[photo-3d] Film Vs Digital

[boris@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

In 1999 I judged stereocards for the NSA competition in Green Bay.  One
entry was a series of very classy looking sepiatone views taken at a
baseball game.  Memorable for the modern people in the pictures, and the
old timey mood.  Obviously the documentation of a modern day game, the
format (Holmes card) and sepia tone linked the ideas and spirit of the game
to those of an earlier time.

No one thought these were digital prints.  I didn't think so, either, at
first.  There were no pixels visible, no jaggies on straight or curved
edges.  There was no banding or posterization evident in the tonality of
smooth areas of the pictures (or maybe there were no smooth areas?).

One thing caught my eye - and instantly branded the prints as digital.  A
picture of stadium chairs showed moiré patterns on the fabric of the chair
back.  Further inspection of the images showed more interference patterns
here and there, such as on a distant brick wall, I remember.

This is an inherent drawback of digital: the necessarily repeating, regular
pattern of sensors on the film plane (or output device) will form an
interference pattern in an image that includes a pattern of similar
regularity and spacing.

As a fan of digital myself (I love music CDs for their convenience,
robustness, signal to noise ratio, and dynamic range), I wonder if this
problem shows up in digital audio?  Do some tones "beat" with the quantized
and regular storage medium of the CD?  Or is the sampling rate so high that
even such harmonic beating would be beyond the range of human hearing?  Or
have methods been developed in the post-processing to suppress such
interference.  Can similar methods be applied to pictures without a loss in
detail?

Boris


- Not content with ignorance of the past,
- humanity seeks the counsel of oracles.
-
-                                     J.P.V.D.Balsdon, _Romans & Aliens_

Boris Starosta, manager               boris@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Dynamic Symmetry, LLC                 http://www.starosta.com
usa - 804 979 3930                    http://www.starosta.com/3dshowcase