[filmscanners] Re: Aztek Premier 8000 dpi scan.
On Jul 20, 2007, at 11:23 PM, gary wrote: I think a better comparison would be the Aztek against a dedicated film scanner, not a flat bed. It is clear to me there is a focus issue with the Epson. Yeah, the Epson's problematic at best. I put up crops from the Epson here: http://www.pbase.com/rrjackson/comparison You'll notice that the 100% crops at 2400, 3200, 4800 and 6400 dpi look almost identical. I have a hard time believing that the Epson really resolves more than about 2000 dpi, despite its claim to resolve 6400 dpi. A more interesting comparison, if someone were to do scans strictly for the purposes of comparison, would be the Epson against a Nikon or Minolta film scanner. I'd actually find it pretty interesting to see how the Epson and a Nikon equipped with Aztek's Nikon wet mount holder would compare. Just to see where the juice is in the consumer market. Of course, that's still comparing a $2000 film scanner to a $500 flatbed. -Robert Jackson Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Aztek Premier 8000 dpi scan.
I thought some of you might enjoy seeing this. I went down to Petaluma today and Lenny Eiger introduced me to scanning with a drum scanner. http://www.eigerphoto.com/ I essentially got a crash course in the practicalities of drum scans from someone with a lot of practical experience in making them. I've been all ripped-up this week about my cat having liver failure (I buried her last night) and I'd mis-read Lenny's email about bringing something *not* too challenging for a first scan. I glanced through some boxes of 30-year-old Ektachrome quickly last night and brought along a slide taken inside a van. There's a window on the verge of being blown out and an interior that was so deeply in shadow that it was almost black. Something taken in a band vehicle a long time ago of a drummer napping. Before I left this morning I'd scanned the slide at the 6400 dpi setting on my V700. Lenny scanned it at 8000 dpi on his Aztek. I've uploaded both a lossless .jpf and a jpeg. The jpeg actually looks pretty close to the same as the jpf and it's one meg instead of seventeen, just FYI. You can see them here: http://homepage.mac.com/jackson.robert.rex/ These are 100% crops. The V700 on top, obviously. I scaled the V700 scan up to the 8000 dpi so it would be the same size as the Aztek scan. It's amazing how much more detail the Aztek pulled out of the slide. And this was a ratty old Ektachrome 400 slide. I can hardly imagine what well-exposed 6x7 or 4x5 would yield under the right circumstances. One of the most telling things to me is the etched printing on the window. You can almost read it in the Aztek scan. And see the area on the right side of the window frame? The Epson scan has some kind of strange artifact going on. The edge of the window all the way down through the curve at the bottom looks very strange. On the Aztek crop it looks very natural and smooth. It's amazing, really. Almost too much detail. Lenny is a gentleman with a genuine enthusiasm for what he does and a great wealth of knowledge and experience to guide him. You couldn't ask for a better demo of the technology. I'm really happy to know he's just down the road. -Robert Jackson Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 10, 2007, at 6:23 AM, Berry Ives wrote: Does anyone know what is the market share of FF digital among professional photographers working digitally today? It seems to me that most working pros are using the 1.3x crop Canons. I see those more than just about anything else. Of course, the crop factor gives their big white lenses a little more reach and the 1D series has always had much higher frame rates and burst capabilities than their full-frame 1Ds cousin. With Kodak and Contax out of the market that's left Canon's 5D and 1Ds as the only FF cameras that I'm aware of. Of course, Sony and Nikon may both have FF models waiting in the wings, if current rumors are accurate. Personally, I wouldn't mind shooting with a FF sensor, but the 1Ds is more expensive than I'm willing to go and the 5D (which I considered) is saddled with a body design and control layout from Canon's low-end cameras. If price were no object I'd own a 1Ds, but in addition to being expensive it's a real brick. It's about 3 1/2 pounds with no lens. An E-410 weighs less than a pound. -Rob Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 10, 2007, at 1:28 PM, Bob Geoghegan wrote: Some 2006 Japan-only figures put the 5D at a low single-digit portion of DSLRs overall (and DSLRs are only about 5% of digital camera unit sales). The 1Ds would be a smaller fraction still. Well, the 1Ds is what, about $7000 retail? And the 5D retails at $2500 or so? You have to be a pretty avid photographer to drop that kind of coin on a camera. There are probably a lot of people who'd jump all over an inexpensive FF camera, if only because the reviews would marvel at its high ISO performance. The price of manufacturing the sensors doesn't look like it's going to come down significantly within the next few years. Until FF sensors are inexpensive enough to be an option at all price points I don't think we'll see a serious picture of what the market wants. If Joe Tourist can get an APS camera for $500 or a FF camera for $600 I tend to imagine he'll buy the FF camera. I may be wrong, but I think a lot of the people who have a thousand different really good reasons why they'd never own a FF camera might change their