Mike,

You make some valid points in your essay, but miss some of the economic realities. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the best medium format system around with the highest quality was arguably Hasselblad. A basic 500 series body cost around $2,000 to $2,500 USD new, and lenses were around the same. The best Nikon was roughly half the cost.

Today, a modern Hasselblad H-39 is around $25,000, roughly fives times the cost of a Nikon D3 and equivalent to a decent new car. Now I realize that pro photographers saved on film and processing costs, which justified the switch to digital. But, a huge number of artists and advanced amateurs were left out of the MF digital changeover due to the obscene prices. Some of this is due to the cost of CCD and CMOS chips, but a lot is also due to a monopoly of the market by Danish MF back suppliers.

Even in the world of music, a top-of-the-line Martin D-45 still lists for $9,999 USD (roughly $6,000 street).

Landscape photographers and others have been using 8x10, 4x5 and 120 film formats for very sound technical reasons. Very few of them can afford MF digital equipment today.

Again, you make some valid points, but let's not forget who this equipment is made for. The anger over the cost of previously attainable MF systems has a real basis amongst those who care the most about high quality photography.

Regards,

Bill V.

What you say is quite correct.

But, I would argue that on any absolute image quality scale you'll find that one can now produce image quality equal to that from a 1980s Hasselblad with a camera such as a Canon 5D MKII or Sony A900, which are priced well under $3,000, even without figuring in an inflation factor.

Today's medium format is on another plane alltogether, and because it pushes current technology to its commercial limits, is high priced.

Michael

I would argue that the new 8x10 is not the P65+, it is stitching based imaging, be it from a high end DSLR of from a MFDB. Stitching is the great equalizer since pixel quality becomes the only meaningful measurement...



Not a solution for all needs, but clearly the best absolute image quality by far for landscape, together with an un-beatable price/performance ratio.

Fine art photographers looking for the best possible image quality should IMHO consider it seriously.

Cheers,
Bernard

Hi Bernard,

I agree stitching is a partial solution only - there are many instances where stitching is either impossible or virtually so.

Stitching can of course bring a lower MP camera up to or greater than the same number of pixels from a MFDB - but pixel count is not the whole story. There are a lot of other factors owners of High end MFDB's attest to as significantly superior to even high end DSLR's like my 1DSMK3 or your D3X.

I think stitching remains a good viable option - but it isnt a substitute for a high end MFDB in my opinion.

As to the value question - well.. i think that like 'beauty', 'value' is also in the eye of the beholder (or holder in this case )

P.S - Lovely Shot.

Stitching is one technique, which I use, by the way, with my Nikon D200:

Click to view attachment

However, we have been talking from a perspective of someone who moved up to MF from 35mm in order to get better results and differentiate themselves. Many of us moved down to MF as a lighter alternative to field cameras and film holders--just like St. Ansel (Adams). We have large investments in optics and equipment, which are not economically updatable to digital. I have a Phase One H20 back I purchased for $3,500, but it has to be tethered. A P20 is just simply beyond my means, and as a long time Hasselblad owner, I am obviously not poor. Even the least expensive, "student level" Better Light back is on the order of five grand. Vendors have to come up with more economical digital alternatives. Perhaps, a scanning back for the Hasselblad could be done for a couple of thousand. Who knows?

Regarding quality, an 8x10 contact print is way beyond the ability of any current digital capture system; you only have to view one at an Edward Weston exhibition to understand. In the end, digital capture only provides an ethereal abstraction of reality recorded by ones and zeroes based on several million tiny light meters. But in the end, it will never be "writing with light," i.e. photography.

Stitching doesn't solve issues when things are moving in a scene, or dealing with precise movements when a wave hits the pier, or the sun is setting and you have a brief moment to get it right, etc. Also, there are times that I simply don't want to 3 stop bracket and pan a scene. Then process nine images in five steps and round trip to PS twice. It gets ugly fast.

Agreed, the entry point is now around 7000 US$, which is much higher than it used to be and this is specially painful for those invested in MF gear. Now you should be aware that older MF lenses will not be fully able to tap into the resolution potential of the latest backs... which is why Mamiya has been redesigning its all lens line up.

So yes, did MFDB's elite pricing hurt very badely photography? My opinion has always been that they did. Michael is right though that a 5dII will get you close though.



