What We Lose When Film Cameras Change to Digital Ones

This is part two of a three-part series about the movie industry’s switch to digital cameras and what is lost, and gained, in the process. Part one, on the traditional approach to filming movies and the birth of digital, ran yesterday; part three runs tomorrow.

Most people have an intuitive understanding that, for most of its history, digital video (DV) looked both less true-to-life and less beautiful than film. Early-generation DV was an extremely “lossy” format, delivering images that looked simultaneously harsh and muddy. Until very recently, the digital format offered an erratic and unnatural-looking color palette, especially when it came to human skin tones. Throughout their history, digital formats have typically had significantly less “latitude,” meaning the ability to overexpose or underexpose the image and still get a usable or pleasing result.

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