RE: [Leica]: Vs: digital

["Austin Franklin" <darkroom@ix.netcom.com>]

> I was at the Photo Expo in New York on Friday.  Canon had an interesting
> digital photography exhibition.  They stuck a model in a small studio
> setup, gave a photographer a D30 (Canon's "consumer" digital SLR, of
> modest specs), and started taking pictures.  The D30 does not use
> special lenses; it uses EOS lenses.  The photographer was using the
> 28-135mm zoom.  Moments after the picture was taken, it was transmitted
> to large video screens for the audience to see.  The photos were then
> printed out on one of Canon's high-end wide-paper printers.  They came
> out poster-sized, perhaps two feet by three feet - larger than anything
> I'd try with a 35mm camera.  They  passed the prints around; the prints
> were beautiful - lovely color, lovely contrast, nice sharpness, even
> from very close up.  The photographer explained that he was using only
> jpeg's, and not RAW or whatever images.  The guy printing the stuff out
> said all he did was about 30 seconds worth of Photoshop work - a little
> resize, a little crop, a little sharpening.
>
> I'd like to be able to do this with my M camera, or something similar.
>
> But you're right, in the end the pictures had all these false pixels and
> stuff.  It was awful.  I can't believe they went in public and
> humiliated themselves with that technology.  Really appalling.
>
> C.
> http://www.availabledark.com

This sounds entirely silly.  Without having seen the prints first hand, I
really can't comment...  Simple arithmetic.  The Canon D30 sensor is 2160 x
1440.  You said the output was 24" x 36".  That means the printout, without
any interpolation (except what is done in the camera to make up for the fact
that it takes four sensors to get one pixels worth of color information) was
60 PIXELS PER INCH.  I have used a Canon D30.  It is a very good tool for
the right job, but that job has limitations.

Looking at an image on a TV screen is hardly indicative of a cameras
performance!  Do you have ANY clue what the resolution is of a TV?

This is a Leica group for God's sake.  If you thought that a ZOOM lense on a
Canon gives you good enough results, then you probably don't really
appreciate your Leica.  What you were probably looking at was an image that
had something like Genuine Fractals run on it, and had very sharp edge
detail, but NO texture detail.  If you don't know enough to look for that,
you can believe that the image is actually much better than it really is.

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