Re: Digicam vs. Scanner resolutions

["Phil.Lippincott" <phil.lippincott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

You are absolutely correct about film Harvey,

    I think most people under estimate how good film is and what means.  I know your
in New York City.  I now use for an example of film quality a print produced by one
of Aztek's Digital PhotoLab Premier drum scanner customers, as their very first scan
during installation last year,  Big Apples Sign scanned an Ektachrome E100SV 35mm
slide for me at 8000 dpi optical.  This scan produced a 250 mega byte flawless with
no grain full fidelity histogram file that they directly printed from the Aztek
Digital PhotoLab scanning software (without Photoshop) on their Lambda to a 50 inch
by 150 inch print.  We have a one of these prints on our wall (in California) from
this picture and you can walk up with your nose to the print or look at it from
across the room, and it is perfect.
   If pictures like these can be taken from any 35mm camera and when captured
digitally to the quality of the film be used in the most demanding applications.
Then digital cameras have a long ways to go before they can duplicate the quality
and cost effectiveness for professional applications of film.  By the way with 120
/220 film we can conquer the world (1 GB) and 4 x5 has over 4 giga bytes of 24 bit
RGB equivalent optical data.
   Beyond the optical resolution discussions there are many others too, i.e.
latitude of exposure comparison to negative films.  Where one exposure can have over
16 stops of exposure, for example a fine art sunset shot of the sun going down at a
beach. The direct sun without blooming,  blow out, or over exposure in on corner and
the sand of the beach and shadows without closing up into black or under exposure in
the other corner.  And with your drum scanner at Skip you can capture all of this
density digitally.  This discussion also leads to the comparison of color capture
fidelity differences and the film again has the dramatic benefit over digital
cameras due light sensitivity and over a hundred years of technical refinements.
   Of course there are a lot of other digital camera benefits like convenience and
avoidance of developing where its use for applications not driven by quality allow
it to  shine.  And I expect that if given enough substantial time for new technology
discoveries we can find ways for digital cameras to compare to what we already have
with film.  The Foven chip seems like an evolutionary step however small, in the
right direction.  It doesn't address however how they are going to produce a 24 bit
250 MB full fidelity response like just loading my 35 mm camera with a $5 roll of
E100SV or Portra NC.   We still seem a very long way from duplicating with digi cams
the performance of films.
   It may be instead that we professionals are being asked by some marketing people
to be caught up in the excitement, for the newest technology announcements or to
except with their wild claims ultimately lower quality results for the instant
gratification convenience of digital cameras.

Sincerely
Phil Lippincott
Aztek, Inc.

SKID Photography wrote:

> byard pidgeon wrote:
>
> > Supposedly, 6 megapixels is the threshold point for making "real" photos
> > with a digicam...but, making a "real" photo quality neg or slide with a film
> > recorder requires just under 12 megapixels (and a good FR, like a PCR II at
> > least).
> >
> > So, it seems to me that what we really need are 12 megapixel digicams, and
> > we're only halfway there.
> >
> > I'm defining the quality factor as being sufficient to make a neg that
> > produces a photo print of at least 11X and preferably 16X that's
> > indistinguishable from a camera neg.
> >
> > Along the same lines, my film scanner yields about 14 megapixels...doesn't
> > it make sense that 12-14 megapixels is what we need in a pro quality
> > digicam?
>
> Well, sort of.  A '6 megapixel' capture chip in a digicam really has only a 1/4
> to a 1/3 of those stated pixels, as the camera manufacturers are passing a huge
> lie off on the public.
>
> When a spec sheet says it has 6 megapixels, what they really mean is that there
> are 6 million receptors, each receptor being an R,G,G, or B (only).  (These
> cameras use 2 G receptors for every pair of R&B receptors.)  A 'pixel' is made
> from an R,G, & B component, but each sensor only captures a third of a pixel's
> worth of information, the rest is interpolation, which is to say:  Making up the
> information.  Albeit, through a very good and sophisticated algorithm, it's not
> 'real' full pixel info it's capturing...Unlike what one gets from a scanner,
> which are real RGB pixels.
>
> So draw your own conclusion as to how big a chip they will need to replace
> film.   Also, the new 'Foven' chips might be just the ticket, as they, at each
> sensor point, capture an RG & B component (a pixel) at different wavelengths
> (they focus at different depths on the chip).  Some have said that these chips
> will have other shortcomings, but that remains to be seen.
>
> Harvey Ferdschneider
> partner, SKID Photography, NYC
>
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