Not necessarily. I can produce some images with high global contrast that still look flat because of low local contrast, either in luminance, or in color discrimination. I don't say that this actually happens with digicams, I just say that this is possible.
Sure, but it's hardly only a problem of the digital domain :-)
Of course. Try a poor negative film, or a lens with poor coatings and lots of internal reflections and you're there. You can boost the global contrast later, but there will be no fine textures and gradations in the image. You can also boost the color saturation, but again you won't get more color shades than in the original - you just spread that limited number on a larger range. So the image will still look like "lacking something" (experiment: scan an image from an 800 ISO disposable and see what you can make in Photoshop with it; unless you add synthetic textures in luminance and chroma (like through some fractal program), it will be flat whatever you do). However, in the film world, we already have well performing tools. With digital, this will enhance during the next years, with higher resolution, both spatial and as number of bits per pixel. Or you can "fix it later in Photoshop (TM)" with some fractal rendering plugins or similar technique.
DACs are now offering specifications beyond the realities of analogue support circuitry and if you want to read up about a nice mic do a search on the MKH-
800 (digicams aren't expensive).
" It is the very fist microphone to fully utilize the wider frequency response and dynamic range of the new 24 bit/96 kHz standard, marking the breakthrough to a yet unknown clarity and precision in audio."
Which confirms that the hypothesis of "humans hear up to 22kHz so sampling at 44kHz would be enough for everyone" had some flaw. And talking about digital imaging - something similar is going on there too.
cheers, caveman
