Photography: Digital and Film Compared.

I experimented with interiors under natural light, using a Nikon D40 digital camera and an old, but reconditioned, Pentax Spotmatic F film camera. The latter I recently acquired for a song, it turns out to be in excellent condition, and I wanted to check its performance against the modern digital format. The upper photo was taken with the Nikon, the second with the Pentax. The film was exposed at various shutter speeds from 1" to about 8", timing it roughly with my wristwatch. The photos are only slightly retouched; I think they could be edited to nearly identical colour and brightness, with suitable photo software.

The Nikon picture was taken with a zoom lens at a wide angle, the Pentax with a standard 55mm f/1.8 lens, hence the narrower field of view.

In days gone by, I used a Zeiss film camera for many years, and I've picked this up again as a sideline. The snag is that you can't get film other than colour negative ISO-200 here, and one depends very much on the skill of the processor -- with the advent of digital format, film processing is not done much by the photo shops. Digitizing the negatives with a scanner introduces a further margin for error.

The Old Faithful, still going strong after 40+ years! These cameras were one of the top brands in their day, the first to introduce through-the-lens (TTL) metering.