The guy at the photo store says that I can get better picture quality on my computer screen by scanning a 35 mm picture than by taking a picture with a digital camera. This surprised me and I wonder if he is correct. Can anyone contrast the quality of picture from these three methods:
1) Scanning a 35 mm picture
2) Scanning a 35 mm negative
3) Taking a digital picture
I’m sure the specific equipment used would make a big difference. To keep things somewhat consistent, assume above average quality/price, but not top of the line quality/price.
The new issue of DIscover magazine has a great article about the current state of photography. It said something along the lines that an ASA 100 photo would include the equivilent of 20 million pixels. Most current digital cameras only have about 2 million pixels. Scanners, of course, will have their own limitaions.
As you say in your OP, the equipment used makes a big difference.
Assuming a reasonably good 35mm camera, scanning a slide or negative on equipment made for that purpose, cost $1000, would give the best results.
Scanning the print on a flatbed scanner would be less desireable because the print is not the first generation. The print contains less dynamic range then the negative or slide. The number of pixels available depends on the scanner. Scanning a 4x6 print at 600 PPI results in 8.6 million pixels.
The newer digital cameras such as Nikon 990 or Olympus 3030 provide just over 3 million pixels.
Most monitors image at approx 72-75 PPI. I imagine that you want to fill the screen with the image. A digital camera with 2 million pixel resolution is more than enough. That even allows for some cropping or the image.
However, making prints is a different story. There you want all the pixels you can afford.
With a good photo printer and one of these cameras, prints up to 8x10 are virtually indistinguishable from film prints.
Check out the Digital Camera Resource web site at http://www.dcresource.com for a lot more information.
I’ve working in the printing biz for about 7 years now and the best scans I’ve ever seen have been from color slides scanned on a drum scanner. However, unless you’ve got a few thousand to spend on scanner, this might not be your best option.
Digital cameras are great for on screen, but don’t have the resolution for fine printwork. With a good photo manipulation progrem (ie: photoshop) you can take a scan made from a print, play with the color levels, contrast and whatever, and get some great results. I’ve found that when printing, 200 dpi is usually your best bet. Much smaller decreases the quality and bigger just takes up space.
As andyman says, drum scanners are the best but out of reach for most of us. One consumer grade scanner I use a lot is a HP Photosmart scanner. It can scan 35mm slides or negatives as well as prints up to 5x7 inch.
It’s not a drum scanner, but does a reasonable job for a consumer grade product. I recently scanned some of my 40 year old Kodachrome slides and was pleased with the results.
However, I still love my Nikon CP950 because I can shoot, download and view or e-mail in just a few moments. If I had to wait and have film or slides processed I’d lose the please or sending an e-mail with a photo and being able to say…look what the storm did to my trees…
I have no doubt digital cameras are developing fast and in a few years they will replace traditional film cameras… but not yet. If you do only 2 or 3 rolls a year like I do, staying with your old camera is much cheaper. Digital cameras are way too expensive.
I do have a computer cam, a Kodak DVC323 which I bought for about $70 and it gives good quality at 640x480 pixels. Hooked up to my laptop it is reasonably portable.
For the rest I just use film and scan the prints. The scanner makes a great tool, not only for scanning photos and documents but also objects that are reasonably flat.
As other have posted you need a bazillion pixels to equal the quality of film. I find it’s best to decide what final output is required and work backward from there. I find that to get an acceptable image on glossy photo paper with an HP722 I need approx. 150 image pixels per printed inch. This isn’t too far off from the halftone pattern used in high quality magazine prints. With a decent source image I find this makes a quit acceptable “arm’s length” print. You won’t fool anyone who looks closely but it’s quite good enough for my walls. For an 8"x10" then I’d need a source image of at least 1200x1500 pixels. That said the 2.3 megapixel cameras would be marginal so I’m lusting after one of the high end Nikons like GaryM uses but I’m not ready to pony up the bucks.
FWIW I have an ultra cheapie digital that is marginal for web photos and even then only under perfefct lighting conditions. I stick with my old Nikon F2A and F3 with a Visioneer 8100B scanner and on occasion borrow the Nikon Coolscan film scanner at work. I may convince myself to buy a 1.3 megapixel for web work and the Vegas Doper bash in September.
I read an interesting article that I have a vague recollection of. It said that Fuji (I think) had developed a new CCD (charge-coupled device) for digital imaging that had hexagons instead of squares for pixels. This new development , once deployed, will greatly increase the quality of digital images, although still not to the same level as a film camera. IIRC, I also have a vague recollection of reading about a new process for film photography that will greatly increase the quality of conventional photographs.
It seems that both methods are still improving, so if quality is your priority, go for film. If convenience and speed are your priorities, go digital.
Myself, I use both. BTW, sorry for the vagueness above, I would do some further research, but I gotta go!
I hear drum scanners have high maintenance cost - it usually costs tens of dollars per scan (per image, that is).
If you want to compare $500 slide scanners to $500 digital cameras, in my experience the slide scanner can produce better images. But I produce decent images more consistently on the digital camera. It takes a lot of work to get a good image from a scanner because so many steps are involved - you need to take a good negative or slide to begin with, handle it with extreme care to avoid dust, and adjust the scanning parameters till you get a good scan. Being an inexperienced amateur, it takes me 10 minutes per image to get a satisfactory (for me) scan. I can get a comparable image by just pressing the button on my Nikon CP900 digital camera.
