By asking these questions shows I’m still not sure about film processing and surely haven’t made up my mind on anything…!
Making a 4x6 print from a 35mm negative either colour or B&W you would be very hard pressed to see any degradation be it sharpness, grain, or colour balancer providing it is printed properly. I prefer prints from film they are to me anyway, more natural and non of the over sharpened and over saturated images.
What is the point of this question anyway, it looks as if you have already made up your mind.
Is it true when developing film there is some degradation by processing whereas it’s avoided from a SD card directly to your computer…?
Both digital and analog media are subject to degradation over time. Analog endures no particular image loss during development, but can fade with time if not processed properly, or become mechanically compromised if not stored or handled properly.
Digital media is subject to "bit rot" wherein the data loses integrity due to the properties of the storage medium, cosmic ray bombardment, and so forth.
Properly processed analog film should well outlast digital media in almost every case. The fix for that is to make multiple, independently located backups on different media types. There are companies that specialize in offsite storage of backups so that you can survive even a catastrophic facility lost.
ProTip: SD Cards, Flash Drives, and their various cousins are very unreliable backup media. For local (i.e., In you office or home) storage, some form of redundant storage is recommended like a small NAS.
Good to know and what makes SD Cards or Flash Drives so unreliable…?
The nature of how the electronics work means that they have a limited number of read/write cycles. That's why you're told to copy stuff off a camera SD onto a serious storage medium for critical files.
But no electronic storage medium is really that reliable - hence the need to do offsite and duplicated backups. We have analog film over 100 years old that is entirely usable for making prints but even 30 year old digital storage is showing a lot of cracks already.
All the world is an analog stage and digital technology is but a bit player ...
The image on the computer is size 11x16 using SD card or flash drive for film…!
Exactly. And the screen is probably brighter than the paper base.
I suggest you should get to see some top quality exhibition prints made optically from 35mm film, and then decide about the degradation inherent in each pathway.
But you should use whichever you find most satisfying and convenient, it’s not a decision for us to make in this forum.
Do you consider music to have "degraded" because it needs to go from sheet music to a performance of some type?
I use Blue Moon Camera and Machine for optical film printing …!
Depends who is performing
How do you make a rock guitarist play quieter? Put sheet music in front of them.
Depends who is performing
How do you make a rock guitarist play quieter? Put sheet music in front of them.
Pure film based B&W is one of the most stable forms of recorded image. Developed, fixed and washed properly, then printed followed by selenium or sepia toning will ensure that the images stay usable for at least 100 years. The negatives if kept in perfect conditions away from air born pollution for reprinting, will last for a similar time possibly longer maybe for at least 150 years. There was an English photographer called Frank Meadow Sutcliffe who recorded images of life, people and places in and around the eastern England coastal town of Whitby from the mid to late1800's are as good now as when first taken. Just google the name.
When you make a print from the negative you can not get all the details/quality there are on the negative. Besides it's another generation the printing paper can not show all the dynamic range there is in the negative as the dynamic range is compressed on the negative. Any imperfection on the enlarging process like alignment, lens quality etc.. will affect the quality.
When you copy the image files from on media to another you do not lose anything. For example if you copy the file from the SD card to a thum drive, put it in the computer copy to the hard disk, upload to the cloud then down load again on another computer nothing is lost. But when you display the file on the screen as an image you do not get everything there is available in the file. The same thing about limited dynamic range, color gamut, screen resolution etc.. reduce the quality you can get from the file when you display it.
What a bunch of crock! Light has to jump through all kinds of secondary hoops to acquire a digital image to begin with. Then it's lossy again when you manipulate it to print it. And when you do print it, it's highly probably the output medium will be less precisely nuanced than in traditional darkroom technique. How about a level playing field in this discussion?
What about the SD card direct to the computer…?
It still gives you nothing but data - nothing that by itself constitutes an image.
It’s amazing what you can get from an SD card…!
I’m still not clear what the original question was. Is it basically digital vs analogue? And are we talking colour or b/w?
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