Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/08/19
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Repost as requested. - ----- Original Message ----- From: Erwin Puts <imxputs@knoware.nl> To: <leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> Sent: Monday, August 09, 1999 5:01 PM Subject: [Leica] Erwin's adventures in digiland. part 1 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