Digital BW, The Print

Is a functional equivalent of this low-pass/anti-aliasing filtering 
also occurring when film is scanned? Will we also, for example, not 
get the benefit of the best lenses and the best film if the film is 
scanned on, say, Polaroid's SprintScan 4000 but begin to if it is 
scanned on the 4000Plus or an Imacon or a drum scanner?

I think I've seen it said on another, scanning list that in the best 
35mm films there's detail down (up?) to about 6000 samples per inch, 
but I'm not sure resolution is the issue. Whatever the limits of film 
are, I'm curious to know how to relate them to lens quality, scan 
quality, and print quality.

Sam McCandless           samcc@...


>There's actually something "funny" about that.  Sharp lenses mean nothing on
>this camera.  The issue is there is a "low pass" filter (some call it
>"anti-aliasing" filter) between the lense and the CCD.  Why this is
>important to understand is this filter actually "dumbs down" the lense so
>the MTF of the lense matches the CCD pitch.  The sharpness of the lense, on
>that camera, really doesn't matter...you'd probably get equally as good a
>result with a Sigma or Tamaron etc. lense, than a high end piece of glass,
>as far as "sharpness" goes that is.
>
> > There is a big difference
> > between Top grade glass and average lenses, and it really shows
> > up in digital.
>
>Actually, that's is not true, as I stated above.  Most of the web sites that
>talk about this stuff acknowledge this readily.  Even DPReview says that the
>D-60 is probably the first digital camera (as far as the 35mm-esque
>varieties) that the lense might actually matter ;-)
>
>Regards,
>
>Austin