Fine Resolving Moose wrote:
> As scientists find regularly, the theoretical calculations may or may not
> match the experimental results. Sometimes the theory has to go....
> ...It's my guess that in a real world test, a sensor like the Phase One IQ280
> and/or the Mamiya Chuck mentions will resolve about as much visible detail
> as any practical film in the Mamiya 67. When you get through shooting,
> processing, scanning, Raw conversion, etc., and get down to peeking at the
> images, the fine detail of leaves, cloth, eyelashes, and so on, the large
> difference in simple theory numbers will boil down to little difference.
We film geeks like to talk about resolving ability of film over
digital and technically, and mathematically, it is true. However, in
actual practice, it isn't. Why?
Because with digital, almost across the entire brightness range of the
image, the resolution stays the same. The exception being in the
bottom three stops of exposure where things muddy up a bit, and when
working with reds or blues, which have fewer sensels. But for the most
part, effective resolution remains uniform across most of the tonal
range. With film, this is certainly not true.
A favorite whipping boy of mine is Fujichrome Provia. Provia is
notorious for being quite varied in resolution as you deal with
subjects of lower contrast. Once you get below 70%, it falls off the
face of the earth. Original Fujichrome 50 and 100 had the ability to
hold details farther than Velvia or Provia. The exception would be
Velvia 100 (not F). That is the best of breed. This was largely
addressed with Astia, but for the most part, all "F" variants of
Fujichromes has a dramatic sliding scale of resolving power. In
contrast (pun intended), Kodachrome is very uniform across the entire
tonal range.
I bring this up because the talking heads (Michael Richtmann leading
the pack) compared digital to Provia and declared stupid things like
3MP beat full-frame 35mm Provia 100F. It was nonesense then, and it's
even more obvious nonesense now, but it was declared to be true
because few peope understood what was really going on with the curved
resolution response of films.
I like my film, but I also like my digital. Time/place for both, but
I'm not going to declare one universally better than the other as they
each have strengths and weaknesses depending on the photographer,
subject and what the photographer is trying to achieve.
AG
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