IMHO the limitation you are talking about here is that of printing technology, not capture. So contact print is a scenario that is very kind to 8x10. Talk about a normal size enlargement, say B0, and I believe that a properlly executed 300 megapixel pano will fare better than drum scanned 8x10.

Light in itself is a discrete quantity and the way light is materialized by film is also made of grains that are spatially well defined and therefore discrete in nature. There is no philosophical gap between the bits and zeros of digital and film. Only the native processes designed to handle film and digital differ which gives us an illusion of continuity for film.

Cheers,
Bernard

This thread is originally not about stitching and I should probably not have brought up the topic as it is deviating a bit, but for what it is worth, it is true that stitching doesn't handle everything perfectly, but it can a handle a lot more than you first think when starting to use the technique.

- movement is OK as long as the size of the moving object is smaller than each frame in the scene (birds,...), or continuous in nature (clouds are a total non issue nowadays),
- movement of water is OK as long as the critical scale of the waves is small enough relative to the size of the scene, or with long shutter speeds. The example you give is indeed challenging,
- Sunsets are not a problem at all,
- since I started to use the d3x, I have basically mostly stopped doing bracketing,but if you have bracketed AutoPano Pro and PTgui will deal with it perfectly thanks to their built-in HDR capability. Just feed in the images optinally adjust a few parameters and wait for the output.

The attached set gives many examples of the above:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernardlangui...57600916381270/

Cheers,
Bernard

For general landscape work, I very much think that stitching with a high end DSLR is a better option that a single frame from a high end MFDB (and mostly than stitched MFDB as well). There are obviously certain images that I will not be able to capture, but the result will be much better for the 95% I will be able to handle.

As far as these high end backs being vastly superior to a D3x in terms of pixel quality, I believe this to be an urban legend non backed up by facts or real world usage.

This sample, already posted a few days ago, might help you understand why I think so. http://www.flickr.com/photos/bernardlangui...720762/sizes/o/

Cheers,
Bernard

It is all true, but I think it also depends how you want to work. I stitched a lot and still do it from time to time. However I really don't like the feeling. There is nothing nicer than to set up a large format camera and make one image with a MFDB.

Another factor is what you NEED in terms of pixels. Do I really need 100 or 200MP to print ? I know the biggest I will print is something like 40in by XXXin. Is it nice to have 100Mp to print that big ? Yes, but mostly something around 40, will be enough to do the job. The fact I hate about doing many stitches and large one is files are getting bigger and bigger. HDs are cheap, but still I prefer a 500MB tiff to a 4GB tiff ^^

Why?



I dont agree with this statement (and I dont think anyone who has viewed high end MFDB images would either) - I have personally seen and viewed D3X files, (my own 1DSMK3 files) and files from high end MFDB's from Phase and Leaf. There is nothing urban legend about it - the MFDB files possess a depth of clarity, accutance and color that DSLR files simply dont have (and that includes both the D3X and 1DSMK3). Does it translate in an 8x10 print? No.. not really, or not at all to be more accurate (just witness the canon G10 v. P45+ back debate) - does it come across in a much larger print or at 100% on screen? - most definitely.

As good as the D3X and 1DSMk3 are (and they are both very very good - I use and love the 1DSMK3 daily) - they cannot compete with the high end MFDB's on the market today - especially the new P65+. Do you think Jeff S. and Michael R and may other pro's. would be shelling out tens of thousands for these backs if there wasn't something to it?

Michael said it in a nutshell above -

Thus bringing us back to the whole value discussion - if person 'A' see's value in the MFDB, then its worth the price of admission for their line of work provided their hip pocket can take the hit, and/or provided they can get their investment back. And that is the real key to the lock when it comes to value. As a professional photographer its all about return on investment - if product 'A' costs me 'X' dollars, but makes me 'X+1' then its worth the price of admission. If it just makes me 'X' back - then it isn't worth it. Its a business decision based on the individuals business.

Edit - BTW: Bernard, you made a highly valid point above that is worth re-iterating. Price v. Performance - its hard to go passed a stitched image from a high end DSLR.

Bill,

If you believe this then you should be shooting with a sensor not film, because film is a digital format and a sensor based system is at its heart analog in nature.

