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