Four digits, and falling. My Nikon DX40 cost about $1400 and is practically indistinguishable from film.
I worked at Kodak around digital movie film scanners/printers. Quality work required a $0.5M machine to digitize the film, and another $0.5M machine to write the edited image back to film. Now you can just buy a RED cinema camera for around $0.01M (aka $10K) to shoot the “footage” directly, and screen it with the theater’s $50K digital projector; the camera is flatly better than film, and the projector (while still inferior to the trained eye) is considered superior in the general public’s perception.
Upshot: you have to be doing very high quality, large-format photography for a wealthy & keen-eyed audience to find any discernable difference between film & digital ... and at those prices involved, the digital option may very well be superior.
Bonus: “film” is practically free for digital; I can dump hundreds of 3Kx2K images on a single cheap SD card, then move ‘em to a notebook in seconds for near-endless storage. Even if I could discern the difference between film & a good digital camera (and do have the eye to), I’d sacrifice a bit of quality to up the odds of getting a really good picture content-wise. Some of the best photos I’ve seen were from a grainy 1-megapixel camera.
Let me know when digital blur and the video edge highlight disappears.
Let me know when “digital motion blur”...
A polaroid looks different from film too.
Always will.
Have you seen Tim Burton’s “The Corpse Bride?” As you may know, it was “filmed” with Canon 1DmkII digital SLRs. (It was stop-action animation, of course.)
They did a preproduction screen test comparing a scene shot with these cameras to same scene shot with a standard motion picture film camera. Every viewer said, “Hey, put that other one back on!”