[Leica] Erwin's adventures in digiland. part 1

[Erwin Puts <imxputs@knoware.nl>]

I am deeply involved in digital photography since 5 years as I am 
testing all digital equipment for the Dutch magazine I am writing 
for. This may be a  part of my experience that most Luggers are 
unaware of. I a loose series I will reflect on my findings.
Here is the first one.
Goal now is a comparison between the current crop of the above 2 
million digicams printed with the Epson 750, the acknowledged leader 
of the pack and the classical 35mm colour neg image as printed on 
silverbased paper.
I had the Fuji 2700, a 2.3 million pixel camera and the M6 with Fuji 
100 Reala. The ccd of the Fuji has an ISo equivalent of 120, so the 
100ISO film is appropriate.
I choose a very demanding scene, with lots of glass and highly 
reflecting chrome and silver, and very fine textural details.  That 
is the inage a Leica loves to record.
The Fuji was set to 1800x1200 resolution, the highest and the 
sharpness index was also level 4 (the best). With this setting only 8 
images could be recorded on the flash card. First positive notice: 
the preview function works like a technical camera setup: take a 
picture, look at the light, composition etc. rearrange and shoot. 
Call it a digital Polaroid shot. Very convenient. First negative 
remark: the dynamic range is bad. Chrome reflections, highlights and 
dark parts etc are washed out and clogged up. Fill-in flash kelps, 
but now the white balance is off. The Fuji has many controls for 
adjusting the exposure meter and the flash output, but every 
combination I tried was inadequate. So I tried the best and assumed 
Photoshop would do the rest.
Downloading the images into the Mac was the usual hassle: Twain 
driver not recognized, camera not attached (with all cables on etc). 
Eventually it worked. It took every picture about 3 minutes to load. 
The flashcard images were 1 million jpeg images, which expanded in 
Photoshop to 6 million images. Do not save them as jpeg again as now 
the images will be compressed another factor of 6 and more pixel info 
is lost. So save them as TIF or Photoshop.   Now we have 6 million 
images that are 25 by 17 inches at 72 p/inch resolution. Not good for 
printing. A reduction to 300 dpi (for printing) produces a 4x6 inch 
format, so just the standard postcard of the normal 35mm print. Going 
to a 1440 resolution, reveals a pathetic 1,2 by 0.8 inch print! Of 
course interpolation can blow this up, but where there is no info. no 
software can produce anything. But OK. A 300 dpi is fine. The 
original jpeg file shows all the familiar artefacts of software 
interpolation. Remember that 4 pixels are needed to record one image 
pixel. So the 2.3 million pixels are in reality about 600.000 pixels 
against at least 10 million of the Reala. Blooming, colour fringes, 
white noise, you name it and the image has it. We can use Photoshop 
to correct part of this. Not all can be rescues and it takes lots of 
time and expertise. Glass reflections exhibit severe pixelisation. 
Well how will the prints look.
Next installment

Erwin