[Leica] Re: Leica and coming digital age

[Jim Brick <jim@brick.org>]

As I have dissertated, numerous times on this list, digital replacement of
film is a very long ways away. People always say "but I can make a great
8x10 with my digital camera and my ink jet printer. Great. But stop and
think for a minute.

You go on vacation. You are visiting the Pyramids, watching a glacier in
Glacier Bay, walking the Great Wall of China. How many digital photographs
can you take at "8x10" resolution. Lets say it's 36. What do you do after
picture 36? Slip in another $150 smart media card? And after the second 36,
another $150 smart media card? Either that or you are packing a laptop
computer to dump your smart media into. $5 rolls of film are sure cheaper.
And available AT the pyramids, ON the ship in Glacier Bay, AT the Great
Wall of China...

Now you are back. You took five rolls of slides. Maybe $50 of film. You can
hold the five boxes of slides in your hand. You can put on a slide show.
You can spread them out on a light table. You can make 8x10, 11x14, 16x20,
20x24, etc. prints from them (Leica pictures... remember).

To get EQUIVALENT resolution from digital, you can store two photographs on
a CD. How many CD's for 5 x 36 divided by two ? How about 88. And the smart
media cost $800 for the trip. Can you give a slide show? No. Can you spread
them out on a light table? No. Can you make prints larger than 11x14 on a
relatively inexpensive inkjet printer? No. You have to have a computer to
look at them. They will NOT be color balanced on your monitor unless you
have a very expensive set-up. To get large prints you must use an Iris or
LightJet printer. And you have no color reference as you do with a slide.

Digital is great for professional catalog work, news reportage, and
consumer local happysnaps. After that, it gets very very expensive and
complicated. And it will take a long while to change. A hundreds of
megabytes of image just cannot be compressed without losing resolution. You
can equate a 400MB file to a Velvia/Summicron 35mm slide. Which would you
rather carry around? I'll take a slide and a good Loupe.


At 08:06 PM 7/24/99 -0700, you wrote:
>Dave Yoder wrote:
>><snip>digital
>> won't be as good as film for at least another ten years, and that
hopefully those ten years will
>> be the best of my career, it made sense to indulge. You only live once,
and you get the chance at
>> capturing these passing moments on film only once. Makes sense to make
the most of them.
>> To me it's kinda like why Spielberg (for notoriety's sake, I'd prefer to
invoke Wenders) shoots
>> his movies on film rather than videotape.
>><snip>
>
>Well Lucas looks like he shot this latest Star Wars with a High 8. Make
that low
>8. Then had it imported into the Macs at the Grade school and let the kids
strip
>in their favorite cartoon ideas. I want my money back! Where's Luke Skywalker
>when you need' em? Kurt Cobain is not Luke Skywalkers dad!!! I'd rather be
put
>to sleep with 70mm any day.
>Mark Rabiner
>