How so? Well, each grain of silver is either exposed or unexposed. There's no such thing as a silver grain that's partially exposed. It's on or it's off. ie: it's a one or a zero. It's therefore totally digital in nature. The reason that film looks continuous tone is because particles of silver halide are not consistent. Some turn black sooner or later than others when exposed to the same amount of light. It's millions of these little digital receptors that record the image. This is what gives film a shoulder and a toe curve, rathar than a linear response to light.

On the other hand a camera's sensor is an analog device. It has a continuous response to light and a variable voltage is generated in response to the number of photons hitting the photo site. We then have to turn that voltage into a digital signal so we can store it, transfer it and control it.

The bottom line – film is the original digital medium. If you don't want ones and zeros recording your image you'd better switch to digital.

Michael

(let me join two topics in one reply - Want-need-Afford & 17mm T-S/E...)
Related to the topic, but not the MFDB discussion, the ne Canon 17mm T-SE fits firmly into this for me. Whilst my photography is almost entirely based around travel and trying to capture something that my eye likes, what I find is that when it comes to certain circumstances (nearly all of which involve buildings), the pictures suffer. Putting down $2.5k on a lens that will be used "occasionally" is a challenging decision!

As a lens, this one is twice the price, according to B&H, of the 24mm, but yet is sold out whilst the 24mm is not. How do I justify the 17mm over the 24mm? I can get useful wideangle on FF, APS-H and APS-C from 17mm but not 24mm.

For those that have and use T-S lenses, how are they to use with filters such as polarizers and natural graident? In this regard, the 17mm is something of a conundrum: its design would seem to preclude the use of screw in filters - do the filter holder systems make a difference? (Can they be used?)

When I see what one of these lenses does, I feel like I need one (and perhps more to the point, that every camera/lens should provide this) but do I really need to spend that much cash on something that will probably see as many days of use per year as it has mm?

I don't want to go to far into this as it has been discussed quite a bit already, but let's just say that after normal sharpening, I have never seen a MFDB file that looked significantly better than a d3x file. Resolutionwise also, although this stops to be relevant once stitching is part of the equation.

It could very well be that the MFDB files I saw (my Mamiya ZD files or others) had not be optimally captured, so I would be interested in looking at one of your sample files (a crop would do). I would have no problem changing my mind on this.

I believe that many high end shooters buy a P65+ mostly because they don't want to bother with stitching.

Finally, productivity is a strong advocate against stitching in some domains, but clearly not fine art. So I am personally 100% sure that for the fine art landscape work I am trying to do (whether I am succeeding or not is a different matter), a 40.000 US$ back would have zero of negative value compared to my current kit.

As to why landscape stitching is better done with a D3x than a back, there are many objective reasons like:

- lighter than most MF systems, especially when dealing with the kind of focal lenghts I consider best for stitching (100mm on FX), pancake cameras are the exception but are practically very hard to focus accurately in the field (think low light levels,...),
- access to a very wide array of top quality lenses from 14 to 300 mm (to only mention those that I actually use), the image below was shot with a 300 f2.8 as an example:



- live view enables perfect focusing of the main subject with 100% accuracy 100% of the time,
- much better high ISO image quality enlarges dramatically the range of scenes that can be captures with stitching (windy situations in low light,...), the image below was shot at 800 ISO because of low light level and the need to maintain enough shutter speed to avoid clouds migration:



- more DoF thanks to the smaller format reduces the need to do DoF stacking and reduces the lenght of the exposures significantly at equal DoF, which is critical at sunset and sunrise where skies change every 15 sec of so,
- much better long exposure image quality and lack of dark frame substraction until 8 sec results in much easier low light panorama shooting,
- much longer battery life lends itself well to the large amount of capture induced by stitching,
- no need for color calibration when shooting wide,
- much better handling of cold weather,
- support of panoramic robotic heads,
- SDK enables automation of HDR/DoF when needed,
- total lack of moire reduces the need to check images at 100% pixel magnification in post and does therefore saves time,
- typically better availability of accessories from third party (L brackets,...),
- much lower price makes it actually possible to carry a credible back up body when doing long over seas missions,
- better support from third party raw conversion software from some of the backs give more options,
- the 3:2 vs 4:3 aspect ratio increases the pixel count on the long side of the frame and reduces the need to do multi-row stitching at equal resolution (a 24 MP d3x is about equivalent to a 28MP back from this standpoint)
- ...

