Is Film Alive?

Maybe so. For quite awhile now Ken Rockwell has been extolling the virtues of shooting color negative film and having the negatives scanned. His main article on this subject can be found here. Frankly, on my monitor the results are pretty impressive. Now he is promoting the scanning services of North Coast Photo Services, a real lab in San Diego, California. According to Ken, North Coast can make some fantastic scans for a very low price. I can’t link directly to that piece, but you can find it on Ken’s Todays’ Updates page on September 26th.

So, is it time to “get back”? Not so long ago I tried the very same thing that Ken is recommending. I got a beater Leica M7 and a Zeiss 35 mm f/2 Biogon and several rolls of film. I discovered, to my chagrin, that, unless you follow Ken’s instructions to the letter, you will be greatly disappointed. I took my exposed film to my local Ritz/Wolf/Proex and asked them to scan the negatives on to CDs. I had been doing that with some leftover rolls and it is convenient. When I took a look at the results from my new film outfit, however, I discovered that the best that they could do was about a 1.4-1.8 MB JPEG file. On my D700 that’s about the same quality as shooting JPEG Basic Large or Normal Medium. To my mind that’s just not good enough.

So what about Ken’s method. To begin with he recommends using Costco’s photo processing services. A rather radical notion considering the people who are still using film. Ken claims that Costco can make 4.5 MB JPEGs at 3,089 x 2,048 pixels. According to my manual that’s very close to the same quality as a JPEG Large Fine image from my D700. Now we’re talking. Furthermore, if that’s not good enough, Ken says that North Coast can make scans of 16.8 MP (about 5,035 x 3,339 pixels)! That’s the size of a Lossless Compressed RAW image from a D700.

Before you run out and buy that film outfit, a few caveats. A Costco membership is $50 per year. They do not accept credit cards other than their own or American Express. Each Costco is different and this level of processing may not be available at your local store. North Coast is in San Diego which means shipping your film. While cheap, film processing still costs money that digital does not. That said, if you do your homework the joys (?) of film could be yours again.