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Comment by jannyfer | Hacker News Reader

Film isn't necessarily less accurate than digital capture, especially with film cameras that do automatic exposure and focus. Film uses chemical reactions to capture light, and digital uses electrical signals. Accuracy is based on how we map these to their true colours.

Digital would make sense to be more precise (not accurate) than film, though.

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Film is automatically much worse any time you need higher sensitivity because of low light situations and can't use a tripod or need to capture a more mobile target. 400 iso film in 35mm format is noisier than any modern DSLR used in 3200+ iso settings, any, even entry-level $400 Canon or Nikon.

Also, in terms of level of details it has been possibly a decade since DSLR have become much better than 35mm film. Medium and large format film was still better for a longer amount of time, but medium format cameras are a lot more cumbersome and large format cameras are something only the most dedicated would ever bother to carry anywhere.

This is one of the smallest medium format camera for comparison : https://melbournestreetphotography.files.wordpress.com/2013/... And it's a rangefinder, so it's basically unusable with telephoto lenses. Mirror based medium format cameras like the Hasselblad were things that pretty much never left indoor studios.

Correction: 35mm is grainier, not noisier. After staring at grain vs color noise in shadows for hours at a time, the aesthetics of grain are one of the reasons I still shoot film sometimes.

This is somewhat of a good point, I like film's aesthetics too. But, grain and noise are two different inter-related things.

A digital full-frame sensor (vs 35mm film) at the same settings is going to have much less noise. I love film. But the fact is that silver vs cmos is a losing battle of technologies.

http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/cml/opt307/spr04/...

I take my Bronica ETRSi all over the place.

It depends if you are talking about detail or color accuracy. I shot medium format for years until digital just passed it by on both.

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