Quote Originally Posted by Asylum Steve
Good topic. The problem is that not everyone thinks film grain is bad.

That includes me. In fact, ironically, film grain is (IMO) still the one thing digtal cannot duplicate that well, and probably the only reason I still shoot high speed bw film on occasion...

So, this has the potential of becoming philisophical at some point.

If you embrace the beauty and style of film grain, then high-speed film is the obvious choice. If you don't, you'll be more satisfied with digital.
Yes, I guess I should clarify my opinion on film grain. As with most things in the world of photography, good and bad are determined by what results your looking for. I will always like the way film looks, B&W in particular. I hope to have a darkroom in my house one day.

I think for certain types of photos large film grain is perfectly acceptable or even desirable, but for the majority of the shooting I do, I prefer it to be minimized. I like Tri-X a lot, and it has large grain even at 400 ISO. BUT, I wouldn't enlarge 35mm Tri-X above 8x10, and even that is too much for some subject matter. When I pushed Tri-X to 800 (the one time I did it) the results turned out pretty good at 8x10, but not good enough to go further...IMO. So for me, grain size is mostly a limitation when it comes to making big prints. This brings me to another point.

It's not only about grain. Another thing I noticed about pushing Tri-X to 800 was a lack of tonal range. It was very contrasty. So, aside from the size of the grain, this can be looked at as a negative in some circumstances (most for me). I seem to get a better tonal range from high ISO digital than film. Tonal range is one of those things you can remove, but not add, so more is always better...IMO.

Paul