Graham,
When I was talking to someone on the Kodak stand at a photoshow in France last year, I expressed the view that their new pro digital with 14mp signalled the end for film. His reply was interesting. He said that the theoretical resolving power of the then new high definition 100 ASA negative film was in the region of 38mp for a 35mm negative, so that digital still had some way to go to reach this. On this basis, with the reduced negative size of APS, it should still be capable to a resultion of up to an equivalent of 22.5mp i.e. better than anything other than a full size 120 digital back. The poor results that I accept many APS cameras produce can therefore only be down to three factors; poor lens design, poor lens to film register control or the film not being held flat on the register plane. My own experience was that I was given a cheap waterproof single focus Minolta as a promotional gift at a conference, which I passed on to my children. I was very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the output. When the time came to replace another family camera (a long suffering Olympus 35mm compact, which finally succumbed to a mixture of sand, suntan lotion and Coca Cola), I purchased a quite expensive Minolta Vectis 300, with a longish zoom lens, at around GBP180 on the strength of the results of the cheap Minolta. Its results were very poor and it has languished in a drawer for most of its life, has now taken umbrage and died. Given Contax's experience with lenses and the fact that they decided not to put the Vario Sonnar on the camera, I sincerely hope that the output of the Tix will comfortably exceed that of the original and satisfactory cheap Minolta. Wilson