song if FF cameras were more affordable. I still like to shoot film. For me it's tough to buy into a camera system unless I can swap the glass off onto a film camera. Like, Sony may come out with a FF camera early next year, but my only option for a film body with that mount would be a Minolta that won't drive SSM lenses. Nikon may come out with a FF body and they still sell new F6 bodies, so there ya go. And of course you can find a new EOS-1v at a lot of places, so that's an option. It's actually pretty sad that we'll probably never see another new 35mm SLR design. Hard to even absorb that, really. -Robert Jackson Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 7, 2007, at 7:51 PM, David J. Littleboy wrote: The M7 doesn't get close (without going to heroic efforts), polarizers are a pain, it doesn't really do portraits. It's a two-trick pony (43 and 65 (three if you like 80mm)) Actually, my preferences are 65mm and 150mm. The 43mm and 50mm are pricey and you have to use an external finder. Same with the 210mm. All the range-coupled lenses work pretty nicely, though, IMO. , but the 43 is expensive enough that it never showed up here (oops: for 1/2 the money I could have had the GSW690III with full 6x9, but the lack of interchangeable lenses put me off). Yeah, me too. Hard to commit to one focal length. Unless you're Ozu. Heh...I always thought 'Ozu's 50' would be a cool name for a band. Seems nice, though. Never used one. And I'm not convinced the M7 is any better on the shutter speed than the M645. If I need 1/60 or slower with either of them, the tripod gets used. People insist rangefinders work handheld, but that's a lot of film and a lot of lens to waste. I almost never hand-hold medium format. It's a sexy idea and all. I love seeing the guys in movies dancing around with a Hasselblad while some rock star pouts for them, but when I'm going to be shooting big film I usually make time to shoot from a tripod. If I'm going to shoot hand-held I'll almost always grab a 35mm. The main reasons I like the 7 are that it's pretty small and light. I can keep it in my case and not feel like I'm dragging around a lot of extra stuff just on the off-chance I'll want to shoot 6x7. And Mamiya optics are really nice. I've got a Beseler 67 with negatrans carriers for both 35mm and 6x7, but I'm really starting to warm up to the idea of scanning at very high resolutions and sending out the files when I need large prints. I've scanned about 400 slides and negatives on this V700 over the past few weeks. At first I was limiting my 35mm scans to 4800 dpi. I wasn't really seeing much difference between 4800 and 6400, so I wasn't bothering to go any higher. I think I was mainly looking at negatives, though. A few days ago I scanned some crappy old Ektachrome at 6400 just to see what it looked like and I was really surprised at how close 6400 dpi seemed to come to capturing the grain. I should have been doing my early comparisons with slide film. I don't know why I didn't have my head screwed on right. I'm in San Diego in a couple of weeks and I think I'm going to make a trip up to L.A. and rent some time on an Aztek or an Imacon while I'm in SoCal. I really wonder if 8000 dpi will do the trick. 8000 dpi and autofocus just might be the right stuff. HEADS UP! The GX-680 III doesn't have movements; you need the GX-680 IIIS. You got that one backwards. The S is the lightweight version sans movements: http://www.jafaphotography.com/fuji_gx680s.htm Over five pounds with no lens or magazine isn't what I consider a light camera, but I guess it's lighter than a Vespa. I was looking at old TLRs on the lowest shelf of a glass case on the dusty second floor of a used camera shop here in Tokyo, and when I stood up and turned around, there was a Fuji GX-680 on the top shelf of the case behind me ready to pounce. I practically had a heart attack; that guy's enormous. Yeah, they're really immense. A few years ago I was at the East Bay Camera Show in Hayward and a guy had one on his table. I don't remember if it was a I, II or III, but I'd wanted to check one out for years. I'd imagined it with a central chassis the size of a 500ELM body and then discovered that the chassis was more like a car battery. A year or so later the same guy had it down at the San Jose camera show. No takers, I guess. I checked it out again and again it left me walking away shaking my head. I've really been leaning towards getting a view camera the last couple of years. It's something I'd wanted to do for ages, but for some reason I never got around to it. Work and life and stuff, I guess. Anyway, that Fuji kind of popped into my head a few times lately. It wouldn't be hard to shoot 120 and digital with the same rig that way. Tethered to a laptop in a hooded Portabrace monitor pack it would be possible to maintain a pretty useful degree of control. I was always a fan of guys like Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko who worked at in very large scale. Standing right up in front of their paintings is kind of like standing in front of a big picture window looking out on some alien landscape. I've really wanted to do some experiments at a very large scale, but I think it's something I'm just now starting to be ready to pursue. Heh...both financially and artistically. ;-) BTW, what do you do with a 48 x 96 print if you decide you don't really like it, after all? Heh... -Rob Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate)
