P3D Re: Grain of Truth

["Greg Wageman" <gjw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

From: Michael Kersenbrock <michaelk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

>I would assume that Kodak if said "at about the limits of film
>resolution" that this would indicate the best that the best
>film can do.  Do all films have the same resolution (so that
>using these numbers would be reasonable for all films)?


Of course not, but you knew that.  B&W films like Technical Pan have way
more resolving power than color films, for example.  Remember that film
used to make holograms must resolve better than one wavelength of the
laser light used in order to record the interference pattern.

>For a lot of purposes, that's definitely true, "fer sure".  But I'm not
>totally convinced.  The main competitor for digital camera usage
>isn't "film" based cameras, but Polaroid ones.  Digital cameras are
>"instant" cameras in that you can review what you took on the spot
>and take another if it isn't "okay".  This is more the polaroid model
>of photography.  So if one were to price-out the lifetime cost of
>a digital camera and it's consumables, how would that stack up against
>a Polaroid camera and the cost of its consumables (making some
assumption
>of the number of shots that were retaken due to not liking the first
>try).  Digital camera might not do that bad!


That's a pretty fair comparison, I think, and I agree with you that
today's digital cameras can do pretty well in that niche.  (And Polaroid
apparently agrees, too, as they market a digital cam of their own.)

On the other hand, with a Polaroid, you can also make instant copies of
the original to give to your friends.  That's tough with digital (no
hard copy) cameras.  Then again, the images from a digital cam are
probably superior to Polaroid's self-developing films, which I was never
impressed with, and copies made in the digital realm are perfect copies.

Another thing people want to do with their digital cameras is put their
photos on their Web sites, a concept which simply didn't exist when 126
cameras were in vogue.  It still isn't particularly easy, convenient, or
cheap to get 35mm slides or negatives into the digital realm.  Photo-CD
isn't by any means "instant", and a quality film scanner like a Nikon
Coolscan will set you back over $1000, and you still have to get the
film processed first.  And the 1024x768 resolution of many current
digital cams is more than sufficient for screen-only applications.

>I still don't think Digital cameras are "ripe for the picking" (as a
>new toy anyway) quite yet, but the more I watch I don't think it
>too far off (for general "aunt martha" snapshot and web-publication
use).


They'll be there when Aunt Martha doesn't need a computer to display and
print her digital photos.

     -Greg W. (gjw@xxxxxxxxxx)



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