Well, Hi Lin!!
Gee, I was wondering when we would have a good discussion, though this isn't the one I was planning.
A small amount of background on my post... You see, I was waiting till someone once again trotted out the Michael Reichmann "d30_vs_film" link. (Norman Koren says, for example, that he couldn't reconcile Michael's D30 claims with other data, and now feels with the D60 post that Michael has changed his tune. Norman also feels that Michael's D60 post images support Norman's numbers better than the D60 post text.) My feeling is that Michael perhaps had more things in mind than he was clearly expressing. At any rate, Michael's film/digital use and appreciation are quite balanced.
Okay, Lin, let's talk...
I don't know how much of Ken Rockwell's site you looked at before you concluded that he has a "rather decided film bias", but it seems to me not much. He loves digital cameras. For example, look at how he writes about the D100:
http://kenrockwell.com/nikon/d100.htm
And, of course, he owns a Nikon D1H, and writes about it here:
http://kenrockwell.com/nikon/d1x.htm
Oh, by the way, he doesn't seem to think a whole lot of 35mm
http://kenrockwell.com/tech/format.htm (and gives the briefest of summaries of his digital experience on the same page under the "Digital" heading). Gamut? Certainly sRGB reduces RGB's gamut. RGB's gamut is not perfect either, but at any rate, people now go for "snappy" colors and images. We don't like real color. Velvia is not the answer, D30/D60s are not the answer. Michael Reichman felt that the 1D came closer to color truth than a D30, and he seemed to like D30 colors better.
Oh, you say that your findings agree very closely with those of Michael's. On his D60 page, he states that scanned 35mm will support prints to Super-A3, while A3 is the limit for the D60.
Fine, you stopped using film in 1995. You have your and your clients needs to meet.
I hope I know how to look at things and like to cite resources for people that do the same. Seems to me that Ken knows
very much what he is talking about--that doesn't mean that his experience is the same as yours, though. That's life. But hey, poke around on his site some and see what you think.
I put up the particular scan excerpt because I don't think that "grain" ("dye clumps") is anything to whip out the silver crucifixes over. We'll get to your sky and shadow areas in a moment, but what I had put up was a portion of "ASA 200" film scanned at 4000 dpi. Did you see any dye clumps in the crop?
Okay, the full scan from the crop I put up did not have any sky in it, nor did it have any deeply shaded areas. No doubt this won't satisfy you either, but it is again an actual pixels crop from a 4000 dpi scan of Fuji Provia 100F pushed to ASA 200:
This was shot pre-sunrise against some lightening sky. I'm sorry, I am not doing any fresh scans for you, my crops were things I already had on the server.
I can't argue with what you or our associates have seen. We all learn to trust our eyes. After all, we
are photographers.
Grain free quality? I must care about it somewhat, I favor fine grain slide films, but I truly like 35mm. I like projecting it and working with good slide films. Yep, a person can go bigger with other formats. I make 300 dpi inkjet "contact prints" of my 4000 dpi scans. Suits me to a tee, and just perhaps people are encouraging me to start working with galleries. But, of course, there are
very professional, and well known, landscape photographers who do their work in 35mm.
Okay, the final things. You mentioned shadow noise (grain) and sky noise (grain), hmmm, seems to me the same things people worry about in their digitally originated photographs.
Frankly, in dark areas of my scans scanner noise can be a problem, especially if I increase scan duration to put more light through dark slides. Minolta Multi Pro scanners can go deeper and multi scan to average out the noise. That, of course, will do nothing about any dye clumps, but they don't present me with a problem, nor have I seen that be any special issue with the dark region Multi Pro multiple scan examples I have seen from reviewers. And I could make 360 dpi "contact prints".
Skies, ah skies... They are an interesting situation. People like to use them for an example, and they truly
can appear objectionably "noisy". They seem to be more of a problem in my size reduced jpegs than in my 300 dpi prints. Geez, I have a roll of Velvia I had pushed to ASA 200, yeah, Velvia can make grain. Printed the scan at 300 dpi, sharpened the sky a smidge less than the rest of the photograph, you'd never know from an inkjet print how I tortured that poor roll of film. However, a size reduced jpeg of the same frame
does need special handling.
But here's the thing. How many people really look at real skies and really think about them? How are skies constructed? Why do they take on any color at all? How many people have looked at the sky makeup
between clouds? Or in some region of even non-cloudy skies? Really, skies are massive soups of dust, and moisture, reflection and refraction. There's nothing truly homogeneous about them, though I would expect a sky in a desert region with no airborne dust and 0% humidity to fare better in that respect. I won't claim this is everything, but did you ever wonder how a physical object that has a smooth color somewhere in the sky gamut of possibilities can look so much less noisy? I've looked at skies deeply around where I live. Even "smooth" blue areas have a lot going on in them. When film and digital capture that, and maybe boost contrast a bit, people are going to worry about what they see. How many people really
look at a real sky?
My best,
Ed