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 7, 2007, at 7:34 AM, David J. Littleboy wrote: But you are forgetting to take the other aspects of the format difference into account. This seems like an assumption. ;-) For the same pixel count (to a rough first approximation, 10 is about the same as 12.7), a 4/3 camera's pixels are 1/4 the area, and thus are two stops less sensitive. Natch. And DOF scales with the format size, so you gain two stops of DOF. (Only at the wide end, at smaller apertures, diffraction kicks in two stops sooner, so while f/16 on FF results in sharp images, apertures smaller than f/8 on 4/3 will show diffraction effects. But since DOF is two stops shallower you don't need to stop the lens down as much to get the same effective DOF. So that sexy-sounding f/2.0 lens will be functionally indistinguishable from an f/4.0 28-70mm lens on FF (with the FF at four times the ISO for identical noise/dynamic range). That's assuming a linear comparison of sensitivity where the 4/3 sensor is functionally two stops less sensitive than the FF sensor across its entire ISO range, which in a technical sense it may well be. However, 100 ISO is 100 ISO on both a FF and a 4/3 sensor. From my experience shooting with 4/3 the images from my E-1 looked wonderful at ISO 100-200. The combination of the lovely color rendition of the Kodak CCD used in the camera and the microcontrast qualities of the Zuiko glass conspired to create a beautiful capture device. Where you started losing IQ with the E-1 was at 400 and above. Not terrible at 400. Mostly a luminance noise pattern that looked almost like film grain at 400. At 800 it was starting to contain enough color speckling from the rising curve of the chrominance noise to look more electronic. Which comes back to that issue of high ISO on the 4/3 chips being problematic. That doesn't mean that you're going to suffer at low ISO, though. So a birder, for example, will have a two-stop DOF advantage over a FF guy right out of the gate just because of his format of choice. Add in the faster Zuiko f/2.0 lens at ISO 100 and he can use a higher shutter speed at a lower aperture all day long. You're right, though, when you get to the end of the day and the light starts to fall the extra speed of the lens becomes a crutch that attempts to overcome the limits of the sensor. Still, the high- end Oly glass tends to be very sharp wide open and you don't have to stop them down much at all to hit their sweet spot. Note that to actually be equivalent, the 4/3 lens has to provide _twice_ the resolution (twice the lp/mm at any given MTF, or an MTF curve shifted up by a factor of two due to the finer pixel pitch) at f/2.0 than the FF 28-70mm lens does at f/4.0. (Interestingly, MTF performance does scale up with decreasing format sizes, so this point may not be a problem; but the need for twice the resolution at a much wider f stop may be problematic.) This is the biggest problem with the format, IMO. You're always going to be fighting that battle. It's the same thing with shooting 16mm instead of 35mm cine stuff. The 16mm gear is lighter, has greater DOF for run-and-gun work and is obviously a lot less expensive to work with. But the frame is roughly a quarter the size of the 35mm frame, so the glass always has to be much better than glass would have to be on a comparable 35mm rig and obviously the grain is going to be magnified on top of that. A grain pattern that looks subtle and wonderful in 35mm may look really bad in 16mm, so you can't even use the same standards of judging what stock to use because 5263 is not the same at the end of the day as 7263 when you take the format into consideration. So that's the rub when you have to decide on buying glass from Olympus now. The 35-100mm f/2 is a really nice lens. Effectively a 70-200mm f/2 lens, but it carries a price tag of $2200. Is it equal to a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 on APS? Or a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 on a FF camera? Hard to say. More than the MTF numbers of the lens play into it, of course. Those Canon FF cameras have a sensor with a diagonal nearly as wide as their lens mount where the 4/3 sensor is tiny in comparison to the 4/3 mount. That allows a lot of advantageous geometry when it comes to lens design and how the light strikes their sensor it a big part of the 4/3 advantage (to quote the nauseating Olympus PR machine). At the end of the day I think it's about what camera you enjoy using as much as almost anything else, unless you have some particular application that draws you to one camera over another. I prefer CCD sensors and my E-1 and now my D200 both have CCDs. I don't know what options will be available to me in the future, though. I'd love to see the Foveon chips get it together. I'd take full color information over just about any other consideration, but so far I'm unconvinced that they've got that format ironed-out. I really like the highlight and color characteristics of the Fuji Super CCD SR Pro. If Olympus
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