Cheers,
Bernard

Mike, thanks for adding back the part of my comment I originally edited out. I am perfectly aware of the analog v. digital irony of digital imaging, but in the end, a traditional photograph is a physical medium, not electrical charges in the ether. Remember that when you back up your files yet again ten years from now on some yet to be invented storage device.

Yes ... every time I make yet another perfect, pixel-for-pixel copy of my captures and 'prints' with absolutely no information loss I will remember how I longed to do that with my film and slides ...

It is not enough to copy files - hardware can corrupt them without you being aware - you need to verify every copy, just like when burning DVDs, if you want to be sure that no bits were lost. That includes the initial one from the camera/camera storage.

All computer storage mediums have non-zero MTBF (mean time between failure) and error rates. Thus "xcopy /v/e" is my tool to copy files from camera storage to pc storage on Windows.

I would be interested to know if those small picture storage units (meant for use in the field where you don't have a laptop) do this verification or just initial copy.

I thought the "Film vs. Digital" war was over...

Uh, maybe you don't understand forum posting since you're a bit new in these parts...but when you say something either stupid or outrageous, other posters will take your post at face value (in the time frame you wrote it) and respond. Going back after the fact and editing (whether you note the edit or not) doesn't erase what you wrote nor invalidate somebody else quoting you.

Fact is, I would have responded to the rather ill-informed view you have of what constitutes digital capture but Mike beat me to it. In the end, digital isn't really any more or less fragile than film...you ever have film get wet in a basement flood and dry before you got the chance to take it out of sleeves? Between fixer stains, scratches or wet damage, I've lost more film photography to the elements over the years than I have lost digital.

Your view of what constitutes a photograph is horribly pedestrian and backwards...really doode, wake up and smell the silicon. Photography is, whatever the f$%#&k somebody says it is...but if you can't afford the new toys that doesn't give you free range to claim it ain't "writing with light", ya know? Whatever the heck you think THAT actually means, really, "writing" with light? That's how you translate "photo" & "graph", really?

I would call it a "pictorial device" made with "light". But hey, that's just me...

:~)

yeah, I like that, but really, if I was going to have a show in Chicago at Edelman or a "Big-Name" Gallery in NYC, I might be tempted to use his "ethereal abstraction of reality" as a truly obtuse line of verbiage to describe the life and death of light itself... as a metaphor for all photography. [we entomb light as a daily practice]

Hey, I'm still pissed Bill Mitchell (the Chicago art historian) basically called anyone using digital as a potential liar (removal of the witness aspect of a silver-gelatin exposure) compared the the "fact" once revered as "photography." The first photo was more like "hardened" by light, like today's printmaker's asphaltum... but I digress. History will make this argument another triviality in the ongoing (and changing) role of visual capture/imagemaking.

Totally OT but just have to say, Schewe, love your direct, say-it-like-you-feel-it style (no sarcasm; really like it). Sometimes I like it a bit less, but if it dried up, I know I'd really miss it. Who cares if you're right or wrong. Thank Christ for individuals in this increasingly bland/frightened time, and good on yer.

Well, _I_ care...golly, imagine my chagrin if proved wrong (it's been known to happen but I try really hard to be the first to confess when I screw up).

I don't know if you can tell, but I'm kinda filled with piss&vinegar at the moment cause my 3rd book is done (and shipping in a couple of weeks) so I have some "free time" to spend playing on the forums. Hum, I guess that's kinda fair warning for idiots and a$$holes huh?

:~)

.

Sorry you had so many mishaps with your darkroom work. Regarding your comments, you obviously don't get it.

As Wikipedia explains, 'The word "photography" comes from the Greek φώς (phos) "light" + γραφίς (graphis) "stylus", "paintbrush" or γραφή (graphê) "representation by means of lines" or "drawing", together meaning "drawing with light."' Implied in the word's definition is a permanent or semi-permanent image formed by light on a light-sensitive medium.

If done properly, an image may last for centuries. Indeed, in theory a well developed platinum print should last over a thousand years. To maintain that image in a digital format for a thousand years would require a heck of a lot of repeated back ups on electronic storage media.

Some food for thought: there is a very good reason why Hollywood studios require a final master copy on film for all movies made, even digitally produced ones.

deleted

.

Uh no...there is no implied permanence what so ever...some people bent over backward to TRY to make things more permanent but alas any art where paper is involved takes vastly more effort to conserve it properly than it does to create it. In reality, the current estimate time for carbon black ink jet prints at +300 years (depending on the paper again) that exceeds traditional silver gelatin unless you want to deep freeze it in total darkness.

