A useful article by Thom Hogan about the perils which await the photographer in getting an optimal image out of their camera, whether shooting film or digital. Occasionally you get some smug g*t who will write into a magazine or post on a forum that with film they get a fresh sensor for every shot. Hogan points out that things are not that straightforward and film has its own problems as well with dirt and other contamination. Remember all those letters we used to see about scratched negatives and transparencies? It does not end there, either. Working in a darkroom to produce a clean print poses other challenges along the way and attention to detail is necessary at every stage. Give me digital every time.
So is digital any better? There is the perennial problem of dirt on the sensor, but there are other issues as well, especially when shooting JPEGs. The introduction of unwanted artefacts by JPEG compression is not something I have thought about before. Admittedly Hogan uses an example from an early digital camera to illustrate what can happen and the manufacturers have since got much better at optimising JPEGs, but the processing is not perfect. Nor is it ever likely to be and the only answer might be a different image format with a better method for compressing image data. There have been various attempts to introduce new standards for image files, but all have floundered against the ubiquity of JPEG which is good enough for most people, despite its drawbacks,
I'll add my own recent example from my "Photo of the Day" series, caused not by in camera JPEG processing but my unwillingness to post large image files online. The shot was taken in Raw and in the original there is a smooth gradation in the sky from the light to dark areas which the high amount JPEG compression has not handled well. The shot was originally published on 28 November 2014 and the JPEG was produced using Lightroom.