On Mar 23, 2006, at 12:56 PM, William Robb wrote:
Comparing against ASA 100-200 35mm color negative film scanned at
4000ppi rather than medium format film scans, the 6Mpixel images
at A3 Super (13x19") full bleed size look better.
Of course, that assumes an excellent quality capture for both:
tripod mounted camera and proper exposure, critical focus.
It also assumes scanning the film rather than printing it optically.
Good optical prints still have the potential to be better, it's
just harder to get good optical prints these days.
A matter of opinion there.
My good optical prints of full-frame 35mm negatives, at 13x
enlargement, look almost as good as 4000ppi scanned prints of 35mm
full frame negatives, in my opinion. I've made both and have a bunch
of them that I have compared. I haven't made any optical/wet lab
prints in a long long time ...
But my friend in SLO, a master photographic printer with the best
possible equipment, agrees: he's switched over his processes to
digital printing now. The reasons, in his words, are a combination of
rendering control and today's available materials.
- Papers today have less silver in their emulsion and generally don't
make the maximum density of papers 20 years ago. The Epson pigment
ink printers of today, and the papers now available for them, achieve
better black density and whiter whites.
- Photoshop allows more selective rendering control, more
consistently, than the darkroom.
This is not to say that digital printing is the end all/be all of
modern photographic art. There are different qualities to optical wet
lab printing that are worth the effort for some work. Those cyanotype
process prints I was mentioning a couple of weeks ago, for instance,
have a unique look and feel that cannot be replicated by a digital
printing process.
Godfrey
