Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/07/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]> HE also wants to keep the quality of analog > film, but in a digital world. This requires a sensor of size 1.5 BILLION > pixels. I hate misinformation like this. It does not take 1.5 BILLION pixels to give the same quality of output as analog film. You can also only print digital images, well, digitally, so let's do the arithmetic, backwards. Analog film, for the most part, can print a very nice 8"x10"...so let's upsize that to 13"x19" for the sake of argument. A very nice B&W printing system, Piezo, uses a quad tone ink system, and it's own driver to produce near or equal to, chemical prints. It needs grayscale data that is 240PPI up to about 480PPI, and you really don't get much more from it by giving it more data, especially in a 13"x19" print. You may say "but the printers print at 1440 or 2160DPI"...yes, they do, but that's printer dots, not pixel information sent TO the printer...there is NOT a one to one correspondence between data resolution sent to the printer driver, and the output resolution. One is PIXELS per inch, and one is DOTS per inch. Printers can only print dots of a single color at each point, so it takes many dots to represent the tones. OK, now that that's out of the way, 480PPI for a 13"x19" print is 480PPI x 13" x 480PPI x 19" = 56,908,800 pixels. A far cry from 1.5 BILLION.