On Jul 5, 2007, at 4:44 PM, David J. Littleboy wrote: > The 4/3 sensor is 1/4 the area of the FF sensors, and not really a > serious > format. If one is concerned with image quality.
Technically, there's merit to what you're saying. Given a the current 10 megapixel 4/3 sensor with a 4.7 micron pixel pitch and a comparable full-frame 10 megapixel chip with a 9 micron pixel pitch, all things being equal, the larger chip should display a comparable noise profile a couple of stops down the road from the 4/3 chip. The overall IQ is an assemblage of a lot of factors, though. The 4/3 lens mount is a pretty well-thought-out digital lens mount and Zuiko's high-end glass is really very nice. Much nicer, IMO, than comparable offerings by Nikon and Canon. Of course, they're generally more expensive, as well. I kind of wonder how many of those high-end lenses are actually out there in the world, really. Kind of hard to justify coughing up $5000 for a lens to put on a little $600 plastic 4/3 camera. Under most circumstances I doubt you could tell the difference between a landscape shot with a full-frame sensor and a 4/3 sensor, though. Certainly not because one falls apart sooner when being printed in large formats. That line of discussion last night about not enlarging a 35mm negative past 8" x10" and never using Tri-X for anything as large as 5" x 7" was kind of a warning flag that we aren't going to agree on this. And that's OK. If by that you meant that you've found a workflow that allows you to make prints from film stocks like PanF Plus or Velvia that don't appear to have originated from film, then what you're saying makes a certain sense. With extremely fine-grained films at small enlargement sizes you can make prints that have very little in the way of tell- tales that would let you know there was an acquisition medium of any kind involved. The kind of stuff you see in magazine ad work. I have an acquaintance who's anal about grain because he does stereoscopic photography and grain kind of kills the illusion. He almost always uses Kodachrome 64. He can't understand why I've ever shot any Kodachrome 200. He thinks the grain is objectionable. He's always saying, "Why shoot Kodachrome if you're going to have grain?" Of course, I just like the way it looks. I like the colors, I like the contrast and I like the grain structure. I'm not a huge fan of the flaky latitude with that particular stock, but it's got a look all its own when the stars are aligned and your karma is working right. Just don't let a black cat cross your path or walk under any ladders. I've routinely made 11" x 14" enlargements from Tri-X that I'd show to anyone and I've enlarged Velvia slides to 16" x 20" a number of times with very pleasing results. Past that 35mm starts to fall apart, IMO. You went on to say that 6x7 falls apart past 16" x 20" which is about the starting point for me with 6x7. And of course you went on to say that the output from a 5D is the equal of medium format film, which is another big agree-to-disagree. I know the output is easier to work with and much easier to print, but I honestly believe you need 100+ megapixels to equal the richness of the grain pattern visible in optical prints made from 6x7. Of course, you don't like seeing grain. Which points out a huge aesthetic difference that I imagine is going to form a lasting dichotomy between those of us who grew up in darkrooms and the younger generation who learned to be photographers sitting at a computer. That ugly ol' grain is the essence and character of the medium for some of us, where I regularly read people discussing about the best way to eliminate it from scans. I just scanned this 30-year-old Ektachrome 400 slide tonight. At 6400 dpi it came out to 5141 x 8085. I downscaled it to 2912 x 4368, which is the output size of a 5D. Now, I'm not going to pretend that there was actually 41 megapixels of information there that made it through the lens and stuck to the film. In fact, the focus is a little dodgy as it is. I think the guitar is in focus better than his face. But here's a jpeg (I don't have the server space to upload a tiff or I would) that's about a meg and you can still see grain aliasing. I think that I could get everything that's rational to get if I could scan at 12,800 dpi. But to me this old piece of Ektachrome, that wasn't a particularly good stock to begin with, yields a much more engaging image than a 5D. No moire. No strange plastic fleshtones. This image hasn't had any post-processing, so unsharp masking might help its apparent sharpness, but it would also help accent the grain aliasing. Film, man. Heh...OK, I've ranted about film enough. Not that I don't like digital at all. It's handy. I work with digital all the time. I just shot a project where I did exteriors on 35mm stock and interiors (interviews) on 720p video. I'm fine with the way it looks. It's just that ya gotta repect the emulsion, baby. Grind me up another horse and feed that gelatin into my camera. ;-) http://home.comcast.net/~jackson.robert.r/RRJ_V700_413.jpg Anyway, to get back to the point where my sanity started to slip, where things start to fall apart with the Oly is in low light. That's the real catch to the small sensor. Their flaky way of doing business left a lot of us freaking out over the past few years. I'd used OMs since the mid-70's and it was hard for me to walk away from the company completely. Zuiko glass has always been the lure of that company. The cameras were nice enough, but the high-end glass has always been excellent and the 4/3 concept is sound. I always kind of thought the 4/3 concept would evolve into their equivalent of a digital Pen (especially when they came out with the E-300 and its finder design was so similar to the old Pens). If they kept the 4/3 as their digital Pen, made the cameras much smaller and then came out with a new lens mount for full frame sensors (a digital OM?) it would give them an excellent range of products, but I seriously doubt that they're looking at it like that. In the meantime, their Live View technology, nice macro lenses and ring flashes make the 4/3 cameras really good for forensic photography. They seem like they were designed for the job. -Rob ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body