Why use a medium format film camera in the age of digital photography?

Just about any medium format camera built to professional specifications will produce beautiful images on film.  It’s a shame that many photographers consider this equipment obsolete. The missing link is the scanner.

 A decent flat bed scanner with a transparency adapter can turn a 2 ¼” by 2 ¼” color negative into a HUGE digital file.

 I’ve been using a refurbished Epson Perfection 3170 flat bed scanner that I purchased 2 years ago for $80. At 3200 dpi, I can produce a 7200 pixel x 7200 pixel image from a 2 ¼” square negative. I’d need a 52 megapixel digital camera to produce an image with these dimensions.

 I pay $3.50 per roll for professional 120 color film and a local photo lab charges me $3 per roll for developing. That’s 54¢ per image for a roll of 12 exposures. Once I scan the film, I can crop and make other adjustments before sending the digital files off to have 20” x 30” prints made.

 If you don’t want to bother with all of this, you could spend $44,000 for a 39 megapixel digital camera, right?

For these images of the Beethoven statue, I scanned a 2 1/4 color negative at 3200 dpi and got an image measuring 6351 pixels by 6351 pixels. I selected portions of the image and show them below. The original scan has been resized so I can use it in this guide.

Here's another 3200 dpi scan that produced a 49 megapixel image. The dragon is at the upper right corner of the roof.

 Check out larger images of these two scans at http://cgi3.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=randaljb

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