"SKID Photography" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I think it's important to remember that film grain and pixels are not > interchangeable terms.
I didn't mean to imply that they were. I was simply trying to make an analogy about expected viewing distance. > I think that part of it, is that pixels are aligned in a grid and have a rectilinear > shape, whereas the film grain is (for lack of a better description) schoastic in > arrangement and irregular in shape, thereby providing more tonal information than pixels. I don't see why stochastic or random dye clouds inherently provides more information than a pixel. A single pixel can represent one of 16 million colours (more or less depending on your bit depth). A single dye cloud can't. The problem is that our pixel sizes aren't down to dye cloud sizes yet (not in the consumer scanners!), and the printers we print with still can't reproduce quite the same subtlety of colour or tone yet. Owners of 1290's may take me to task there. :) In any case until we get affordable digicams with resolution similar to film, most of us are scanning film at resolutions that result in aliasing of some kind, and therefore don't get all the possible information out of the film. > I know that there are those out there that think grain is a dirty word and that the > presence of it, limits the possible size or viewing distance of a print. Grain is only a dirty word for me because when I scan grainy film I get aliasing. If I could scan at (say) 8000ppi and print a 20x30" image, I might be able to reproduce that photographic enlargement. Actually, for A3 sized prints I've already improved on it because after scanning I was able to remove the dust and scratches from the neg. :) Rob