The trend is definitely underway for many serious photographers to make the switch from film to digital SLR cameras instead. There are lots of reasons for this, but there are also some things that you should be aware of before making the switch that could be an unpleasant surprise too.
Perhaps the main advantage that digital SLR cameras have over their film counterparts is that digital cameras give you instant feedback on your photographs as they are taken, allowing the photographer to see if the image they wanted was indeed captured as planned or not. If it didn't come out as expected for any reason, the bad photo can be just erased and the photographer can keep trying until the best results are achieved. This is a big advantage over film cameras as photographers have always had to take many extra shots of important scenes to help ensure that they get the right image, but they would never know for sure until the film was developed hours or days later. And by then the shot opportunity could already be lost forever.
Another great advantage that digital SLR cameras offer over film SLRs is the ability to put plenty of image editing control in the hands of the photographer. With film, most image adjustments and edits would have to be made at the photo lab instead. Digital images though can be edited and adjusted in an almost endless number of ways in digital photo editing software that is widely available. This lets the photographer have total creative control over the finished product, a very appealing feature of digital SLRs for most advanced photographers.
But one major concern that film SLR camera owners should know about before buying their first digital SLR is that the lenses that are used for film photography will provide a completely different angle of view when used on a digital camera instead. This is due to the reduced size of the digital sensor that captures the image information as opposed to the 35mm frame size. Since the sensor is only about 2/3 the size of the 35mm film frame, the images produced by a particular focal length lens tend to be magnified by about 1.5 times.
So this means that a normal 50mm lens will produce images that more closely resemble those made by a 75mm film camera lens, and this same magnification factor holds true for all other lenses used as well. This makes it especially hard to get a wide angle lens to work well with a digital SLR as most 24mm wide angle lenses will make an image that is in the 36mm range instead.
There are some high end digital SLRs that reduce this problem with larger sensor sizes, but expect to pay for that feature.
All in all, digital SLR cameras still offer a lot of great advantages over film though that the serious hobbyist or pro will want to consider to get the best results possible on each shot.
Thad Pickering writes on many consumer related topics including digital photography. You can find digital slr camera reviews and digital camera comparisons by visiting our Digital Photography website.
Written By: Thad Pickering
