Black & White battle: Samsung Galaxy 4 Zoom versus Leica CL with Kodak T-max film

I like to shoot film. There's something about the process. The cameras. The anticipation. The wait. Shooting film makes photography fun for me.

Even in 2014, film photographers still believe they can get a look with film that is not possible with digital. I can guarantee you that the images from my Kodak Porta and Ektar colour negatives have more intrinsic qualities to them then my Nikon DSLR files. Not because I say so, but because people systematically choose my analog pictures over my digital ones.

The test

But is this also the case for black & white? I decided to take the test with a roll of Kodak T-max 100 (TMX). This is the finest-grained black&white film and should therefore compare well with digital. I also could have chosen a film with more 'character' like TriX, but that would make any comparison with digital pointless, since it renders the images in a vastly different way.

The digital camera I will be using for the comparison is not my Nikon DSLR but my newest camera: a Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom smartphone, which was given to me with the request to put it through it's paces. The S4 Zoom has a large sensor (for a smartphone: 1/2.33'') and a 10x Zoom. Read my review for more information.
For the test I shot the T-max with my Leica CL through an Industar 55 lens. The 24 zoom lens of the Galaxy S4 Zoom was used at 2.3x magnification, which corresponds more or less with the same angle of view as the Industar. The Lecia was metered with the built in meter and the S4 Zoom was put on auto.

The images

The results blew me away: the Galaxy S4 zoom could render the same black & white tones as the T-max film. I processed both the scans of the film and the JPGs of the smartphone in Lightroom, but I didn't touch the colour-to-B&W mixing for the smartphone pictures.

There are differences in rendering and exposure, but not as much as I had thought. The Galaxy S4 manages to save both highlights and shadows in most images. Even the clouds where salvageable in Lightroom.

One problem area is DOF. The small sensor of the camera (compared to the fullframe, well: film) does not allow to render objects unsharp. The difference can be seen below.

As you can see in the 100% crop below, in general the smartphone delivers cleaner images with more detail. Only on the shadow side (to the right of the vertical strut) we see that the smartphone's noise reduction has erased all textures. We also see some noise in the smartphone image, compared to a little bit of film grain in the T-max image. The general impression of the image is still more pleasing with the T-max than with the sensor.

The most interesting difference is in the last picture, where there is less detail in the sky in the S4 Zoom image as in the T-max image. Maybe this has to do with the colour mixing, since this image was taken at 1/8s after sunset. The sky was coloured blue and orange.

The full resolution images of the whole film are available in this Google+ album. The images from the Galaxy S4 zoom are here on Flickr.

Personally I still prefer film. Not because it gives me a look which I can't recreate with digital, but because of the pleasure it gives me when shooting. The limitation of only having 36 frames available makes you think about what you are shooting. During this test, I was shooting as I would with film and then took a second image with the digital camera. I don't think that without the film camera and the limitations it offers me I would have come home with the same images.

So will I keep shooting black & white film? Hell, yeah! There are many ways to an end and my way to create images is with a classic film camera. It's as simple as that. Up to you to see what floats your boat.