What is different between a film camera and digital camera?

How much quality do you lose by using a digital camera? Maybe none....... In fact, a digital camera is better quality than a film camera in many important respects! The easiest to understand specification is resolution. A 35mm film-based camera will crush any digital camera in the number of good pixels. But maybe you care about color balance under mixed lighting. A digital camera is actually better than a film camera. Maybe you care about scale, the ability of the camera to capture detail in the brightest highlights and darkest shadows of a scene. A cleverly designed digital camera may be much better in this respect than a film-based camera.

The key word in the above sentence is clever. Most digital cameras come from Japanese companies with a lot of engineering experience making imaging pipelines that run from a CCD to an analog video tape (i.e., what is inside a camcorder). They've adapted these pipelines to the new DV camcorders. So why not adapt them to the digital still camera? It is mostly the same thing except you write one frame at a time to some sort of computer memory. The flaw in this argument is that the CCD sensors are capable of much more dynamic range than one can record in an NTSC video signal. There has thus been very little pressure to make the pipeline milk the ultimate in shadow and highlight detail from the sensor. However, if one were to store digital still images with 16 bits per pixel, it would be worth trying to squeeze all the dynamic resolution from the sensor. Cameras like the Nikon D1 and Canon D30 are just the beginnings of the trend away from 8-bit cameras.

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