Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/12/10

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Subject: RE: [Leica]Digital Photography(slightly OT)
From: "Lee, Jonathan" <Jonathan.Lee@hrcc.on.ca>
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1999 10:04:16 -0500

It's not the camera itself that is keeping me away from a digital camera but
the actual use and sorting of the resulting images.  I'm not talking about
the price of the memory cards or CDs, but rather the use of digital images.
Here's what I mean:

Take 36 film slides. Find the 10 that you like best.  Look more closely at
these 10.  Pass these 10 to wife/client/assisant for a second opinion.  Find
the 4 best that are worth printing.  On a light box with loupe this will
take about 5 minutes.  With 36 digital images, especially if they are of
comparable resolution to a 35mm image, this same exercise will take a long,
long time. Why bother with a digital camera?  

Don't get me wrong, I thik digital output of film images after scanning is
going to replace silver within a short period. But a really useful digital
camera will require  mega-pixel resolution as well as a huge advance in
computing speed and a correspondingly huge drop in price.  

Jonathan Lee 

- -----Original Message-----
From: Jeff S [mailto:4season@boulder.net]
Sent: Friday, December 10, 1999 9:42 AM
To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
Subject: Re: [Leica]Digital Photography(slightly OT)


But it's not the image quality (for casual use at small print sizes)
that keeps me away from most of today's digital cameras, but the slow
speed, sometimes terrible ergonomics, high power demands and cost of the
storage cards. I think even a 1-megapixel camera, if nicely laid out by
a photographer (proper switches and dials, not those multimode
pushbuttons that always return to default settings) would be a good
addition to one's camera bag. But for now, it seems that you can save a
high-res image to film far faster than to flash RAM, and film's storage
capacity still looks really good.

Jeff

Andrew S Jordan wrote:
> 
> Philips CCD rivals 35-mm quality
> By Peter Clarke, EE Times
> Dec 9, 1999 (9:04 AM)
> URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG19991209S0012
> 
> WASHINGTON - Digital still cameras could rival the image quality of 35-mm
> film photography within a couple of years due to a charge coupled device
[snip]
- -- 

Jeff
Somewhere in Boulder, Colorado