Back in the very early days (way before the *ist-D, when I was still shooting with a PZ-1p and scanning from negatives or slides) I did some comparisons between a handful of consumer scanners and a mid-range pro scanner (a Kodak PhotoCD scanner with a competent operator).
My conclusion was that while the 2400dpi or 2700dpi of the low-end units (HP PhotoSmart, Nikon Coolscan III) wasn't quite up to what I could get out of film, the major weakness of these scanners was dynamic range. It was possible to get more than 8 bits/component, but a 45MB image (at the low end 2400dpi) was ridiculously large. (And while they claimed 10-bit data, that was questionable). Sticking simply to resolution; using Fuji Provia 100F, I could just about see an improvement in scans made at 4000dpi, but by that time camera shake, focussing errors, etc. introduced much more image degradation than either the film or the scan. I did take a look at a couple of 8000dpi scans from a very high end Leaf unit; my opinion was that by the time you got to 5000dpi you were looking at the structure of the film, not at the image. These are low-end (almost entry-level) DSLRs; I'm sure they will easily outperform film-based camera systems sold into the same market segment back in the day. There again, I'm pretty sure my K-10D produced better results than most of my film-based systems. I'm absolutely convinced that the K-5 is way out ahead of the film days especially at high ISO; nowadays when I look back at some of the frames I shot on either Kodak Portra 800 or Fuji ISO 1600 I'm amazed at what passed for acceptable image quality. On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 10:13:19PM -0400, John Sessoms wrote: > That math is so simple, even I can do it. > > A 135mm film frame is 24x36 mm. Convert to inches & you get 0.94 x 1.42 > > Scan @ 4,000 dpi = 3760 x 5680 = 21,356,800 > > Divide twice by 1024 gives 20.37 MP > > I chose 4,000 dpi because that's what Nikon said the Coolscan 9000 could do. > > > From: Steven Desjardins > > >I remember a PDML post once upon a time that claimed it would take > >about 20-25 MP for digital to equal the IQ of film. > > > >On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 1:22 PM, Christine Nielsen <[email protected]> > >wrote: > >>...available in red, no less... > >> > >> > >>-c > >> > >>On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Tom C <[email protected]> wrote: > >>>http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/04/19/Nikon-D3200-with-WiFi-Option > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
