Quite true, although I think Paul F may have been referring to comparing photos on his screen from his DSLR directly to the actual prints from his film SLR?

Paul

To be honest, I’ve never compared like for like 35MM vs DSLR photos taken of same subject in same place at same time. I stepped up to my 350D from my old Canon EOS350 and T70 35mm film cameras via a Fuji S6500 “Pro-sumer” digital with 10x zoom.

As a first digicam the Fuji blew me away with it’s sharp colours and pin sharp images, plus a host of operating modes as well as manual. Sure it had a few limitations but nothign too serious, and it overcame my scepticism that digital wa steh way to go. On the back of my results with the S6500 I took the plunge and moved “up” to the EOS 350D, looking forwad to getting back to using a “real camera” and lenses again, only to find that my images were dissapointing – obviously “soft” and with somewhat muted and dull colours, compared to the Fuji. N.B. I have only ever used the 350D in JPEG mode, never tried RAW mode….must do one day.

Comparing 35mm shots from the older Canon film bodies to shots taken (using the same lenses) on the 350D (JPEG) suggested they were generally far less sharp. I have since realised that D-SLR images require a fair degree of post-processing to get the best image for printing – unlike the Fuji images which simply needed a bit of cropping and maybe a colour balance tweak.

As Skymonster says, and something I did not appreciate before buying the 350D, was/is that DSLR images seem to require a good deal of processing, whereas lower end digitals seem to deliver “ready to print” images. Horses for courses I guess – someone using a DSLR is probably more likely to want to “tinker” with the images before displaying/printing them, whereas users of “lower end” cameras simply want to “snap and print”.

Having had my 350D a year now, I finally feel like I’m starting to get the best out of it, though at times I still prefer the convenience of the Fuji – a 10x zoom with no need to carry seperate lenses round with me, a much smaller piece of kit (albeit not quite pocket sized), bright and sharp images, and an interpolated 6Mp image that easily stands being printed out at A4 with little need to slave over a hot laptop afterwards. On a recent business trip to China I took the Fuji to save space, and had forgotten just what a delight it is to use. That said, having learnt how to work on the 350D images then

Oh, and I think the fact that I’m using a 70 – 210mm Canon zoom lens that came as part of my (35mm) 350 kit didn’t help my first results with my 350D – a budget “kit” lens is never going to produce images as sharp as a decent piece of glassware -and Digital just seems to make it’s limitations more obvious.

Moral of the story – make sure you understand just how much post-production work may be required on the images when you consider buying a DSLR! It’s all very good coming home from a day at a museum or airshow with many hundreds of images on the CF cards, but it may take many more hours to sort and process them fit for viewing/printing/display :eek:.

Paul F