Uh, this should be deeper...sorry. ;-) On Jul 7, 2007, at 12:08 PM, R. Jackson wrote: But since DOF is two stops shallower you don't need to stop the lens down as much to get the same effective DOF. Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 7, 2007, at 1:29 PM, David J. Littleboy wrote: It don't work that wayg. The 5D user shoots at ISO 400 with the same image quality (photon shot noise) and same shutter speed and sees the same DOF (and same background blurring effects) at f/4.0 as the 4/3 user does at f/2.0. It is seriously cool how digital cameras with the same pixel count scale across formats. (At ISO 100, the 5D should have a two stop dynamic range advantage, except that the A/D converters don't have enough bits.) So you have an unrealized two-stop advantage at low ISO. I can see how important that unrealized potential could be. ;-) The bottom line is that if you think a smaller format buys you anything other than lighter weight/smaller size/lower price, you've done your math, physics, and/or optics wrong. Theoretically. Funny how things don't always work that way practically. You are already shooting two stops smaller with the 5D for the same DOF. And for portrait work, you don't shoot at f/4.0 with FF, you shoot at f/ 2.0 and wider. For a DOF effect that simply isn't available from the 4/3 format. (Although I wish Canon had an 75 or 85/1.4. The f/1.2 is overmuch.) If you shoot portraits exclusively then the selective focus issue is always going to be your overriding priority. The larger the film the shallower the DOF. Large format is your friend in the studio. Of course, Olympus doesn't actually have a single decent portrait lens in their lineup. If that's the kind of work you do then the 4/3 line of cameras and optics isn't something to be considered. That's the difference with digital: you can get a reasonable 10MP image from the 4/3 camera at ISO 100. You really can't get a reasonable film image from 1/4 the area of 35mm. Well, it kind of depends. With cinema cameras you used to always be fighting against generation loss. I think I can get better IQ from a 16mm scanned negative than we used to get from a 35mm negative that had gone through four or five generation losses. This would make 16mm an ideal format for television if those productions were still shot like they were 20 years ago, but with faster film stocks the evolution of the medium has favored using less lighting for heat/ power cost savings as well as the need for less crew. 35mm using ISO 500 stocks (pretty much the standard now) doesn't translate down to 16mm because the apparent grain signature will be more dominant. Again, if you are using a 10MP 4/3 camera, then the comparison is with the 70-200/4.0 (IS). I know you like that f/4 comparison, but like you said earlier, with the A/D converters as they are you aren't seeing a dynamic range advantage at low ISO, so the comparison doesn't hold. Unless you're still dwelling on DOF. Any excuse to erect a straw man? :-) The telecentric bit strikes me as nothing other than lying snake oil. Heh...makes you feel better about that CMOS dust-magnet you bought? ;-) At the end of the day, one shoots a camera that meets one's needs. If the 4/3 meets your needs, there's no reason to move to a larger format (just don't try to tell me that it's better; it ain't). It's better at some things, certainly. If, for example, you're doing forensic work you have additional DOF and since you can use lower stops you extend the range of your strobes. Just as 645 meets my needs but not the needs of someone making larger landscape prints. I prefer my 6x7. ;-) Foveon doesn't buy you anything the human eye can actually see. And not using a low-pass filter reduces real resolution by it's snap-to- grid effect which puts features in the wrong place; it's an artificial sharpening trick at best. Foveon, and actually any capture medium that delivers 4:4:4 color, should really shine when you start manipulating the image in post. The more color timing you do the quicker a Bayer image will fall apart when compared to, say, the image from a scanning back. I assume Foveon will hold up the same way, but the implementation of the technology seems shaky at best right now. Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 7, 2007, at 3:59 PM, James L. Sims wrote: Control of chromatic aberrations become proportionately more restrictive. Then there's Lord Rayleigh's Criteria regarding Diffraction Limit is just as true today as it was when he published it. Therefore, with today's APO lenses, we can achieve very high quality images, with smaller formats. BUT, to achieve sharp images, the minimum acceptable lens aperture size will increase (f:# will decrease) because of diffraction. Having said this, I'm very pleased with my Canon 20D, The two lenses I have are incredibly sharp, and zoom lenses at that (I did think that no zoom lens could equal a prime lens but that may be changing) but I try to stay within its limitations - shoot at the lowest ISO that I can get away with and control exposure time to stay within a range of f:4 to f:11. Jim These are excellent points. The thing I notice most about working with digital cameras in general is that all that nonsense about automation making the process easier is pretty much just that. At this moment in time you really need to have a very tight leash on your aperture and ISO, at the very least. If you let the camera pick your aperture and/or ISO it's just going to lead to trouble. On the other hand, the output from almost all DSLRs anymore is really exceptionally good. A few months back I had decided to leave Olympus and spent a long time agonizing over where I was going to migrate. I'd owned Canon stuff in the 70's. Loved the L lenses back then. Thought the F-1 was the greatest camera in the world until I was at a photo show given by a local paper and they were bench-testing