[filmscanners] RE: film and scanning vs digital photography

["Laurie@advancenet.net" <laurie@advancenet.net>]

Of course, preferences for film versus digital is a matter of personal
preference and taste; I was not attempting to address that.  I was merely
attempting to address why Getty had the specs it did and why the sought drum
scans of film by professional scanning houses that they know rather than
flatbed or dedicated film scanners of the type mentioned in the post that
use sensors.

Secondly, some artifacts produced in the scanning process by prosummer
scanners operated by layoperators may not be readily remedied or correctable
at all in some cases.  They may be a function of the equipment and software
or the nature of the scanning process used by prosummer scanners.

Thirdly, a 4800 ppi scan of a 35mm film frame if it is an optical scan and
not an interpolated one is probably minimal in terms of resolution for a
stock house, who will be licensing the files for a large variety of
different uses at different sizes and croppings. Most of the DSLRs mentioned
may be less than 25 megapixels but they shoot in Camera RAW formats, which
can be adjusted in a number of ways if needed before converting the Camera
Raw format to an interpreted value standard image format, which cannot be
done when scanning film.  In comparing megapixels, one also needs to take
into account that the 35mm film frame is larger than the size of the frame
captured by the digital camera sensor, which accounts for the multiplier
effect such that it may be more or less equivalent to the number of
megapixels that one gets with the mentioned DSLRs.  That you cannot tell the
difference between a 4800 ppi scan and a significantly larger optical ppi
scan maybe because you have not seen a good drum scan to compare with and
you may not be as critical as the stock houses and their clients are.

At any rate, I was not attempting to defend anyone or any position; I was
only attempting to offer some possible explanations.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk
> [mailto:filmscanners_owner@halftone.co.uk] On Behalf Of R. Jackson
> Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2007 1:47 AM
> To: laurie@advancenet.net
> Subject: [filmscanners] Re: film and scanning vs digital photography
>
>
> On Jul 1, 2007, at 6:00 PM, Laurie@advancenet.net wrote:
>
> > Yes because you are mixing apples and oranges in your comparison.
> > The D200
> > and D2X produce a 35mm equivalent first generation capture; it does
> > not need
> > to be converted into a digital file after the capture by a second
> > external
> > process.   A 35mm film capture's quality after scanning will depend
> > on the
> > film uses, and how it was processed, for starters, and the scanning
> > of the
> > film will comprise the equivalent of a second generation capture
> > with the
> > possible introduction of noise, artifacts, and other degrading
> > components
> > during the scan.
>
> I'm sure I'm not the only one who's going to find this a little
> suspect. I own a D200 and I like it quite a bit, but at the end of
> the day I like a scanned Kodachrome/Velvia slide more most of the
> time. Now, it's true that the slide may well end up being a
> troublesome scan and may have dust or other artifacts that I'll have
> to clean up and won't ever completely transfer to digital. There's
> always going to be a percentage of what's on that transparency that
> doesn't make it into the computer for whatever reason, but it's still
> a pretty good source, IMO. At 4800 dpi a 35mm scan is 6255x4079.
> That's over 25 megapixels. I can't really tell the difference between
> a 4800 dpi scan and a 6400 dpi scan, so I never go higher than 4800
> dpi, but it's still a pretty decent capture medium, IMO.
>
> Not knocking digital. It's cool. Very convenient. Very high quality.
> And I'd agree that the D200 is probably resolving as much detail as
> film, more or less. It's just that film's detail extends down to its
> grain structure and things that the lens didn't even necessarily
> resolve, as well as having a different appearance in general than
> electronic capture. A certain vibrance in things like afternoon
> sunlight seems to be there on film that I, at least, have real
> trouble duplicating with digital properly. The instant feedback is
> very conducive to a sharp learning curve, though.
>
> Robert Jackson
> Santa Rosa, CA
>
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