David Rayfield wrote:
Use two cameras, say, an F5 (loaded with Tri-X or T-Max) and a D-300 (RAW), to make two exposures of the same subject. The subject should be carefully chosen to have smooth transitions between low and high values. Now make two 8X10 images in black and white (color, of course, is for kids). Now look carefully at the photograph and the digital image, particularly at the transitions from darker to lighter areas. If you've looked carefully, you'll see that the transition in the photograph is smooth, continuous, while that in the digital image is not. In the latter, the transition or gradation eventually "jumps" from a very light gray to dead white, or from a very dark gray to dead black.
Well, except that the inkjet grays are made by distributed dots at the physical layer, just as the silver-gelatine grays are made with different frequencies of different size silver particles. It's certainly possible to create visible posterization by stretching the image too far, but you're not talking about that, you're talking about a very good (somewhere near "best possible") print in each medium, right? I don't care about issues I need a microscope to see. That's "pixel peeping", whether anything digital is involved at all. You can learn useful things about the materials and algorithms and so forth that way, but you can't learn a *thing* about "art" from it.
I haven't tried your exact test, but I've had a chance to compare dye-transfer and digital prints from 6x7 color negatives, for example, and I've recently made some 20x30 image-size prints from digital files and one old tri-x scan of my own images, and these nasty transitions you're so concerned about don't seem to me to exist.
(I can't try your exact test; I don't have an F5 *or* a D300 :-). I'm pretty sure I got rid of my last 35mm film body last year when I was financing the 70-200/2.8 VR. )
Remember, too, that with digital images, the image is ON the paper: with photographs, the image is thoroughly IN the emulsion.
It's a catchy phrase, but I'm not sure the facts of where in the sandwich the ink ends up, compared to where the developed silver grains end up, really support your view that it's a major difference. The ink is *not* on the surface of any of the modern inkjet papers.
-- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
