Hi all! Here are my two cents about this topic
As you know, I am doing astrophotography from Chile. Here the reality of this field is widely different from what you live in USA or Europe. We don't have the experience you have, and also we have not the equipment... Here everithing is much more expensive, due to the taxes (customs), shipping and becouse the market is by far smaller. Also we don't earn as much money as you do. In fact, I study at a university, so I can't work to afford all the cost are involved with our hobby. I still shot with film, without autoguiders, with common lenses and achromatic scopes, and a small CG5 mount. But, I know that with my modest equipment I am pushing it to the limit, and obtaining some of the finest wide field pics. The only advantages that I have are the skies (I think that I can go to magnitude 21.5 photographycally) and the advanced use of the "digital darkroom".
I know I can't compite with CCDs in deep sky shots. Also planetary/lunar/solar shots are the field for other media (webcams). But, I am sure that we film guys have a lot to say with wide field shots, specially with common photographical lenses. Just go as long as you can, stack multiple shots and make use of all the arsenal of tool we have in our computers. I am using Pleiades PixInsight for nearly six months, and I can say to you that with all those new tools we can do miracles, and obtain results by far better than using Photoshop or other softwares. But it isn't only a software advantage. We must apply all we have learn from the ccd guys with our film images. We can also apply "flat fields". We can improve the SNR stacking. We can remove the noise aspect of the grainy film with wavelets, deconvolution, sgbnr, scnr... All that is needed is experience and innovation.
Of course that if we have better equipment we can obtain better results, but also I am aware that there are a lot of people here in the poor countries doing what the can with modest equipment, pushing them to the limit, and the results that they got only have to envy the resolution of the high-end scopes you own. And, to be honest, there are some fields, as wide field and planetery shots, that I have seen even better results.
Well, my last words... I have invested a lot of money (for me, at last) in my film based equipment (camera, lenses, scanner, etc.) and I plan to continue shooting wide field pics untill there is no more film left. I know that it is the only way that I can make top level astrophotographies, and not be "just another guy".
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