Digital BW, The Print

Steve,

That is the 64 dollar question. The answer is it probably depends on who 
is looking at the image. I could take a CD cut add noise to it to 
simulate 8 bit quatization (a CD is 16 bits) and play the original and 
the one with noise back to back to my wife and she would not be able to 
tell the difference - but I sure can.

So there are two questions here - the one is technical the other is one 
of based ot the expectations of the individual. But you are right I've 
never seen a full up review of the digital backs like the ones you see 
on DPreview of DSLR's and prosumer digitals. On the other hand at 20 
grand a pop there is probably not a lot of demand either to justify the 
expense of the review.

Clearly at some point the nosie is so low that it is not noticable. 
Currently we may not know that threshold.  In reconnoissance systems 
there are "rules of thumb" but they are based on the ability of 
automatic target recognition systems to perform rather than to please 
the eye and the eye can detect a lot of noise in images that these 
target  recognizes work just fine.

I would be interesting to know these numbers. Otherwise the digital 
world is going to be based the hype of big pixel numbers and big S/N 
numbers.

Truman


Steve Kale wrote:

> Truman
>
> Thanks for the reply and the references.  But have you seen any reviews of
> the high end digital SLRs vs digital backs?  It seems like these two 
> markets
> are kept well apart.  I suspect the 35mm guys simply don¹t yet want to 
> rate
> their product against the 1 shot per second backs¹ quality and are focused
> on their own closer-to-home competition.  I fear the MF guys see no 
> need to
> make the comparison or display the stats because it could undermine the
> significant premium they can extract from studio photographers that 
> want to
> stay looking studio-pro rather than sports-pro/prosumer.  If a 
> PhaseOne H10
> uses a 35mm-sized mosaic sensor like the 1 Ds (albeit one is CCD and the
> other CMOS) how much noise cuts the price in half (even ignoring all the
> other benefits of faster fps and portability)?  Ask a dealer of both why
> there is such a difference in price and he will say that the PhaseOne/Leaf
> delivers a much better image, lower noise etc.  But no one I have 
> spoken too
> is able to tell me the noise stats.  Canon brags about the high signal to
> noise ratio of the new MK II.  Yet I can't find that stat on their 
> website.
> 16 megapixels at a decent price (let alone the other features) becomes a
> powerful proposition vs film if the image quality is close to that which I
> have seen from an old 6 mp H10.  Like I said, how much noise cuts the 
> price
> in half?
>
> Steve
>


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