Re: [Leica] Leica Quality versus Medium Format

["Mxsmanic" <mxsmanic@hotmail.com>]

Tarek writes:

> When the artist compared the Ektachromes he dumped
> the MF slides and kept the Leica slides because:
> "they look better than my paintings..."

The main advantage of MF accrues from the higher resolution possible.  This has
a lot of effects on image quality, but it isn't all of it.  Since I suspect that
Leica glass is superior to Mamiya glass overall, I can easily understand why
someone might still prefer 35mm images taken with a Leica to MF images taken
with a Mamiya.

Anyway, in my case, the one unavoidable weak link in the workflow is the scan.
While few of my photos reach the resolution limit of my scanner, the 35mm format
itself is perfectly capable of doing so, under the right conditions; overall the
film format is an extremely good match for a 2700-dpi scanner.  If I needed
larger scans, MF would look more attractive, as 4000 dpi adds only very slightly
to resolution even under good conditions for 35mm, and anything beyond that
hardly adds anything at all, even under ideal conditions.  But I don't need
larger scans right now.

I might be tempted to try MF one day, but right now the workflow is far too
daunting.  If it were just a matter of buying an MF camera and lens, that
wouldn't be much of a problem; but there are the issues of more expensive film,
more expensive development, more expensive scanning, a new computer (to handle
larger scans), more expensive archiving of images, and so on, and it just isn't
worth it--not when I can get stunning images from 35mm.

I was just looking at some scans from images taken with the Apo-Summicron-M
1:2/90 ASPH last night, and once again the optical quality of the lens left me
staring enraptured at the scans for minutes at a time.  Leica and other
companies have evolved 35mm far beyond anything that Oscar might have
envisioned, and they may push it still further; indeed, 35mm today is far
superior to MF back then.