You may not have a choice soon - Nikon all but giving up on 35mm

An article on Nikon's web site says that they (Nikon) are stopping production of most of their 35mm film and larger format cameras. Only the F6 will be available (in Europe and North America) and the F10 mechanical in the rest of the world along with a small number of manual lenses. The assumption is that only their newer lenses that are compatible with the likes of the Nikon D70(s) and D50 and D100 etc. will be available. The ones I lust after :)

Note that while I was doing a bit of research for this article, I came across the fact that they have a recall for the battery that I use in my D70 - the EN-EL3. See the note at the Nikon USA web site I phoned the Canadian support number and find that I can exchange it at their Richmond BC location rather than sending it in via snail-mail.

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I'll be honest, I didn't think Nikon would do this quite so early in the game. On the other hand, David Hancock, our host here on the forum, who is well known as a naturalist photographer with a stable of Nikon and other cameras, has all but moved exclusively to the use of his pair of Nikon D70s cameras for his work just over the past year.

To those who have experienced digital photography only through the use of "snapshooter" style cameras, the digital revolution has been going on for some time now. Even the cameras that had less than 1 Megapixel a few years ago produced 3x5 or 4x6 pictures (the most common size printed for most people) that were quite acceptable. They also worked fairly well on the then emerging Web too.

Not so for those of us who really used 35mm film (and larger formats) for professional and semi-professional work, printing 8x10 or larger and/or cropping to produce better looking pieces. To us it seemed that nothing short of the theoretical equivallent of the resolution of 35mm would do - something in excess of 12 Megapixels with excellent dynamic range. That was the theory.

The practice is that there are all manner of mitigating circumstances where digital of even half that theoretical equivallent is as good or better than film; circumstances that many photographers get into far more often than they are in the ones where only film will give the best results. Take a look at Dr. Roger Clark's absolutely excellent treatise on Film vs Digital. The first graph of Film Speed (ISO) vs Digital Megapixel equivallent shows that only at lower ISO speeds is film better than digital - pushing the equivallent necessary up to as high as 20 Megapixels to get close to film at ISO speeds below 100. This is the area of ultra fine-grain specialty films and (now almost unavailable unless you have a freezer full) things like Kodachrome 64 that were completely different from the typical films today. Mostly these would be black and white such as the noted Tech Pan film.

The fact is that over the ISO range of the D70, (200-1600) the graph shows that digital is as good as or better than film.

This graph fits well with my and others' hands-on results and opinions. Getting the shot with higher ISO ratings compared to pushing film makes the digital much more valuable in many situations; low light, fast motion, higher depth of field, etc.

The one area where most digitals don't quite work as well as film is in their use of lenses. The typically smaller image area of the CCD or other image capture unit means that the lens must have much better resolution than one that works with the larger 35mm film area. Fortunately the rest of the digital revolution has made this much easier for the manufacturers to achieve through the use of computer design and manufacturing. This by the way is also why you probably don't want to use your (really) old lenses on your new digital, even if they fit.

It appears that Nikon recognizes this and, while they will still sell a 35mm camera, the rest as they say are history.