Recently I’ve been thinking about digital noise and wondering if it’s time for me to switch to full frame. But every digital camera has noise, the only difference is how the photographer sees it. My noise threshold is low, probably because the digital noise seems too patterned to me. Film grain on the other hand is random. If you claim that you prefer the noise to film grain, then I bet you’ve never seen a Velvia slide up close! Or then you just really like noise (or you’re really young and think that analogue cameras belong to a museum together with vinyl records). I remember when I switched to digital and was looking at the nearly noise-free ISO 100 images, the smoothness blew me away. Now I look at my old slides and see the grain in Velvia 50 and think that it’s beautiful! Grain is the nature of film, it’s part of its charm (your mileage may vary), but noise is just… well, noise.

Just to have an idea of the noise on a full frame camera, I tested a Canon 5D Mark II and to be honest, I wasn’t impressed. I was seeing a lot more noise than I had expected after reading all the positive reviews, so the 25K investment is not justified in any way, even if it looked like the noise was more random (thus more tolerable) than it is on my 40D. When it comes to full frame, I get to play with it on my cheap 2nd hand film camera anyway. Will be nice to see how my lenses perform, the 15mm fish-eye in particular should be interesting.

So with regard to getting back to film photography, there isn’t really any big reason to do it, it’s more of a feeling than a rational move. But here’s one thought: When I switched from film to digital, it quickly improved my photography thanks to the quick feedback. Now that I’ll start using film again, I’m actually half expecting it will make me a better photographer because it will slow me down!