From: "Russell McMahon" <apptech@PARADISE.NET.NZ>
Sent: Friday, July 30, 2004 2:01 AM

> Notwithstanding, the best 35mm format digitals now exceed the resolution
> performance of 35mm film using industry recognised standards. Dynamic
range
> of film is still superior but this is under improvement.

This is something that I was trying to avoid bringing up to further
complicate the thread.  Resolution or pixel count has become some magic
number in the digital camera industry that is supposed to tell you how good
a camera is, but in practice has very little meaning; sort of like megahertz
on PCs. My 2 year old digital camera is 2.3 megapixels.  There are a lot of
3-4 megapixel cameras in the $200 area now, and my digital camera gives far
better pictures.  Of course, my pictures look better on screen at 0.7
megapixels where the extra pixels don't matter at all, but they also look
better as a physical print.  I'm referring to the sharpness, color fidelity,
noise, and even apparent grainyness - my cameras prints *look* higher
resolution than a cheap camera with double the resolution.  All the cheap
high res ones do is waste memory space.  I also know someone with a fairly
new and very expensive 4MP camera that makes the prints from mine look like
they came from a child's toy, so in digital cameras, you get what you pay
for. IIRC the Hubble space telescope's highest resolution sensor is sub-2MP,
and it's certainly a much better sensor than the best consumer device
available.

The lens is one of the most important elements, SLR digital cameras solve
that problem at least.  But most rangefinder digital camers I see seem to
have a lens from a throwaway camera.

Jason

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic:
[PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads