[ale] Re: digital camera -- OT and long

Sean Kilpatrick kilpatms at mindspring.com
Mon Aug 19 08:07:54 EDT 2002




On Monday 19 August 2002 09:47 am, Irv Mullins wrote:

> My question is, short of the $5,000 professional Nikon class, do any
> digital cameras produce results as good as can be gotten from a
> same-priced conventional camera?
>  




Well, yes and no.
Most folks who own a "point-and-shoot" film-based camera just take
snapshots and let the local drugstore process the negatives and
provide 3X5 prints. The quality _will_ vary wildly as inexpensive
"one-hour" labs typically run their chemicals to (and often past)
exhaustion. If this happens on the development/film side the 
negatives will be degraded if not ruined. On the print side, the
results are poor prints with skewed color.  Digital cameras are
far more consistent in their output.
The next issue is lens quality. Here quality improves with the
bucks spent and the delta looks much the same for both film and
digital cameras. That is, a $500 digital camera will have about
the same lens quality as a $500 film camera.


The primary difference is quality of film processing. Given two
$500 cameras, one digital and the other using silver-based film:
with typical "one-hour" processing of the film the two cameras
will produce very similar 5X7 prints -- assuming that the digital
image is printed with a moderately high quality "photo quality"
inkjet printer. Try for 8X10 prints and the film image has the
"potential" to produce sharper, cleaner images.


To see where digital photography was two years ago (when I
purchased my first digital camera body) I ran a simple test:
I fixed a tripod in position and mounted a Nikon film body and lens
on the tripod, inserted 400 asa film and took some pictures;
Then I put a digital body on the same tripod, used the same lens,
and took the same set of pictures with the camera set for 400 asa.


Then I took the film to a pro lab for processing. Went home and
pulled the images off the micro-drive  and printed them without
any post processing on an Epson photo 1270. 
(now the CCD chip that replaces the film is about 2/3 the size of
a regular 35mm negative.) So I took my 8X11 full frame print down
to the pro lab and asked them to print the matching negative,
_cropped_ to match the size of the one I had printed at home.


The results: the two images were equally sharp; the digital image
had better shadow detail and held the highlights as well as the
film image. The digital color was ever so slightly off, but this
could have been much less obvious with a bit of massaging via the
photo-processing software of choice.
My point is that with electronics, quality rapidly trickles downward.
Today's $500 digital cameras produce images better than those produced
by $1000 cameras three years ago.


A 2-megapixel camera today ($300) will give good quality 5X7 prints,
but the zoom lens is likely to show obvious barrel-distortion at
wide angles.  For $500 you can get 3-4 megapixels; the lens
will show less distortion, and the 5X7 prints will be noticeably
better. For $1000 you get a better lens, a better CCD, and much
better in-camera photoprocessing software.



If all you want is 800X600 or 1024X768 pixel images for digital
display, all of the major camera manufacturers make <$300 cameras
that will do nicely. The images will have a lower cost than the
equivelent image taken with a point-and-shoot film camera that is 
then scanned to create a digital image -- and the quality will be
very much the same.
My experience is that dollar for dollar the camera manufacturers do
a better job than the software developers. That is, Nikon, Cannon,
Minolta, Fuji, etc. do a better job at making digital cameras than
firms such as Sony or HP.


My one suggestion is to avoid digital cameras that do not have a
viewfinder. If you are forced to hold the camera out at arm's length
to see the view screen on the back while taking a picture, you are
going to have a helleva lot of blurred pictures because of camera
shake.


Sean,
   who spent more than 15 years working as a commercial photographer.



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