We use an old Ixus – compact but still has a small viewfinder. I tend to still use film, and there is still a real camera shop on the High Street.
On the MP front I wonder how many megaP my old Super Ikonta C 6 × 9 captures? Possibly over 100 MP?
(The little more professional compacts like the Nikon P series or Canon G also have a viewfinder)
I think a Kodachrome 25 (35mm) film frame is worth about 150 megapixels.
But ISO 25 is impractical (a tripod is needed almost everywhere) and there is no scanner which can get the info out of it – other than a drum scanner and that is really pricey.
Taking a more popular old film, say Ektachrome 64, you could scan it in any slide scanner and count the grains. It was rubbish compared to any 100 quid pocket camera today. Ektachrome 400 was really rubbish.
The last film I used was Provia 100 (in an OM4TI) which was very good, but I was glad to see the back of film. I still have an absolutely mint OM1 which one day might be worth some money 
A Kodachrome 25 IMHO has no chance against a good 12mp DSLR. While you are right theoretically the overall image quality is much worse. I have scanned 5000 Kodachrome 25 slides, and i scanned them as Tiffs with 4000 dpi. And those were made with a Nikon F2AS and very good lenses.
The Fuji Velvia ones i made with a Nikon F4s are a little sharper, but not as good as the digital images.
I have some of my analog Nikon SLRs, but i think they will never be worth much anymore…
Film has a certain “look” about it. Some people like that… Digital is simply more accurate. Also lenses are much better these days.
What scanner did you scan the Kodachrome 25 slides on? Only a drum scanner, or something that scans them oil-immersed (the £10/slide option I was offered, on 5000 slides!) will do it properly.
There seem to be two markets for old gear, both on Ebay. One is photography college students. I sold all my gear (OM1N, OM2SP, OM4TI and about 20 lenses, but I kept the OM1) on Ebay and most went to college students in places like Spain. They still seem to have “real” education down there, not like the UK where a photography course is mostly messing around. The other market is in China where they love the old gear and it has a high value attached to it; a bit like old mechanical watches everywhere. I sold some lenses out there, including a Tamron catadioptric F8 one. But there is a lot of scammers in China, taking advantage of the “not as described” (NAD) refund scam, made so easy by Paypal. I no longer sell anything outside Europe, and high value items I do UK only.
Sorry, but that’s not my experience. The Coolscan 5000 can scan 24×36 slides 95 % as well as any high end scanner. I made a test run back then and let a company scan 1 slide in the best possible quality – and then I scanned it with the 5000. NO DIFFERENCE
Are you sure you had the 5000 model?
But you have to scan them with the highest resolution (4000 dpi) and as TIFFs.
The “certain look” of film can very easily be simulated by Photoshop plug-ins that are available for almost every of the traditional B&W or slide films. Other than that it’s simply a myth to me (!). I am not very good at beeing nostalgic. And the other other day I spoke to a highly qualified professional photographer (who worked for many nature magazines and runs a successful wedding photography business) about the “quality” of old slide films. He said that no way could he ever produce the quality his D4 delivers with any film equipment, not even with a 6 × 6.
But there will always be different opinions on this topic. What I see is that all the professional photographers have already FORGOTTEN about film. There’s only a very small miority of artists who use it, for romantic reasons I guess :-) Which is okay for me!
This is a scanned Fuji Velvia image. Nikon F4S, 50 ASA (forgot which lens …)
And this is 12 MP digital image, Nikon D2X, 24-85 AF-S lens (cheap lens)
Is there ANY quality in the 1st picture the 2nd one doesn’t have? (Except that we would all prefer the TBM :-))
On my monitor I would say both are very wrong in colour. The sky is never that colour.
I don’t prefer film either. My old slides are crap quality.
You have a calibrated monitor? Calibrated to what? These images are optimized for printing standards in the magazine industry. Since the white balance was set correctly the blue tones are very close to what they were.
YOu can see that the “blue” of the sky varies, depending on where you are, altitude, daytime etc etc…. First one was in Bend, Oregon, early morning – second one over the Pyrenees, an hour before sunset, i think.
Is there ANY quality in the 1st picture the 2nd one doesn’t have?
The very smooth and rich gradient of the blue sky in the Velvia image is really awesome. Film has an an infinite dynamic range versus the 8 or 12 bit quantisation of a digital sensor. And I think I can see more detail in the Velvia image as well (like the static wicks). In the full resolution picture one can probably even read the manufacturer name on the propeller blade.
But of course there are more differences between the two pictures than film vs. digital. Like different lenses, different f-stops, different shutter speeds which have more influence than the storage medium.
And the scan is almost perfect too. Was this one professionally made or did you do it with the Nikon 5000?