cameras for free. My Canon wasn't even close to specs. I spent the whole day there watching cameras being tested. My unofficial tally at the end of the day showed a higher percentage of Olympus cameras testing close to spec and that's when I started looking at the Oly stuff. I was an OM-2n user a month later and hadn't really even looked at another camera manufacturer seriously since the late 70's. It was kind of a tough change for me. Heh...anyway, I borrowed cameras from friends quite a bit during my painful migration. I tried out a Minolta 7D that seemed really nice. I tried a Pentax K100D that seemed excellent, actually. I tried a Canon 30D which seemed nice, as well. At the end of the day the only reason I bought the Nikon was that the D200 had weather seals and seemed really durable and it could shoot at 5 fps. I picked up a D200 and an F80 at the same time because I wanted to be able to share glass between a film body and digital body. I grabbed a few lenses and they've proven to be really quite good within a certain range of apertures. BTW, one of the lenses I bought was the 18-200mm novelty zoom that's been hammered pretty much continually since it was released. My prime lens set for shooting 35mm cinema is comprised of 18mm, 22mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, 75mm and 200mm primes. The cinema frame size is very comparable to the APS sensor size and having a single zoom that could cover the range of all my primes made it a nice tool for location scouting. Look at the EXIF data later and know right up front what lenses will need to come out and when. So from that standpoint it's been handy. It's not the nicest zoom I've ever owned and it's very plastic-y and it creeps really bad, but for an example of a bad lens even it isn't all that bad. Somewhere in the middle of its zoom range the complex distortions go away and image quality gets pretty decent. Certainly a lot nicer than what we considered to be a bad lens 20 years ago. And at the end of the day, it's still all about getting out and taking photos. I have a little day trip planned for tomorrow. I was just getting ready. ;-) http://home.comcast.net/~jackson.robert.r/DirtyCrazy.jpg Tomorrow morning I am headed out to Tracey, Farmington, Linden, Clements and Sonora. I'm off to hunt down the locations used in the filming of 'Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry' and take photos of them from as close as possible to the perspectives used in the film. Just for kicks, really. Those cities are all still really small. Sonora is the biggest at about 3000 people. I tend to imagine that a lot of the locations haven't changed much. It should make a fun little document of those places and it gives me an excuse to shoot some film in an interesting way. I printed out a bunch of frame grabs from the movie, put together some maps and pulled out some film to shoot. It's the nerdy days out doing stuff like this that make all the sweating out technical details worthwhile. ;- -Rob Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 7, 2007, at 5:15 PM, David J. Littleboy wrote: The 5D doesn't deliver a dynamic range advantage (at low ISOs), just a two stop sensitivity advantage across comparable ISOs. Sure. I thought I'd already made that stipulation clear. Yes, a bigger sensor will get you more high-ISO sensitivity. Of course. I don't think anyone's going to question Canon FF cameras when it comes to available-light photography. Above ISO 800 pretty much nothing can touch them. Again, no. It all scales; ISO 400 is the same noise performance as ISO 100. So ISO 400 at f/4.0 is exactly the same photographically as ISO 100 at f/2.0. Eh, good point. The Guide Number for range will double with the ISO boost, even though the modifier for F-stop will be lower. I like my Mamiya 7, too. But it doesn't replace an SLR, and you have to need to print larger than A3 to need 6x7. HA! So IQ is vital to you unless it isn't. Heh...I guess we could go on for a couple of days with me saying that 645 isn't a serious format and you can choose to use an inferior format if it suits your needs, but that doesn't make it worth using. ;-) And FWIW, a medium format SLR is only useful, IMO, if you lock up the mirror. When you start moving big mirrors like that around it defeats the purpose of using a larger format. I tried out a couple of Pentax 67s at camera shows and releasing the shutter was like tripping a mouse trap. The Mamiya is really well-behaved, IMO. I can live without it being an SLR in exchange for not having a bid sheet of glass swinging wildly to and fro inside the body. I've actually been thinking about picking up a Fuji GX-680 III. Being able to change off between 120 and a digital back plus having view camera movements (although somewhat limited) makes a pretty strong argument for owing one, but every time I pick one up at a camera show the sheer bulk of it scares me away. It's a lot cheaper option than the SInar M route, though. -Rob Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
