Originally posted by CreationBear Ha, the next thing you'll tell me is that Comcast lies about its Internet speeds...
At any rate, I'll definitely have to explore how film has changed--Velvia 50 has, what?, five stops, but as you allude, it seems as if you've got a much bigger window to explore in Ektar and Portra especially. Besides, even blown highlights don't seem to be that big of deal with a lot of MF shot I've seen--who needs HDR when you can be "artistic"?
Kodak Vision 3, which is the latest(last?) motion picture film made by Kodak, and the new Portra 400 is based off that, has 14 stops of DR. But more importantly, on the shoulder of the curve, there is nothing that comes close to it in digital. If you want to shoot on natural light, or even overexpose and go for that look, you have to use film. There's a reason the greatest natural light only film, The Tree Of Life, is shot on film. Yeah, Lubezki decided to shoot The Revenant on digital, but they had to make him a new camera, stitching together 3 sensors of a regular Alexa camera, which gave the a 65mm size frame. And still, you can see in both, he chose no to over expose it, like he did on The Tree Of Life, quite the contrary, it's underexposed.
The way film handles highlights, nothing come close yet in digital. And I've shot with the best digital cinema cameras there are. The dinamic range in the bottom, and the sensitivity is much better in digital, but not the highlights, not yet.