I'm very happy with digital photography, and wouldn't ever want to go back to 35mm.

However, I've found a few sites recently that have comparisons between film and digital photos and been inspired to test this out myself.

For this experiment I shot several subjects on a manual SLR and a digital camera within a few minutes of each other. The film was processed and lab-scanned so that it could be compared with those from the digital camera. The negative scan size was 7200 x 4800 pixels, which is the best I could find online at a price I was prepared to pay. This turned out to be overkill, but I didn't want to leave the possibility of wishing I'd paid a bit more, and it gave the film the best possible chance of performing well.

The equipment and consumables used were as follows:

• Canon Powershot SX20 IS (12mp / 20X optical zoom) - all photos taken with ISO100 setting, except as noted below.
  
• Fujica st705w fitted with max F1.8, 55mm 'Standard' lens
• Hoya HMC max F2.8, 135mm 'Telephoto' lens
  
• 100ASA Fujicolor 35mm film
  

As I only had fixed focal length lenses available for the SLR in 55mm and 135mm sizes, I tried to adjust the digital camera's optical zoom so that the overall area of the subject was roughly similar.
(Obviously a Digital SLR with similar lenses would be a closer comparison, but as I rejected that route for myself in favour of a 'prosumer' model, this is the best I could do)

So why do some more comparisons when there are several out there ? Well, the best ones I have seen aren't quite what I'm looking for. These are my favourites:-

• Steve Hoffman's "DIGITAL SLR vs. FILM SCANS"
  
• Ken Rockwell's "Film vs. Digital Cameras" shows how 4"x5" film can completely blow 35mm film and DSLRs out of the water.
  Definitely eye-opening, but most of us have never considered using a camera the size of a bucket that costs £3 per negative before it's developed. 
• Michael Reichmann's balanced essay "Like It Is"
  
• Roger Clark's fairly technical "Film versus Digital Information"
  

As good as these articles are, they don't really feature enough comparison images to show the pros and cons of digital and conventional photography. I wanted to see the full-sized images to gauge their overall appearance as well as close-ups of selected details. I was also keen to see how the two systems coped with different lighting conditions, such as long exposures, heavily back-lit subjects, artificial and natural light, and sunny/cloudy days.

Here is the final list of 28 photographs and 23 subjects / lighting conditions that I compared.

NB. The film was developed and scanned by Fuji Digital Imaging using an Agfa d-lab 2 minilab, and I was really pleased with the speed of service and degree of personal attention given.

You can jump directly to the photo thumbnails page which features an easy way to compare the digital and film images side-by-side (just click on the digital image thumbnail). There are no detailed comments on this page, so you can view them unhindered by my opinions.

However a more comprehensive comparison can be found on my comments and conclusions page. This page has similar links to side-by-side 4000px wide comparisons in frames, along with Flickr links to the 7200x4800 original scans for the 10 best film captures.

If you'd like to add your own comments about the comparisons, or rescore the images yourself, please use this form.