there are compansy that produce special black ink sets and paper that are supposed to be much better than standard. Then there is the whole issue of making test strips and profiles for your individual printer/ink/paper combo. People (inc me) tend to just press print but it is possible to take it much more seriously if you demand ultimate quality.

I did once see a web article talking about a dedicated b&w digicam that one company made (maybe kodak). Instead of being an interpolated colour image that was then turned to b&w the camera didn't have any colour filters and just used each pixel to record light level. The quality was supposed to be much better but obviously it had very limited sales.

 

[ranarama]

Film does still have greater highlight and shadow detail

I should have said I often use very subtle HDR to bring out the shadow details in my B&W prints and that combined with photobox printing is usually what fools people.

 

[9designs2]

I think sometime soon I'll fire an image over to PB, and get a A3 or 12x16 done, and see how it compares, without telling the guy at work !

The funny for me was when he showed me his B&W pictures, yep print in the Darkroom, Fibre based paper, not any of your common multigrade RC stuff !!! .... From his 6x6 neg..... for me, it was too low in contrast, too much grey, and I wonder if he has a milk bottle for a lens !!!! As my 35mm Film stuff is way sharper and crisp... So it kind of made me smile when he critiqued my work !!
I can see this debate or challenge will run some.... I'll shoot the same scene on film and on the 5D once I've collected it, send the digital off to Photobox, and I'll give the guy my neg to print !!!

 

[hoodmeister]

I just did a load of work with a fairly basic Bronica setup, a load of Rollei PAN25 (slightly hard film to find, it is stocked in the UK though) & some heavyweight 16*12 matt FB paper...
God damn the results are gorgeous.

Since doing that, I'm finding it very hard to shoot digital for a few reasons, but the biggest is probably tonal range - it just aint there with digi

 

[MajorPart]

All mini labs ie high street or online are digital to chemical.. they expose the paper with a laser then it goes through basically (not quite) the same chemical baths ie dev, stop, fix. The laser does the job of the enlarger.. however due to the nature of digital printing to get the same resolution as a diffusion enlarger ie at 10x8 or larger then the files would have to be quite large the best I've seen detail wise from a mini lab was using a friends Phase one P45 medium format digital back.. the level of detail blew 35mm and medium format traditional printing away it brought the same detail in enlargements as i would say a 5x4 large format film camera. Even if you sent in a film to get processed and printed with the high street labs it gets scanned and printed digital to chemical. Unlike what they used to do a few years back.

So the printer is capable.. yet most digital cameras do not have a high enough res.. at least to compete with medium format film.

I still shoot a bit film (mostly b&w: tech pan, scala, sfx, hie, apx) and them scan them. I got rid of my enlarger a few years back.. been a good few months since I've used one at the local cam club.

PS A few people tend to get confused about mini labs as they think they are just glorified laser printers this is not the case as said above.. however the kiosks at say boots where you get the print out underneath the screen then pay for it are basically inkjet/thermal printers. Which have limited PQ/res. Good enough for most peoples drunken/holiday snaps tho.

From my experience with a lot of different digital camera/backs and the years before with film.. film still has it with tonal range both colour and b&w just ever so slightly.. (d200/5d come very close to film) BUT the biggest advantage is Exposure latitude... film has that every time.

 

[MajorPart]

I doubt whether photobox will do as good a job as a proper pro film lab either.

Same equipment and same profiles as most other so called pro labs.. Photobox are basically Fuji UK's retail printer. Same staff training too.
Just do not have the time if you want something unusual. Hence the price.

 

[Spie]

The Canon 9000 was slated for its poor B&W output in AP recently.

I've got the new 9500, but not tried it with B&W yet.

 

[Mohain]

Same equipment and same profiles as most other so called pro labs.. Photobox are basically Fuji UK's retail printer. Same staff training too.
Just do not have the time if you want something unusual. Hence the price.

Just to add my tuppance here ...

I did a little experiment and printed the same 2 images to 15in x 10in at Colab & Photobox, one colour & one mono, both sRGB. At this size Colab are (were, I think they've changed their prices since I did this) about 10% cheaper than Photobox. Both took a day to print. Colab let me upload Tiffs via their Cyrstalpix software interface. Photobox would only take JPEGs.

The monos were quite similar, Colab's mono was slightly warmer and Photobox's was more neutral. Colab's tones seemed slightly more 'open' and there was a better tonal range than Photobox's, but the difference was marginal.

The huge difference was the colour image. Colab's was superb! Colour was spot on! Lovely brightness, saturation and contrast, better looking than on screen! In comparison Photobox's print was muddy and overly yellow and looked much worse than the screen version.

One other observation, the colour print was an odd format (16 x 9) and in both cases I chose, shrink to fit. Colab printed right to the edge of the 15" whilst Photobox left a boader on the length.

These were the two images I printed: mono colour

Mind you I didn't use the ICC profiles for Photobox that have been posted on this site sometime earlier.

One other thing, both mono prints and colour trans from my £15 Lubitel have a much nicer tonal range than my £800 30D. Ranarama made a good point, I wonder how much difference there would be with the correct processing?

 

[aztechnology]

If any of you are in the North, the Lowry centre has an exhibition of Ian Berry's work on at the moment (well 'till June 10). Presented there are digital prints and the quality is exhibition standard (obviously).

I think anyone would be hard pushed to say that these prints lacked anything that could be attained in a conventional Darkroom. (though I suspect that the printer used to create these prints cost a few pounds)

Whether you use a darkroom or a digital setup to produce the final image, you need the right skill to produce either. You can't hold up your work, and that of our friend unless you think you are both equally talented in getting the most from an image in your medium.

For the record, I still shoot and print film exclusively for anything other than "snaps". Within a year though I think the film cameras will start to gather dust.

 

[Nicos Rex]

Leaving aside all considerations of quality, which as far as printing from digital media are concerned seems to come down to the depth of your pocket, I will continue to use film and paper for my black and white photography for as long as the materials remain available at any sort of reasonable price.

There are lots of reasons for this, but the main one is that I really enjoy doing it. I love the smell of the chemicals, I love the first sight of the negative projected onto the enlarger easel, and most of all I love the sight of the image appearing as if by magic as I rock the print in the developer. I was hooked by that very experience when I was taught how to do it by my Dad nearly 40 years ago, and in that moment when the image appears I am a child filled with wonder again.