Photography Asked by Mark Morgan Lloyd on December 12, 2020
During the history of photography, there has arguably been no component which has improved as much as the medium which records the light. The mainstream has gradually moved from glass plates, to 5×4" "press" cameras, to TLRs (120 film with 6x6cm images) to 35mm film (24x36mm image) and finally to sensors with a wide variety of shapes and sizes.
At the same time, there is obviously some metric which decides whether a particular image is good enough to use for, for example, newspaper reportage. For the sake of this question please could we keep it simple and assume that it this largely based on the resolution of the image (line-pairs per inch, pixels across the diagonal etc.).
Is there any established rule of thumb which suggests that the resolution offered by a TLR, the resolution offered by a 35mm camera and the resolution offered by a digital camera were roughly equivalent when they started being favoured over their predecessors by e.g. photographers accompanying journalists?
Although this question might sound hopelessly naive, please assume that I am familiar with both sensor and film technology (halide grain structure, the possibility of multiple active sites per grain etc.). This was initially going to be a simpler question asking at what point (megapixels per sensor) journalists started considering DSLRs for their work.
For photojournalists, the movement from large format to medium format to 135 format to digital was never about absolute image quality. It was about several other factors that gave each new format an advantage over the previous format while still providing images that were good enough for relatively low resolution newsprint.
These are some of what drove the move in photojournalism from larger to smaller formats. The last point is what drove the move to digital. An image could be distributed mere seconds after it was captured, fully developed and ready for use!
Correct answer by Michael C on December 12, 2020
Consider the "inveniton" of 35mm film; it is well documented. The creation of the format for still photography can be attributed to a single person - Oskar Barnack. He was a genius engineer, keen mountaineer and - crucially - asthma sufferer. He was physically incapable of carrying a "proper" camera to a mountaintop. And so he went on and invented the Leica. Later photographers fell in love with the format not because of superior print quality, but because of ease of use & speed in the field (wow, snapshots!) while giving clearly inferior, but still acceptable print quality.
Answered by Jindra Lacko on December 12, 2020
It was an economic decision and not based on quality. Traditional media spent a fortune on processing, splicing, etc. Digital removed 75% of the cost. 35mm film quality was much higher than digital during the transition. MF was obviously even better but even more expensive. News and magazine image quality is quite low but I do remember a SI swimsuit issue when they switched from 645 to digital and the pics were horrible. So that that transition may have been a cost saver but it was not smooth.
The transition started in real estate appraisals. Banks spent a fortune processing film for appraisals. Switching to the early Fuji digitals saved them a fortune. They didn't need high image quality, just reference pics. Appraisers kept minilabs open in the 80's/90's. And appraisers killed minilabs when they pulled their accounts.
Answered by Robert Allen Kautz on December 12, 2020
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