A decade ago, when independent movies shot in digital video like “Chuck and Buck” (2000) started hitting the big screen, it was easy to tell you weren’t looking at film because the often smeary, muddy visuals looked about as bad as an old VHS tape. Audiences didn’t seem to care, possibly because, after decades of watching battered home videos on standard-definition televisions, they were accustomed to degraded imagery. For many the pleasure of being able to rent a Billy Wilder movie at their leisure outweighed complaints about how lousy the videos looked. But today’s digital has a far higher image quality than the low-res digital video used to shoot movies like “Chuck and Buck,” which makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish movies shot in digital from those shot on celluloid.

The director David Fincher has been using digital to make movies beginning with “Zodiac” in 2007. He has said he likes digital for its workflow convenience, cost and ability to capture images in low light, important for a filmmaker whose visuals are often as dark as his topics. Digital also frees him up to do numerous takes because he’s not burning through expensive film, just adding data to either reusable flash cards or external hard drives (turbocharged versions of what you might have at home). And Mr. Fincher likes a lot of takes, having shot the first scene of “The Social Network,” in which the protagonist Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), learns a harsh life lesson from a soon-to-be ex, in a whopping 99 takes.