Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/12/08

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Subject: Re: [Leica] OT: The endless nonsense about film vs. digital (long rant)
From: Rafael Alday <rafaelalday@yahoo.es>
Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 09:23:39 +0100 (CET)

Take a look at this article on photo.net 

http://www.photo.net/digital/cameras/choosing

They expain why the quality of film is the highest,
followed by scanned film (3 CCD one for each color)
and the last one digital cameras (only 1 CCD with
mixtuted colors) and 8 bits.
Very intesresting article.
Rafael

 --- Martin Howard <mvhoward@mac.com> escribió: > 
> I subscribe to Photo Techniques, the US magazine
> primarily for LF 
> weenies, but also a great bogroom read for wannabees
> like myself 
> (actually my real reason for subscribing to it is
> David Vestal's 
> column).  While seated upon the aforementioned
> facility this evening, I 
> came across an article by Paul Schranz in the latest
> issue (Nov/Dec 
> 02).  He writes about "conventional" and digital
> photography, a sort of 
> personal odyssey through technology and back.  In
> this, we can find the 
> following sentences:
> 
> 	Film is still the best means of recording an image.
> The best scanners 
> do
> 	not yet meet the richness of data that is available
> on film.  
> Inevitably,
> 	that time will come, as will digital camera
> quality.
> 
> I, for one, don't think that that time will ever
> come.  Like most areas 
> of technology, what drives development is economy. 
> If there is little 
> or no economic incentive of developing a digital
> sensor for cameras, or 
> a scanner, that matches or surpasses chemical film,
> then it is unlikely 
> that it will happen.
> 
> Fine art photographers seem to be split in two
> communities: those who 
> vow to continue with film, printing on fibre paper
> to archival 
> standards, and those who dabble with digital images
> at some point in 
> the process.  (An interesting aside is a group who
> belong to the 
> former, but still use computers to produce masks
> which are subsequently 
> sandwiched with the original negative for [contact]
> printing.)  The 
> most fervent arguments about quality seem to be
> raged in this 
> community.  Is digital good enough?  Can you tell
> the difference 
> between a chemical print and an inkjet print?
> 
> In reality, fine art photographers don't count worth
> a toss.  They're 
> about as important to the those that fund the
> digital photography 
> development as the super-heavy-weight vinyl LP
> weenies are to the music 
> industry.
> 
> What matters are large volume, commercial
> photographers and the general 
> public.  I'd guess that the commercial photographers
> that count are (a) 
> advertizing, (b) press.  Both of these are
> characterized by a degree of 
> ephemerality where convenience and "good enough" are
> more important 
> than whether something is qualitatively the same as
> a archival, 
> selenium toned, fibre print at 20x24" from an 8x10"
> T-MAX 100 negative 
> observed through a 5x Schneider loupe.  The same
> goes for the general 
> public: good enough is good enough.
> 
> What will happen is that digital (camera) technology
> will improve to 
> the point where three things coincide: (a) tiered
> quality and pricing 
> ("consumer", "prosumer", "professional");  (b)
> quality improvements 
> until "good enough" (given the application area) has
> been reached;  (c) 
> ease-of-use issues, convenience, and infra-structure
> break above the 
> cost-of-entry for new consumers.
> 
> Once this happens, improvements will not be in the
> direction of the 
> information capacity of the digital technology and
> this will probably 
> happen well before digital devices come even close
> to (i.e., several 
> orders-of-magnitude away from) capturing the amount
> of information that 
> film does.
> 
> And, just as you can still buy tube amps, and play
> new LPs on recently 
> manufactured turntables, I suspect that film will be
> around for a long 
> while yet.  Existing in a somewhat marginal role,
> but still existing in 
> parallel with digital imaging.
> 
> M.
> 
> --
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