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What will hapen with my zeiss lenses

> Hi Clive,

Your comment "You have only to view a digital image to see that the quality is still sadly lacking a film & scanned image." I believe is way, way off mark. I don't think that you have seen enough high end digital prints! They can be gorgeous. I have a digital shot taken with my ND a few months ago that is now hanging in the State Capital in Austin in a Representative's office. It is a very nice print. I agree that film still has alot of life to it, but whether it is the prefereed capture device still is debated. Digital offers advantatages over film and film offers advantages over digital. Just really a matter of which set of advantages (or disadvantages!) one prefers.

michale.
 
Michael,

I can only speak as I find, and the digitally captured photographs displayed in British photography magazines, even at the low resolution of the printer's page, are noticibly inferior to traditional film derived and scanned images.

If these small images are obviously inferior then I can only assume that the 10" x 8" and greater prints will be so too.

Last month I sent some slides obtained using a Vario - Sonnar to a forum user to compare with images taken using primes. If a digital user can bear to part with one or two of their prints then I would be only too happy to compare them to my own Ciba's.

Clive
 
Clive,

I simply can't believe that Bristish Rags would be so inferior in their printing of digital prints compared to film prints! I look in US mags and can see some very great quality reproducitons from digital. Contact me off list at coyote@outbackcoyote.com and I will send you 3 8x10 shots that I print in my digital darkroom, taken with a Contax ND or a Canon G1. Then you can give me your honest impressions!

michael.
 
At the risk of sounding like a wise guy, how often does quality stand in the way of "progress?" (The CD/vinyl debate rages still, twenty years later.)

IMHO the digital-film battleground is primarily being fought in the snapshot arena, where digital is in the process of snuffing out the P&S market. Once folks divorice themselves from film and print processing, they won't be coming back. The quality of their photos will be good enough for their needs.

What can we conclude? There will be a LOT less film made and bought three or four years from now.

For myself, I'd carry a three-ounce digital around as a fun toy, but I'm a looong way from taking the plunge for a pro-level digicam. The several-kilobuck N-Digital is impressive but irrelevant to my needs and budget.

If I have to I'll buy a freezer and stock it with a lifetime supply of my favorite films. It won't even need to be an especially large freezer. I hope I won't also have to buy a K-14 lab.

--Rick
 
Rick / Michael,

Firstly Michael thanks for the offer of the prints – I will certainly take you up on that and I will send some Ciba’s and some British photo magazines when I return them.

Secondly, I am now looking at this month’s Practical Photography’s digital supplement. It features Canon D60, Nikon D100 and a Fuji S2 in a head to head group test by four amateur photographers. The images are upto half a page each and printed on glossy paper. I’m looking at a shot of a leaf, maybe a beech, that is one and a half life size on the page. It looks like plastic – there is no detail. Over the page is a 1/8 page shot of leaf litter. I have a very similar shot on my lightbox taken using a 50mm Planar, tubes and Kodak EBX. On mine I can see the texture of the leaves, on the digital shot I cannot. There is a shot of a tree trunk, maybe 1/4 of a page. Again I have a similar shot taken on an old M42 Zeiss 35mm Flektogon. The digital shot looks washed out whereas mine is saturated. The film image also has much more detail in the bark. Same for the fungi shot – mine has scales visible, the digital shot has a bland surface.

OK, these are not scientific comparisons, but neither is having a print exhibited in a public place a definitive answer.

Cast your minds back to the APS launch. Manufacturers were extolling the virtues of the wonder emulsion that could overcome the 50% reduction in raw image size. They crowed about the supposed benefits of the magnetic strip that would ensure processors could overcome poor exposure. The photo press echoed these claims without reservation. Five years on everyone can see APS for what it was – a blatant commercial scam designed by greedy corporations to corner the P & S market.

Recently we have seen Contax bring out a full size CCD chip. Before that the images were 2/3 of 35mm size. Now Sigma have introduced an improved CCD that can replicate actual colours in each pixel – no one told us the previous generations did not do this.

In my experience you cannot trust manufacturers or the photo press to give you a true account. That is why forums such as this are invaluable.

Clive
 
> IMHO the digital-film battleground is primarily being fought in the> snapshot arena, where digital is in the process of snuffing out the> P&S market.

Thats not quite true , figures in Europe for 2001 show digital camera salesonly representing 20% of film cameras - and only about 5% if you include disposable cameras . I dare say they grew during 2002 , but "snuffingout"??, not by a long shot. Steve
 
Clive,

>

I do feel the same, although I must admit that I'm not too confident about how long this "long time" may be.

>

I do agree with you on this point. Btw, I'm acting consequently too.

Francesco
 
'how long this "long time" may be'

I would put that figure at 15 to 20 years without a shadow of a doubt, you can still get 126 & 110 films and it's a long time since those cameras were made. Any way I will stick up for Disc film!!
 
Hi Folks,

"15 to 20 years"? I reckon that you could double that and add some more.

Let's do some math's:- I currently scan a 35mm slide at 1800ppi giving a maximum print size of 6" x 9" at the usually accepted quality mark of 300ppi for digital printing. That gives me a file size of around 19Mb. When I process this file on my PC using an asthmatic 500 Mhz AMD processor (I know, I know, time to upgrade) it takes around 20 seconds to turn the file over. Even if I did upgrade to a 2Ghz mill it would still take about five seconds to process one image at 1800ppi - that is less than a 5 million pixel image. The current top of the range SLR’s give double that image quality, so double the process time and you arrive at around ten seconds for the camera to sort out one image.

My RTSiii can run through a 36 roll of Velvia in a tad over 7 seconds. In order for a digital camera to do that at the present maximum resolution of 11 mega – pixels it would need a processor of around 110Ghz if my arithmetic is sound?

OK, so they have buffers that can absorb more than one image at a time. But ultimately these buffers take up memory that has to be processed. You can only store so much before it needs transferring to the camera’s main memory.

That is 35mm. Now think of a digital image of 6 x 7! There is a long way to go before silver halide is confined to museums.

For my money digital only offers one viable benefit over film and that is immediacy of image. If you don’t need to see or send an image immediately I cannot see any reason to abandon film – yet.

Clive
 
> [Clive, I just finished an 18x28 inch digital print for my design class term project. The file ended up being 129MB (one hundred and twenty-nine) and it opened instantaneously on the 2Ghz computers in our labs. Even when making major adjustments to the image in Photoshop, all of the actions were instant. Earlier in the year, working with vector based images of around 30MB, the 2Ghz computers were able to redraw the images within seconds.

However, on my home computer, which is a Celeron 466, the 129MB file will not even open, and the vector based images I was working on took several minutes to redraw.

Chris Toronto Canada
 
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