JCO emphasized:
> I think you are arguing that slow and fast films are different
> and they are as it is today but I what I am saying is if the fast ones
> had
> exact same image quality as the slow ones the slow ones
> would be obsolete because slower is worse from a practical
> standpoint nearly all the time.
You're right ... _nearly_ all the time. But not quite nearly
enough, in my book, to stop using 'em entirely. I *have* run
into situations where I've wanted a slower film than I had
with me. More than two or three times. Not _often_, I'll
grant you that much; and like you I find myself wishing for
more speed more often than less. But it does come up.
One problem here is that you're making an emphatic case based
on a hypothetical -- the big if-identical-in-all-other-respects
angle. And that makes the Overwhelming and Obvious Superiority
of faster films itself a hypothetical proposition ...
... and folks who are more interested in real-world film
choices than in mathemagical hypotheses (well, enough more
interested that the real world keeps distracting them when
they stumble into an argument about hypothetical cases so
far from actual experience) are going to look at the
_question_ just differently enough for you to annoy each
other.
Another problem is that word "nearly" -- with your emphatic
tone it _sounds_ like you mean "effectively always [handwave
at obscure special cases]". I'm not sure whether that's
really what you mean, but it comes across that way, and
anyone who's had at least half as many "I need slower film,
how odd" moments as I have is going to react to that with
something alongs the lines of, "But that _does_ come up in
the real world, and not just in obscure once-in-a-lifetime
situations!"
If you _didn't_ mean that -- if you meant merely, "in the
majority of cases" *without* the implication that the
small number of times it goes the other way can be disregarded
out of hand as statisticaly insignificant -- then you're
sending a slightly different message than you intend, and
the degree to which you seem to be worked up over this is
then rather confusing.
Hoping to clarify communication,
-- Glenn
