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
> 
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