Yeah, I had an E-1. I actually gave it to a friend of mine last year and he's enjoying it. They've just taken so long replacing it that there's really no choice in a high-end E model right now, though the leaked document about the E-1 replacement looks promising. -Rob On Jul 6, 2007, at 7:00 AM, Berry Ives wrote: Just a detail, Rob, but the Oly E-1 has a weather-sealed magnesium body. It's quite solid. I don't know if any of their other models have the magnesium body, or if that feature is reserved for their pro line. Berry Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 4, 2007, at 11:28 PM, Arthur Entlich wrote: However, if the same processing that is done to digital images in camera were done to the film image, a lot of the grain could be suppressed. Yeah, but would you want to suppress the grain? I did a test for a video camera manufacturer last year. They were interested in seeing if their mpeg encoder would be practical in a telecine situation. To the encoder the grain structure is just noise, so it ground away ruthlessly trying to suppress as much of the noise as possible. The up side was that 720p transfers of 8mm footage were possible and looked pretty decent. The down side was that if you stopped on a frame and examined it closely there was a sort of cross-hatch aliasing pattern all over the image where the mpeg encoder had tried to smooth out that hideous noise that seemed to be absolutely everywhere. At the end of the day the thoughts of the engineers were that to get close to an acceptable mpeg compromise would result in very large files and require a lot of processing power to encode them. The market was really too small for them to bother. Uncompressed video still seems to be the best format for capturing telecine passes. IMO, most noise reduction attempts at reducing grain in scanned film looks bad. I use ICE occasionally or Noise Ninja sometimes in selected problem areas and then fade it a bit to reduce the grain when something is particularly grainy, but it can look really bad if you aren't careful. The ideal situation, IMO, will arrive when scanning at resolutions sufficient to completely and accurately reproduce the grain structure exist and are practical for photographic use. Look here: http://www.imx.nl/photosite/technical/Filmbasics/filmbasics.html See the 400x magnification? If that level of capture detail existed in your film scans and you had no issues with aliasing I think it would be pretty significant. The files will be enormous, though, and you'd have to really enjoy the artifacts of the medium to even bother. I'd bother, though. I imagine it will be another decade before that kind of technology is accessible to people for fine arts use in any practical sense, but I'll be at the head of the line. -Rob Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 5, 2007, at 1:11 PM, Laurie wrote: While Digital SLRs might know or identify the lens focal length, aperture setting, focus, etc., It cannot identify the glass that is used in any given lens or the optical properties specific to that particular lens. Since most DSLRs allow for interchangeable lenses and lenses made by varying manufacturers, it is probably not reasonable to expect the camera to be able to compensate except in a generalized way for light fall off produced by any particular lens. Actually, the Olympus stuff does know what lens is on the camera and can be set to compensate. I used to have an E-1. I don't know how smart the lenses are, but I know that sometimes I'd get notifications from the Olympus studio software that one of my lenses had a new firmware update available, so apparently the lenses had more than just an ID residing in their circuitry. I personally never used the Shading Compensation because the E-1 was slow enough already. When DP Review tested the E-1 they got these write timing numbers: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympuse1/page10.asp 2560 x 1920 SHQ with no filter 2.0 sec 2560 x 1920 SHQ Lens Shading compensation 18.9 sec Nearly ten times slower write speeds using lens shading compensation was enough to scare me away from it for keeps. Interesting idea, though. -Rob Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 1, 2007, at 6:00 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes because you are mixing apples and oranges in your comparison. The D200 and D2X produce a 35mm equivalent first generation capture; it does not need to be converted into a digital file after the capture by a second external process. A 35mm film capture's quality after scanning will depend on the film uses, and how it was processed, for starters, and the scanning of the film will comprise the equivalent of a second generation capture with the possible introduction of noise, artifacts, and other degrading components during the scan. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's going to find this a little suspect. I own a D200 and I like it quite a bit, but at the end of the day I like a scanned Kodachrome/Velvia slide more most of the time. Now, it's true that the slide may well end up being a troublesome scan and may have dust or other artifacts that I'll have to clean up and won't ever completely transfer to digital. There's always going to be a percentage of what's on that transparency that doesn't make it into the computer for whatever reason, but it's still a pretty good source, IMO. At 4800 dpi a 35mm scan is 6255x4079. That's over 25 megapixels. I can't really tell the difference between a 4800 dpi scan and a 6400 dpi scan, so I never go higher than 4800 dpi, but it's still a pretty decent capture medium, IMO. Not knocking digital. It's cool. Very convenient. Very high quality. And I'd agree that the D200 is probably resolving as much detail as film, more or less. It's just that film's detail extends down to its grain structure and things that the lens didn't even necessarily resolve, as well as having a different