At 02:04 PM 2/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
And I find you tiresome.
Is this the kind of tone that helps build a strong list?
Every time someone brings up something about digital it doesn't matter what it is, we all get pulled into the same shouting match. And in all this I really doubt any of us have answered kostas' question.The only people who get pulled into shouting matches are those who are so set in their ways they are unwilling to accept others points of view.
Since I missed Kostas's original question:
hey hey, boring question No2 for today...
Digital - at least to me - looks better. not only in screen but at some prints (1600 ISO film and digital 6x9 prints) when it comes to close ups, i enjoy the crisp edges and the shinny surfaces of palstic and mettalic materials and i can vividly remember 2 digital roses in Pf gallery that loook so 3D!
so is it only me?
No.
Digital is different that film for many reasons. One of the things that makes a photo look better is film grain. The less grain, the better looking. Traditionally this has caused people to shoot films like Velvia and bigger format films. Film shooters have been educated that "Bigger is better" because it makes the apparent grain less visible.and... why is that so?
Digital has noise, not grain and with many cameras, noise is non-existent at the minimum ISO of the camera. My D1H at ISO 200 is virtually noise free. Noise doesn't start showing up as "grain like" until you get to higher ISO settings like ISO 800. With an ISO 200 film, gain is typically visible in a 4x6" print or a 4x enlargement. Thus the ISO 200 grain free will look like a ISO 50 Fuji Velvia in that aspect.
Film is made up of chaotic irregular edges formed by the grains. Digital is made up of regular square shapes called pixels. At close examination, film will appear more realistic because of Chaos Theory while a digital image will have "Jaggies" or a stair stepping look because pixels are square. However at viewing distances, the jaggies don't show up and are part of the optical illusion (anti-aliasing of the edges for instance) that holds the image together actually helps perceived sharpness.
The next factor to consider is this..... When making a digital print on a continuous tone printer, like a Fuji Frontier or a Durst Lambda or a Kodak Dye Sub, you are using one print dot to represent all the colors in an 8 bit image file. The Kodak LED-II professional mini-lab digital printer outputs at 250 dpi. The Fuji Frontier is a 300 dpi device. That means to print an 8x10 inch image on a LED-II, you need a 2000 x 2500 pixel image. Any more pixels, then you have to throw them away. For the frontier, its a 2400 x 3000 pixel image.
A Nikon D100 produces a 2000 x 3008 pixel image (The Canon D60 is pretty close to this). So for the Kodak LED-II, the 24mm APS sized sensor in the D100 produces all the pixels necessary to make an uninterpolated image on the Kodak LED-II. Only a very minor increase via resampling to make an 8x10 on the Frontier. In the film world, to make an 8x10 from a 35mm negative means an 8X magnification of the film image. That magnification doesn't happen with digital. Because digital images are made up of regular square pixels, resampling methods work well on them unlike a scanned image (covered next). Many digital images can be up-sampled by 400-800% and still produce an acceptable to very good print. I frequently print 20x30" posters from my 2.7 megapixel D1H.
Next, when looking at a digital print and a film print side by side, both are second generation images. However, if the image was printed from a scan or comparing Photoforum images from scans vs. digital, you are now dealing with a first generation vs. second generation image. Many people don't produce scans that have the same contrast, saturation, sharpness, or Umph as an image from a digital camera.
Film photographers have been taught to scan large and never up-size. Downsizing is generally okay, but you should scan for your target size after cropping. Since a film image is made up of random, chaotic, and irregular patterns, turning that analog image into a scan involves taking that and turning it into the irregularities of the grain trying to imitate life. Then you scan it, making a second generation copy and at the same time try to make squares from it. So not only are you working on a second gen copy, you are also working on a two step Analog to Digital Conversion.
Finally, in many cases the digital print you see has been in affect a custom print. The photographer has optimized that individual image file before printing it. The similar print from film is at the lab worker's discretion on how its going to turn out. I recently did an experiment where I shot the same subject with the same lighting and exposure on both MF, 35mm and Pro Digital, trying to keep things as Apple to Apple as possible. In this experiment, the 35mm and MF cameras were shooting Kodak Portra VC and were developed and printed at the same lab on the same machine. The photos came back with a different color cast. The 35mm was too blue, the MF was a touch too yellow (but much closer to reality). In both cases they were too contrasty. The Nikon D100 images had very good shadow detail and because I controlled the contrast, the results were more pleasing.
Rob
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Rob Miracle
Photographic Miracles
203 Carpenter Brook Dr.
Cary, NC 27519
http://www.photo-miracles.com