Heck, we have no friggin' idea how hard it will or won't be to store digital media a 1,000 years but there is very little "paper" left from 1000 years ago.

But seriously, if you hate digital so much why spend time here? Aren't there any place left for analog lovers to hang out together any more?

deleted

Actually, my original post was about the obscenely high cost of switching to digital for photographers who have worked with large and medium format cameras in the past. One of the reasons for this, in my view, is the practical monopolization of the market by a few Danish companies, such as Phase One, which now owns Leaf and partially Mamiya, and Hasselblad, which is owned by a Chinese trading company and really operated by ex-Imacon management.

Franke & Heidecke has fallen by the wayside, so Jenoptik is leaving the market, divesting Sinar along the way. There is MegaVision in California, but I am not sure how much of a factor they are in the market.

.

I gave up on this thread when I read "film is the original digital medium"

Frankly astounding that anyone could post that. Film is an organic substance, it is not binary in nature. It is not "on or off"
We have exposure, and emulsion reacts to that, there are not two simple steps..the graduations of exposure are very many, as the film reacts to the light.

The idea is that through the microscopic size of each particle, and the statistical variation introduced by exposure, you end up with with something that appears as gradation on a macroscopic scale while being on/off at the particle level. Not saying anything about the rest of the kitchen table discussion wich seems like a insulting challenge of some sort, but this idea essentially describing a loose analogy between analog / digital personally appeals to me.

Will do.

But remember to digitize your colour negs and transparencies before they fade away.

Michael

The fact that at its fundamental level grains of silver halide are binary in nature has already been explained, so I'll just ask what being "organic" has to do with anything? There are numerous examples of binary behavior in nature, from the atomic level to the macro. Why should being "organic" somehow be considered superior when it comes to photography?

Light itself is both a particle (binary – there's a particle or there isn't a particle) AND a wave. Which one do YOU want it to be?

In the end it all comes down to the displayed image, whatever its manifestation, whatever its origin.

Michael

Looks like he doesn't know Stuffit Expander and hence has a hard time comprehending the full meaning of your comment.

This being my first post (hello everyone!) I can't help but wonder why there's always so much bickering going on in forums, all forums for that matter? (Have people no wives to listen to?)
Anyhow, I enjoy and appreciate the wealth of knowledge the members on this forum share with each other.
Thank you.

Regarding the "painting with light" comment ... Greek words phos ("light"), and graphis ("stylus", "paintbrush") or graphí, together meaning "drawing with light" ... indeed, it is the meaning of the word photography which became the name of a new technology. Yet, it is per se not the definition in which way/style/kind/form this "drawing with light" has to be achieved.

Let's step away from cameras, film or digital, for a moment.
I presume everyone here is familiar with the works of the old Dutch Master Rembrandt van Ryn.
He was the first to develop to perfection a new technique that entailed the concentration of light and the diffusion of luminosity from the deepest shade/darkness. Rembrandt's method became an entirely new direction in art expression and is regarded today as the key feature of the Dutch school (of painting) that followed in his footsteps.
I apologize for the history lesson. The reason why I'm bringing this up is simple. Rembrandt's technique can be summed up nicely as 'painting with light."
So in the widest sense of its meaning, instead of a camera loaded with film or containing a digital sensor, he used oil and canvas for his "photography."

Considering this, digital photography is just a sign of the times. As film was to plates, silver-plated copper, and photosensitive paper. And once a 'new kid on the block' is advanced enough to surpass its predecessors, differences can only be measured in units of taste or personal preference.


PS: By the way, the first Dutch artist of stature to break with the traditions of the Dutch school was Vincent van Gogh 200+ years later. Today he is considered a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist and the predecessor of Expressionism.
Guess, his revolutionary paintings must have caused a similar stir in emotions as digital photography does today. Funny how history tends to repeat itself.

Real men don't shoot color negs. You know that.

Dude, I get into that battle within my mind almost every day, and digital wins out about 90% of the time... "time" being the key factor here. For the other 10%, the ones that hit 40" or more on my 9800... right tool for the job. Love them both.

Here's one (and btw, I know earlier I wrote that stitching doesn't solve all issues, but I use it when appropriate, and it's not just for crop sensor cameras either):

Click to view attachment

Love that Mamiya glass and that 3D look. When the film goes, I'm going to adapt the lenses.

