----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2003 12:30 PM Subject: Re: Has Pentax missed again?
> > To my way of thinking, no film is a pretty big advantage. So, just curious, > what else could DSLRs offer? Resolution as good as medium format? What? Not dealing with film, and all the problems that go along with it is nice, but all that happens is a whole other set of problems crop up. Film is a very convenient storage medium for shooting a lot of pictures away from a home base. Shooting a lot of pictures on digital, especially those with large pixel count sensors at full quality requires huge amounts of storage. On the ist D, a 1 gb card holds 70 RAW files. Thats less than two rolls of film. The 1 gb card was fairly pricey too. Just for the price of the card, I could have bought 2 dozen rolls of film and paid for the processing. So, you have to want to get away from film enough to spend some dollars. Digital capture prints are deceptive. The lack of grain is amazing, but film really does have an advantage if you need to capture fine detail and translate that to large prints. The digital capture prints look like they are as good as medium format due to the lack of grain, but they aren't. The fine detail just isn't there. OTOH, most people don't care about that anyway. The lack of grain is enough to make them fall in love with the result. What really swayed me towards digital was the ist D itself. It had nothing to do with it being a digital camera, and everything to do with what a lovely piece of equipment it is. I would have bought it on the spot if it had been a film camera too. Well perhaps not, there is still that no K mount compatability issue, and I think I would have felt stronger about it with a film camera. The other thing with digital now is the coming lack of film compatable photo labs. Believe it, minilabs are becoming even less film friendly. Scanning technology, when applied to the needs of a one hour lab just doesn't cut it. The state of the art right now is 2000 PPI scanning capture, with the scans coming out at about 2000x3000 pixels. Just big enough to get all the scanning artifacts we have come to know and love. This may get better, or it may not. It depends on how much faster data tranfer speeds get, as that is really important to fast production turnaround. Personally, I don't think we are going to see much improvement in this area, as the dollars just don't add up for the manufacturers in what is now a rapidly shrinking market. I think consumers are going to be forced into digital, whether they like it or not, if they are going to continue to take pictures. William Robb
