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Contax ND

Dana, the sections on China (1986) and Sri Lanka (1990) in my web site are scanned 6x7 and 6x8 negs, and I only did 1200 DPI.

Marc, I currently have a Kodak 8500 thermal printer, which is quick and has great color but only does 10" width on 12" paper. I first was considering the 2200, then started looking at the 7600 (don't you just hate this). Are they out yet? Other than the obvious size handling differences, are there any speed / quality advantages in the 7600 over the 2200, esp. banding and such?
 
ND Workflow - someone had inquired about it sometime back. I have recently adopted the following:

- On the field, where I pretty much do all my shooting, RAW mode is out for me because of the lack of preview. TIFF takes too long, so best JPEG is it.

- After trying various settings with 1.07 and 1.08, like Irakly and Marc I am now shooting at straight 1.07. Granted, the images look like mush out of the box, but they also noticeably provide the best tonal range options that you can then squeeze out using Photoshop. I noticed that by boosting the chroma you do get better looking pics out of the box but the contast and chroma range suffer especially if you you are even a bit off the perfect exposure.

- Once in Photoshop I re-assign to Adobe RGB color profile which improves initial color, then convert profile (NOT assign profile) to sRGB. As far as I have been able to tell, this has not affected the color quality at all (24 bits is 24 bits, I believe just some hue aspects in an unusual Cyan range are different), and I do enjoy the color I get. This way I don't have to keep separate copies for web and print.

- I save my working copy as TIFF with ZIP compression, also non-lossy but normally better than LZW, and archive the original JPEG. This way there's no quality loss between work sessions.

- If I have to do any kind of extensive surgery like wire or spot removal, I save a "working original" TIFF after the surgery, separate from the working copy.

- I do all the tonal manipulation on the working TIFF copy, usually some combo of Contrast / Brightness, Saturation, Level, and occasionally Curves.

- For "dodging / burning-in" I use the magic selection tool to isolate the area. Depending on the image, I use Saturation, Contrast, and usually Level works better than Brightness.

- I have played with switching to 16-bit color during most manipulations to let the calculations be performed at the higher precision, then switching back to 8-bit at the end. In theory should help, but who knows
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- I print off the working TIFF.

- I create web JPEGs off the working TIFF.
 
DJ, same as the 2200 only bigger prints.
Yes, they are out. about $3,000. $3200 with the stand. That's without a RIP. I'll post more when I know it .
 
N-Digital Manual Download.

Hi Folks, I'm a 645 user but am looking for a ND Manual. My father owns the ND and is having many "issues" with the camera. Because we live so far apart (I'm in Japan, he in the U.S.) I want to have a manual that I can reference. Does anyone know where I can download the .pdf version of it? Thanks in advance for your help.
Kerry
 
> I ran into a real "limitation" of the ND this weekend. I photographed some vintage cars in a garage w/ very low fluorecent lights. Many of the exposures were over 1 second (ISO 100). I found that any shots taken over 1.5 seconds were pretty much unusable due to the excessive noise in the image.

My question: Would I have less noise if I shot at a higher ISO? Or since higher ISO settings have more noise do I just compound the problem?

On a positive note: The color balance for shooting with fluoesent lights worked great. And images shot that were less than 1.5 seconds looked great. But <font color="ff0000">•<font color="ff0000">•<font color="ff0000">•<font color="ff0000">•<font color="ff0000">•<font color="ff0000">•<font color="ff0000">•<font color="ff0000">•<font color="ff0000">•<font color="ff0000">• quite ugly looking at some of the images that had loooong exposure times!

Michael.
 
Michael, I did have the same problem on slow shutter speeds, and I did find that shooting at higher ISO produces results with acceptable amount of noise provided you shoot JPEG or TIFF.
I am still wondering why this camera have slow shutter speed capability...
 
> Yes, I was thinking the same thing earlier. While the camera may mecanically be able to handle long shutter speeds ... rather useless their will be some sort of upgrade offered to the camera in the future.

Thanks for the tip on the ISO setting. That also got me to wondering, what really happens when you change the ISO setting. I have found that one remarkable thing about the camera is the ability to pull data out of a hat. You are way, way, way much better underexposing an image then overexposing. Seems like you can always "at least salvage" the print if you underexpose it.

Ex&le, recent Gymnastics meet, I did an EC -2.0 to increase my shutter speed. Still got decent prints w/o the blur.

bye. michael.
 
Any one out there have a Battery holder for the Contax ND for sale?? I really need one and as usual Contax has none!
Bert
 
In April of 2003 I send Clive some s&le shots from my Digital ND and printed on an Epson 2200 in response to a comment he made saying that any $70.00 compact camera can outperform any 35 mm digital. I disagree, and while you can't see the original prints, I would be interested in your comments on our lively dialogue. These letters of correspondence will follow.

Thanks,

michael.
 
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