Sorry, dude, but it's true. Your mistake in logic is in thinking of the emulsion as a whole as opposed to the individual silver halide molecules which are the actual light sensitive materials in the emulsion. When a photon, or photons, of light strikes one of these molecules, an electron is kicked from the valence band into the conduction band, thereby rendering it "on", meaning it will react with a developer (become solid silver) at a much, much faster rate than non-exposed molecules. There is no half "on" or half "off". It's one or the other. Gradation comes in due to the fact that the emulsion is much thicker than the silver halide molecules, thus the molecules are essentially and randomly stacked atop one another. So, while the film/paper may appear analog, they are in fact the result of a digital process.

Four years of near obsolete photo science, sensitometry, and chemistry finally put to good use!

Thanks Michael. Or as I like to put it: film has billions of horribly low grade 1-bit photosites, with pathetically low S/N ratio and DR from having only two tonal levels. All the fine total gradations, dynamic range, and "low noise" performance of a good print come from "dithering". Larger film formats give better image quality on the same size of print even when using the same quality of individual photosites (same emulsion type), and they do it through using a lower degree of enlargement and thus dithering or smoothing out the imperfections more. In the modern jargon, having more "photosites per mm" and more "photosites per image" improves IQ attributes like dynamic range.

P. S. And as other posts remind us, light is also "digital", as in quantized.

I take it all back, I was wrong. I can now see film is in fact digital. In the same way my kettle is digital as well, or course it's either on or off, and the water temperature has nothing to do with it, just two simple states on or off, hot or cold..
Also I note that a car is digital too, yes it's either on or off, if we take it back to basics it's pure binary.
We could apply this interesting "digital slant" to just about everything, I am deeply humbled ;-)

The point being that discrete quantities at a small scale are perceived as continuous quantities at a large scale.

The modelization of physical phenomenon is often done through such a micro-marco approach where small scales phenomenon are modeled simply and statistics used to average their influence when looking at a system at our human scale.

The reason why you are not relating to all this is that the word digital means something else for you though. You are referring to a process, not to the underlying physics. The way I see it, digital means cold to you, you hate the clean alignement of photosite as opposed to the random mess of the silver grains on a film plane, you like the smell that pops out when opening a can of film and the process of snapping in a roll of 220 in its holder... and that's totally fine by me.

Cheers,
Bernard

I mostly agree with Mike on this, but some clarifications should be added. While silver salts, the basis of modern films, are essentially black or clear after development and fixing, they are crystals and exhibit growth dependent on the light level they are exposed to. Larger crystals on negatives represent lighter areas and smaller crystals represent darker grays. So, they are not directly equivalent to pixels, or photosites, on a modern DSLR sensor.

Also, like human sight, the representation of grays by silver halide films is logarithmic by nature, not linear as with sensors. For the record, all color films, negative or transparent, incorporate multiple color-filtered silver halide layers that are dyed and washed away during processing. In the Kodachrome process, the dyes are added during processing; in the E-6 Ektachrome and C-3 Ektacolor processes, they are part of the emulsion, hence the higher level of detail in Kodachrome.

Regarding "organic," films were once made from cellulose, a highly flammable material, but modern "safety" (i.e., post 1930) are polymer based and inflammable.

Relying on the quality of the "displayed image" is where, in my opinion, the argument gets confused. Are we comparing the absolute quality of silver halide films to DSLR sensors, OR are we REALLY comparing the quality of half-screened lithographic printing in a fine (Ansel Adams quality) book with the half-screened output of the latest Epson or HP printer? 8x10 contact prints on photo paper show more detail than any digital image (there is no screen), dye-sub prints by hand are just as good, and photogravure (a costly alternative) may also be better than an inkjet.

These are, in my mind, important points to discuss, in part to better motivate equipment manufacturers to give us the tools we really need.

Bernard,

As usual - outstanding photographs - excellent work, and many thanks for sharing. One of these days I need to get into panos more seriously - you've inspired me.

I think one other factor that may be worth mentioning in support of the pano approach - by careful selection of the overlapping strategy one can arrange to retain only the highest quality portions of the image the lens can produce in each contributing frame - usually away from the edges. That's what one would want to compare I suppose with the outcome of a single shot from a MFDB with a wide-enough angle lens to provide comparable field of view.

