Digital BW, The Print

on 7/24/02 6:36 PM, Austin Franklin at darkroom@... wrote:

> 35mm film scanned at 4000 SPI gives you 4000 x 6000 FULL COLOR PIXELS, or
> 24M Red "data", 24M Blue "data" and 24M green "data", that's 72M BYTES.
> 
> Hum.  You want to compare a device that gives you 6M BYTES of data with one
> that gives you 72M BYTES of data, and believe their image "quality" is the
> same?

If we are concerned with the perceived quality of an image, and not just
with technical theory and numbers, aren't we missing an essential point
here?

When you scan the 35mm film, you are scanning something that is already one
step removed from reality.  The slide image, no matter how much information
it contains, is a translation of reality into another form.  This is a
translation and not a replication, since the nature of the film and the lens
used will obviously change the colors, the tones, the contrast, the
sharpness of the original image as we would have perceived it.  I have seen
this repeatedly in my own freelance work:  I specialize in photographing art
work, and have often experimented to see if I would get better results by
scanning a slide of a painting as opposed to making a direct digital image.
In many regards, the latter is often superior.  It's not that the direct
digital image necessarily contains more "information" than the film version
does; rather, the quality of the information that it contains - overall -
creates an image that has more to do with the original than.

In my opinion, quality is thus relative.  I hope we can allow each other to
have our own definitions of image quality without having to resort to
verbal, numerical or theoretical lashings.


Stephen Petegorsky
petegorsky@...
www.spphoto.com