appearance in general than electronic capture. A certain vibrance in things like afternoon sunlight seems to be there on film that I, at least, have real trouble duplicating with digital properly. The instant feedback is very conducive to a sharp learning curve, though. Robert Jackson Santa Rosa, CA Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 4, 2007, at 11:35 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Most of the DSLRs mentioned may be less than 25 megapixels but they shoot in Camera RAW formats, which can be adjusted in a number of ways if needed before converting the Camera Raw format to an interpreted value standard image format, which cannot be done when scanning film. Actually, RAW output from VueScan is pretty similar a camera RAW output in its ability to be manipulated in post. -Rob Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 4, 2007, at 3:39 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have not used VueScan in years and am unfamiliar with its current raw output. When I used it the raw scan was 16 bit non-linear scan without any software processing applied at all output as a TIFF file. Correct. You can also save the VueScan data as an Adobe DNG file, which allows for lossless compression and a considerable space savings over 16-bit uncompressed tiff files, which may seem trivial, but when scanning color 6x7 transparencies at 4800 dpi the output is 13,376 x 10,676 and around 260 meg in size. DNG can pull that back to around 175 meg. This is not exactly the same as Camera RAW which via camera raw conversion programs allows the user to interpret the raw data as to exposure, white light, saturation levels, chromatic distortion, and color settings prior to converting the interpreted data into a standard format which the user can then manipulate in image editing programs like Photoshop. All true. When many people scan film, though, they subject the image to automated processing that may well result in the kind of irreversible image degradation you were talking about earlier. By storing a file directly from the CCD output of the scanner and dealing with all processing post-capture you allow yourself the freedom to oversee any processing manually, potentially avoiding the kind of problems you seemed to be referring to. Obviously it's more time-consuming. I find that the RAW files from VueScan can withstand a considerable amount of tweaking in Photoshop before they start to show visible artifacts. Obviously much more than most pre-processed scanner output. Of course, they don't look as appealing right out of the scanner, which may put off more casual users. -Rob Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 4, 2007, at 4:37 PM, Arthur Entlich wrote: At some point, the digital image components will be beyond any human's ability to perceive as discrete components, (other than with massive enlargement) and then the issue will be moot, and for some it is so close to that now, that is already is moot, considering the many other features digital images and music supply. Well, we went through this same kind of technology arc in audio a decade or so ago. CDs may have come along in '84, but I was still using 2 tape up into the 90's. Manufacturers kept coming to trade shows and telling us that with their pre-emphasis model and proprietary compression an 8-bit audio file at 27.5 KHz was indistinguishable from its source and then you'd listen to the demo and run screaming from the building. Then the 12-bit 31 KHz stuff came along and that was definitely, without any wiggle-room an absolute replacement for analog recording equipment. And after the demo we'd once again run screaming from the building and have nightmares for months. This went on through 16-bit 44.1 KHz recorders that were allegedly indistinguishable from the source and then 16-bit 48 KHz and finally at 24-bit 96 KHz decks the advantages of working with tape pretty much evaporated, IMO. Either my ears finally got too old and worn to hear the subtleties anymore or the technology finally arrived. We're kind of going through the same thing with digital imaging, IMO. Right now there are a lot of things that digital does wonderfully and a lot of things it doesn't. A few years ago I went to an Andreas Gursky exhibition where he had massive prints on display of images made with scanning backs and the amount of detail in some of his landscapes was truly stunning. In his interiors, though, there was an image at a soccer game where one of the players appeared twice in the photo, having apparently run ahead of the scanning head after his first capture to make a second appearance on the field. The lack of a de-Bayering process seemed to be worth the inconvenience and slow capture speed of the systems he was using, but it seemed more viable to me for landscapes than for shots involving moving subjects. Eventually we'll undoubtedly see systems that have more compelling output without the disadvantages. And of course, as with digital audio, we're kind of waiting on the computer hardware to catch up with the art. I have a very fast four-core 3 GHz Mac Pro with a lot of memory and a couple of terabytes of drive space and a 250 meg image still grinds my machine to a near halt. It is not that digital is without a footprint, but in the big picture it is likely much smaller, and studies to date seem to suggest that. I really feel like this is a case of human negligence more than an unavoidable reality of chemical capture, though. I just