Cheers,

Mark

Edit: I deleted the images in quote to reduce post size.

My Epson prints are also a physical medium, and what I can do with today's technology far surpasses anything I was able to achieve with film be it colour or B&W, be it in my own darkroom or sent to a service. That's just my two-cents' worth based on my own operational experience. It isn't a general statement about the art of the possible in either medium because I don't know what that is - it's an abstract concept undefined and unbounded by any particular sample of work, with all due respect to the best work out there, film or digital. It is, however, a matter of measurable fact that today's inkjet printers and finest papers can produce B&W images with higher DMax than achievable with pre-digital technologies. And we will be able to save the image files indefinitely and intact with appropriate attention to timing of media conversion, which I appreciate having examined the condition of my Kodachrome slides shot over 50 years ago.

I don't know what you mean by "better", and much of this is a matter of taste. This kind of contention needs to be either acknowledged as the latter, or formally documented in terms of measurable, objective criteria defining "better".

On further consideration, to bring this discussion back "on-topic" - it is about needs, wants, affordability. How did it get into a tangent on film versus digital? I suppose it's because needs and wants can be conditioned by outcomes. But that said, is there some kind of relevant relationship between the potential image quality of film based images versus digital-based images and the relative costs of the equipment and stuff needed to maximize quality in each domain? If that's where it comes from, then it's off-base, because there is none and there's no reason to expect any. And anyone evaluating such relationships, would need to also include the value of time, waste, health effects and environmental impacts. Lots of Luck doing that. No. Each technology developed in its own time and place and its prices are based on the supply and demand conditions prevalent for those materials in real time. Even if for example photogravure prints remained the greatest medium that man ever invented (which I doubt - as nice as they are), it bears no relevance whatsoever to the value the market places on a MFDB, and as long as there is a market for these MFDBs, it means that an economically viable quantum of photographers prefer them to making - for example - photogravure prints for whatever the reasons. That's really where the rubber hits the road, because if too many people thought they'd get better images more easily doing photogravure, for eample, they would do photogravure and the MFDB market would collapse (that may be happening anyhow due to current economic conditions - I don't know - but certainly not because of competition from pre-digital processes of any kind). I think it's time to set aside the theological debating about historical processes and much like Bernard has been suggesting here, focus the discussion on the real trade-offs affecting how people would evaluate the key factors today - such as, does the technical output of a stitched threesome from a 1DsMk3 compare favourably with the same image from a P65? That's the kind of issue which could reasonably determine needs and wants in today's context, and it's also the kind of issue amenable to objective evaluation.

You sure about this? Are they "larger" and "smaller" or is there just more individual crystals affected or less. I can't see how the crystals would "grow" once they are suspended in the emulsion. I think they are larger because more individual crystals in a larger crystal are affected.

I'm not sure anyone was really comparing them to modern sensors. But at the very basic level of the chemical process, silver halide photography is built on the premise that hundreds of millions of crystals each are either exposed and developed into silver or unexposed and undeveloped and the result will then blend into a visual (analog) image. I don't think anyone is saying this is a digital process, but in fact it is more similar to a digital process than a modern sensor, which is truly an analog device, and must be converted to a digital representation of the data it receives.

Thank you Mark, much appreciated.

You raise a very good point indeed, I tend to forget that because the Zeiss 100mm f2.0 I have been using mostly is basically as good in the corners as it is in the center around f6.7/f8 - the aperture I use it at most of the time, but it is obviously not the case for all lenses.

Pano is fun once you get used to it. It can be frustrating at the beginning, but things are very smooth once you get a well defined routine, it is now very rare that I mess things up (don't even remember when that happened last):-)

Cheers,
Bernard

Now finding myself as an old-timer, when light is exposed to a photographic film, it converts silver salts to a pure silver crystal that grows dependent on the lumens hitting it. After fixing, the salts are removed and the silver remains inversely dense to the original light exposure. This is simply the basics of traditional photography using silver halide chemistry.

Photogravure, which is how our paper money is printed, is a very expensive medium, but was utilized by fine print photographers during the early part of the 20th century along with off-the-shelf platinum and palladium printing papers. Almost all modern printing up to ink-jet output has been done by lithographic printing, which relies on various screen levels for depth of detail. Present ink-jet printers produce extremely high screen levels, but cannot match an equivalent contact print.