Digital BW, The Print

Hi,

I guarantee you 16M sensor elements are not enough to reach the "ability" of
fine grained film...but...that depends on what you mean by "ability".  Film
grain is random, and therefore it is very hard to "agree" on what
constitutes equality between the two.

If you go by film grain size, which, let's say, is 5u, and film is 24mm x
36mm, that would be .024 divided by .000005 or 4800 x 7200 or 34,560,000M
pixels, where each pixel was 3 bytes, or ~100M pixels.  That's how that
number is arrived at, pretty simple arithmetic.  Again, that does not take
into consideration the random nature of film grain.  I'm not saying that's
good or bad, BTW.

The other issue that comes into play, is these one shot cameras aren't
really true pixels...they interpolate the color data, which makes them
really require 4x the number of sensors to give you TRUE color data.  The
eye is much more forgiving with color information than it is with luminance,
and that is why these cameras do get reasonably decent color...similar to
the way TV works.

Now, this is not to say that you won't get a great image from a 16M sensor
mind you, but I really believe it's not near what film can give you.

Austin


> Austin,
>
> With all due respect, a number of respected photo publications
> have stated publicly that the resolution of a digital capture
> chip must reach 16 megapixels before it reaches the ability of a
> fine grained film.  I am not a video engineer and quite honestly
> don't have enough information to intelligently debate the issue.
> I can not say whether you are right or wrong, but would like to
> read more on the subject at some pint in the future.
>
> 100 Megapixels sounds bit extreme, but then again I don't know
> enough to say either way.
>
> Thanks for the info.
>
> Mike
>   ----- Original Message -----
>   From: Austin Franklin
>   To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
>   Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 6:13 PM
>   Subject: RE: [Digital BW] Shooting Digitally
>
>
>
>   Hi Mike,
>
>   > I think tha visually you are seeing an image that looks like
>   > film, but in reality the camera would need to approach 16
>   > megapixels to resolve the finest films today.
>
>   By my calculations, it's just under 100M pixels, but certainly much less
>   will give you exceptional results, as seen by the very low res digital
>   cameras of today, like the D-30/D1 etc.  Remember, that one shot digital
>   cameras have 25% red, 25% blue and 50% green sensors...so the color
>   information is interpolated...so because a sensor is 16M
> elements, doesn't
>   mean you get 16M PIXELS of information...without making some of
> it up ;-)
>
>   Austin
>