Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/09/09

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Digital darkroom
From: "Henning J. Wulff" <henningw@archiphoto.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 11:28:04 -0700

At 9:04 AM -0700 9/9/99, Frank Conley wrote:
>With all the positive talk on the high quality of inkjet prints, I'm
>wondering what the correlation is to digital cameras.  I saw the
>following note posted on Macintouch:
>
>"Yashica's Samurai 2100DG is a 2.1-megapixel digital camera with a 4x
>optical/4x digital zoom lens, optical and LCD viewfinders and more for
>$899. USB support is provided via Lexar's JumpShot USB Cable."
>
>2.1 megapixels sounds like a lot! Does anyone know how that resolution
>compares to film?


Not very well. Each pixel of a digital camera only does one color, and so
at best you have only 700K of information points; usually it is less, like
1/4. About 500K. A film scanner like Nikon's LS-2000 will give you about
2500 x 3800 pixels, each with information from all colors, or 9.5M points.
Each point in a digital camera usually gives you less information (bit
depth) than each point of a film scanner, so your digital camera will give
you less than 5% of the information a (now selling for) $1000US scanner
will. Drum scanners can extract almost another order of information,
depending on the quality of the original. Digital cameras are not up to P&S
level yet, by some distance.

   *            Henning J. Wulff
  /|\      Wulff Photography & Design
 /###\   mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
 |[ ]|     http://www.archiphoto.com