[Leica] Part 2: For those who think film will be dead in the near future... (extra long)

[Jim Brick <jimbrick@photoaccess.com>]

PART 2

So... my feeling is that the "technological breakthrough" that will propel
digital photography into the forefront, will be nothing that we (lay
people) are familiar with today. It will have to be the ability to
electronically control molecular bonds or electron orbits, and perhaps have
a build-up of, or depletion of, tagged electrons that can be read-out,
perhaps radiometrically, in parallel. But your guess is as good as mine.

Going to the level of actually competing with film will require a very very
major breakthrough in electronic pixel recording. This is going to take a
long time by anyone's standards. The saying of "every year half the cost
and twice the performance" works only over a finite time. Just like optical
microscopes. Just like propeller engines. Just like electronics. You can
only go so small and so fast for so long. And then you hit the wall. And
have to "invent" some new grandiose scheme. We are pretty close to that
wall in digital photography.

Digital photography is "different" than film photography. The whole
process, from front to back, is near the wall. It takes massive files to
store digital images at full resolution. Lossless compression has been
worked on, by wizards, for decades. Anything other than a little
compression, will degrade the image. Moving, storing, and portability of
digital images is a also a major headache. Requiring lots of CPU
horsepower. The whole discipline requires lots of money.

Digital photography, as we know it now, produces outstanding results for
the disciplines for which it is matched. Consumer P&S, catalog photography
& production, and news photography. But for sheer recording superiority,
information content, ease of use, easy storage, highly portable, easily
viewable, comparatively inexpensive (unless you are a Leica user!), very
inexpensive (pinhole photography), comes in a little can with no wires
attached, and can be digitized after the fact producing superior digitized
results, it is "film". Can you choose between digital sensor "types"? High
speed low res, Low speed hi res and all in between? Color? B&W? No. You
have to use film, or buy a different type of digital camera. One matched to
each type of photography you want to do.

Folks who say film is dead are simply incapable of looking at the facts.
There are many many many major obstacles to overcome before pixels have a
ghost of a chance of killing film photography.

Carry a box of processed Kodachrome 25 or Velvia slides, taken with your
new 90mm APO ASPH lens, in your pocket. These slides are capable of
producing 36 30x40 Cibachrome prints at astounding resolution and clarity.
A digital file capable of producing equal clarity and resolution will have
to be 125MB. Can you get this directly out of a camera? NO! The Leica S1 is
one of the highest resolution "studio" cameras with 25 Megapixel
resolution. If that happened to equate to a 25MB file, it is capable of
producing a good 16x20. We're short about 100MB for a 30x40. A 4 megapixel
camera produces a 1 megabyte raw BMP or TIFF file. And that is all you
have. No software or algorithms in the world can "create" missing
resolution. You cannot get something out of nothing. You will always have
only 1MB of data. Maybe enough to squeeze out an OK 11x14.

If you did have 36 125MB digital files, you need seven CD's to hold them.
You cannot lay them on a light table and look at them with a loupe. You
have to have a high end computer and a reasonably sophisticated viewer, or
Photoshop. You have to swap CD's in and out and wait for each image to
load. You have to look at a computer monitor which is usually a very poor
display medium for photographs. Unless you have spent very big bucks for a
color matched publishing front end system.

Think about the resolution of each frame of 35mm motion picture film. Think
of how many frames there are in a feature length motion picture. Think of
the massive storage, the high speed compression algorithms, the computer
power required, the distribution media, the technology necessary to
"project" a digital image on to a LARGE WIDE SCREEN WITH CRISP RESOLUTION
AND CLARITY, AND BRIGHT ENOUGH TO BE SEEN EASILY. Think about it... I think
it's take a little more than a laserdisk or DVD system. These systems work
OK on your computer or TV set. But not even close for an auditorium full of
people that want to be "blown away" with the dynamics of what they see.
They want to become a part of it. Engulfed.

People forget that the reason projected slides and projected motion
pictures look so good is that they are "transparent" media. A pure full
spectrum white light shines "through" the media reproducing an astounding
dynamic range, superior sharpness, clarity, color richness, and color
subtleness. Completely unobtainable with reflex pixel projection.

It is going to be a very very long time from now before we see anything
digital that will blow film out of the water. The amount of information,
resolution, clarity, sheer power, that is in the slide box in my pocket,
just cannot be beat. At least not for a very long while. And only with a
major technology breakthrough. A complete re-direction of digital imaging
technology.

Now about that box of slides in your pocket... Amazing technology! A
massive amount of usable data.

So until the breakthrough (don't hold your breath)... I'm a Leica kinda guy!

Color slides and B&W negatives forever!!!

Jim