finished a film project about a nuclear waste facility in the American midwest that contaminated the local environment in what you would think would be a criminally irresponsible manner, but the owners of the site broke no laws. Even when they found themselves with 6 million gallons of radioactive water and decided to get rid of it by evaporating it as steam and sending it out of a smokestack they were completely within their legal rights and the CDC backed them up on it in interviews I did last spring. The thing is, there were responsible ways of dealing with that waste and I show a facility in New Mexico where the same type of waste is encapsulated in salt half a mile underground. I could stand on the surface with a geiger counter and read lower background radiation than I get in my bedroom. By the same token, we *can* safely dispose of photo chemistry. We just don't bother most of the time. Robert Jackson Santa Rosa, CA Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jul 4, 2007, at 6:37 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: most of the automatic processing that is done by the scanning software has to do with things that one can already do in Photoshop such as levels and curves settings, saturation settings, brightness and contrast settings, etc. and not with things that are done with Camera RAW applications. The biggest advantage to camera RAW over a scanner DNG is the ability to change color temperature/white balance info. The rest is pretty analogous to operations possible with any image in Photoshop. For instance, I just opened up a shot I took of fireworks last night with my D200. Going through the panes I can control White Balance, Temp and Tint. Then Exposure compensations, including brightness, contrast, saturation, etc. In the next pane I can control tone curves. In the next I can add sharpening. In the next I can convert to grayscale with HSL tweaks. In the next I can do split-toning with Highlight and Shadow controls. In the next I can correct lens geometry and CA. The next is camera color profiling and the final pane is for presets. Really, the only thing I can do with Adobe Camera RAW that I can't do with a DNG from VueScan is adjust the white balance from raw sensor data. The rest of it works just about the same whether I'm adjusting a scan or a NEF. -Rob Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
[filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
On Jun 8, 2007, at 8:49 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hmmm. Interesting and quite contrary to my own experience and others. It depends, really. Like, I was scanning some old Ektachrome 400 today. The images were coming out at at 4374 x 6400 pixels. That's about 28 megapixels and the scanner still wasn't clearly capturing the grain structure. Looking at it closely you can see what looks like noise, but is actually imperfectly resolved grain. Now, Ektachrome wasn't the finest-grained kid on the block, but the grain is fine enough that 28 megapixels isn't getting there. Of course, some of it is undoubtedly me hitting the optical limits of my Microtek scanner. That said, I've taken 5 1/2 megapixel images with my old Olympus E-1 that give some of my Ektachrome slides a run for their money when it comes to resolving detail. It's just that the actual image on a slide doesn't begin to cover the amount of information contained in the slide and if you want it all you have to scan huge to get it. I just shot a couple of rolls of Efke 25 in my Mamiya 7. Those 6x7 negatives contain WAY more than four times the amount of information on those 35mm slides. I wouldn't be surprised if it took 175 megapixels to properly resolve the grain structure. And that's the real problem with comparing film and digital. 10-12 megapixels will certainly give you images every bit as detailed as you're used to getting from film. Yet to capture the beauty of film's grain you have to scan at a level of detail that's really kind of impractical. I had a test arrangement with a camera manufacturer last year to do a telecine of some old 8mm film to HDV. They wanted to know how it performed. They may have been thinking of looking into an HDV telecine product, I don't know. Anyway, the results were mixed. The 720x1280 images from the camera captured all the detail that the lens on the 8mm camera original delivered to the film. I'm fairly confident of that. But the camera didn't even begin to resolve the grain structure. In fact, after talking to their engineers I found out that the mpeg encoder saw the grain as high frequency noise and tried to suppress it. So I was seeing a kind of cross-hatch pattern on individual frames that had replaced the grain structure. Now, when the image was in motion you couldn't tell you weren't just looking at grain, but pausing on a frame left an impression of some kind of jpeg compression gone wrong or something. Obviously this wouldn't be the case with uncompressed recording, but then the file sizes would be immense and I'm pretty sure 720p doesn't even approach the level of detail needed to resolve the 8mm grain structure. So you've got kind of a mixed bag, IMO. You can replace film with digital at a fairly low resolution, IMO. 6-10 megapixels will usually yield comparable imagery, IMO. And yet to fully resolve the grain structure of film takes WAY more resolution than you need to replace it as a capture medium. Robert Jackson Santa Rosa, CA Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
