Let's just say that using film requires commitment. If money is an object, analogue could well have you living off a boiled egg for a fortnight if you get heavy with it.
Of the two mediums, digital is cheapest, fastest and most convenient, even if it is awash with technology that is for the most part entirely superfluous to the creative image making process. Of course, there is no additional cost involved after the shot and you are at liberty to shoot as many of the scene as you want. But with film, you will require discipline and planning.
Film (and its foreseeable diminishment of variety in the future), as you know, will involve the processing (your own) and/or outside processing cost, scanning (whether it is for the web or for exhibition, which would require high level scanner-image post-op workflow) and then printing. I find film to be expensive in an holistic sense e.g. from exposure all the way to finished frame-up (BTW, all of my work is from modified exposure E6 e.g. Velvia 50 and has been for more than 20 years) butit is head and shoulders above digital in terms of the finished quality (from scanning). And this finished work has a very different look to it, especially the now common analogue-to-digital hybridisation print process.
But even with the devotion to film, I also own a Nikon P7700, which "could" be described as a sort of "35mm digital" (but it is not!). I don't even know, nor care, how many pixels it has: I bought it for its robustness. "Little Nik" is useful for proofing a scene that may have a doubtful quality about it. At other times, it is great to have something small and very capable to cart along in lieu of a big film camera. On a challenging remote area bushwalk last year from that camera I had a 1.2metre wallpaper print made off a tiff image file and it was very good indeed. I had mulled for weeks whether I would take the 13kg 6x7 kit. I decided at the last moment to leave the big 6x7 kit at home rather than drag it through such difficult terrain — thank the Lord for sensible thinking!! I would never have got of Green Chasm Gorge with all that stuff weighing me down...
Film photography will get more and more expensive as time goes on, as will chemicals used for B&W work. We are seeing price increases in film products more frequently which can be telling in that it suggests manufacturers are not all that happy to churn out a product of an increasingly smaller market. A couple of manufacturers have gone in the last few years (Efke... who else??)
Sharpness isn't everything in an image, but in certain defined instances of the craft, it can make or break the image. Then, remember that sharpness in digital cameras can be adjusted back and forth (e.g. on the RAW file). With film, specifically medium format, you have baseline sharpness inherent in the quality of the optics and the larger format size (note there is no significant cost-benefit difference from 6x7 to 4x5 in terms of sharpness).
Refined technique and experience will be the best guides as to which of the two mediums (digital / analogue) is best for you. Don't be sidetracked by floss and folly that is so much of the mainstream full frame and medium format camera scene — I cannot for the life of me believe how people are getting all sweaty and shaky for a $10,000 camera and only photographing scenes that could be done equally if not considerably better with a $20 disposable camera. How? All to do with how skills are applied to the making of an image and not pandering to technology.
---------- Post added 03-07-14 at 07:35 PM ----------
Actually E6 is very suitable for printing (always has been, even through the Kodachrome era), when you know how. This is something one needs to look at, critically, on an individual basis. As I said in my earlier post, film requires commitment. A medium format camera and a dozen rolls of film plus a notebook and repetition/refinement is an excellent way to learn.
I talk with too many people who have whinges and whines about E6. They have been bitterly disappointed, expecting a gift from the heavens with the first roll of Velvia (or E100VS, an atrocious film). Adopting a forensic "why is that so?" approach, I often discovered that problems lay in the lousy base exposure of transparency film (the number one repeating problem); next, the failure to understand specific scanning methodology involving the translation and profiling of transparency film (hence, learn it yourself over time or leave this to a pro-level lab) specific to the media the image will be printed to; that is to say, preparation of the scan/image is not the same for inkjet printing as it is for hybridised RA-4 (wet) printing and visualising how a print looks from your transparency. Typically, the print process loses between a third to half a stop, so exposure should be slightly over, rather than under (with transparency film, even slight over-exposure can introduce a whole new set of problems in the scene). The learning curve is quite steep. So who does best? People with a background in graphic arts/electronic or digital arts (my initial training decades ago was in typesetting and the "novel innovation" (in 1989) of desktop publishing) will handle these things much easier than somebody coming off the street with no experience of analogue, digital or even scanning. In that case, digital is probably the best option, but it's a personal decision.
