wrote in message
...
On Thursday, 24 September 2015 14:31:26 UTC+1, NY wrote:

Whisky Dave, is there anything that a photographer who is familiar with
both
media can do with film that can't be done with digital? Or are you
claiming
that someone who uses digital, no matter how proficiently, isn't "a
photographer" but just someone who takes photos?

The whole argument seems more a baseless ego trip than anything. FWIW I've
found digital's ability to autofocus rapidly and accurately a real boon
for fast fired action shots where you can't predict what will happen
where. Film's equivalents were pants by comparison. I will never go back
to film, for a whole list of reasons. It would be like going from mp3 &
flac back to 8 track cartridge.

Yes, I suspect that some of the "film is better than digital" is like the
old "LP is better than CD", which relies partly on personal preference and
partly on "it's better because I say it's better", the old "stands to
reason" defence :-)

I'm not sure about your autofocus reason though. The speed of autofocus
response will be a function of the camera's AF detector and (for an
interchangeable lens) the speed of the AF motor in the lens. Digital cameras
may have faster AF, but that may because they are newer rather than because
they are digital rather than film. Unless anyone knows differently in which
case I might be about to learn something!

As far as I can remember, my film SLR took about the same time to focus as
the digital SLR which replaced it, using the same lens, which suggests that,
for my setup, most of the time is taken by the motor in the lens rather than
by the AF sensor and logic in the camera. That's for like-for-like focussing
rules - eg single-shot rather than continuous and similar sizes of focus
zone.