By the way, the Fuji ‘super honeycomb’ CCDs are already widely used in their digital cameras. They use octagonal pixels, not hexagonal, and Fiji claims that their 2.6-megapixel units are ‘4-megapixel equivalent’. The general consensus seems to be that they are comparable to 3-megapixel cameras from everyone else.
scr4, you’re right about the cost of scanning with a drum scanner, but that’s if you go to a professional lab or printing service. Of course, they charge huge markup. The last drum scanner I worked on cost about $100,000. The main reason they charged so much was to get their money back on the scanner. PLUS - you could not be a newbie and run it. I was lucky enough to have used a smaller one by the same company in my previous job. The day of my interview, which happened to be a Saturday (they made special arrangements for me since I lived 4 hours away) someone came in to get a scan done. Talk about a trial by fire! They asked me if I could do it, I said sure! In 5 minutes I had a great scan done.
This particular scanner was good enough that I could scan from a 35mm slide (or neg, slides preferrably) to billboard size. SWEET!
But I digress… Lately I have been seeing digital cameras that give better picture quality and better resolution, and I won’t be surprised if in the next couple years they don’t replace regualar cameras. One of the main problems has been storage of the information. Some dig cams can plug into your comp and then download the info, some download to a floppy. The latest one I’ve seen downloaded into a data card. Depending on your method of transport, you can only carry so much info. JPEGing things does not help much. When you JPEG a pic, you lose quality.
Anywho, it seems like everyone trades pics online now. Why not go ahead and get a cheaper dig cam for now, the prices on the better ones will come down soon.
PS: scr4, the last time we had to have a tech come and look at the bigboy drum scanner we had they wanted to charge us $5g per day. Sorry I didn’t mention that before, but I’m typing as it comes. (Actually we had a warranty… took us a couple days for them to acknowledge this!)
For the most part, JPEG compression loses nothing but disk space. It is pretty much impossible to tell the difference with the human eye. In fact, if you do a pixel by pixel comparison, you often find that not a single pixel is different, and you’ve saved 75% of the space. While the algorithm is “lossy”, in practice it isn’t. Most 3 megapixel images are stored in about 800K with no loss of quality.
The Compact Flash II cards now take a 340 meg micro drive, and a 200 meg CF I card is on the way. That’s probably the direction of storage for digital cameras. You can then buy a $40 card reader, pull the card from your camera and plug it in the reader, and it looks like an extra disk to you PC.
All the current crop of cameras use some sort of data card, either CF, SmartCard, or Sony Memory Stick. Sony still has some cameras that use a floppy, but they are pretty much useless due to the size of the images these days.
If you are printing pictures less than 11 x 14, you can get a 3 megapixel camera today and never notice a loss in quality vs film. The main issue IMO are the lenses that folks like me have invested in and don’t want to give up or re-purchase.
Telemark is certainly correct about the JPG quality issue, provided you use low compression rates. Tests done with PhotoShop confirm little if any difference between an uncompressed image and a high quality JPG.
As stated by voltaire, decide what the desired result is, then determine the best way to get there.
A digital can’t be beat for speed and 35mm, or larger, film can’t be beat for overall quality.
And if you go digital, be sure to get a card reader as well as NiMh batteries and a MaHA 204F charger.
JPGs are notorious for changing how a pic shows up based on the compression rate. http://www.cwcm.net/compress.html shows you what happens with compression on the second two pictures with agressive compression.
The first pic is a gif, excellent for graphics with few colors. The second two are jpgs. The second pic shows an altered graphic used from the client’s original gif file (this was a year and a half ago) changed to jpg format. The third clearly shows the dramatic difference that jpg compression does in fact alter the original to a great degree.
In my own experience, yes having pictures scanned at a professional printer is the best way to go. Digital camaras should not be used for print at this time.
Scanners usually have a better pixel quality and usually you can manipulate them in the front end. With a digital camara you get what you took.
I am new to digital camaras – aka working with them, but I have always found that pictures that are scanned are usually higher in quality when a client offers them.
Oh and BTW, for my web stuff, I plan on getting a digital camara with in the next month.
This depends a lot on how high you set the jpg compression, and the type of image. Images with lots of edges, particularly line art (such as maps, charts, schematics, etc.) often look much worse with jpg compression. These images are often computer-generated, not real-life images. On the other hand, typical photographs can compress very well, especially for web work.
I agree. GIF is best suited for documents and graphics with solid colors and no shades. JPEG is best suited for photographs and similars. You can adjust the level of compression with JPG from near perfect reproduction and less compression to great compression and noticeable loss of quality. Once you have compressed hundreds of graphics you get a pretty good feel for what to expect in every case. I hate it when people email me a 1 MB graphic file which I can compress to 40KB without much loss of quality.
I was mainly talking about the JPEG compression algorithms used in the cameras themselves before storing to memory. The X megapixel cameras store X megapixels in raw TIFF form, but if you use the JPEG compression the images are usually about .25 the size.
Of course it’s possible to compress images and lose quality using JPEG. The compression level used in the camera is such that you experience almost no loss of image quality, if any.
So, if you take picture at maximum quality with a 3.4 megapixel camera, your image on disk is about 800K. You could save it as a 3.4 meg TIFF file, but there’s really no point, as the quality is no better. Comparing the two will often show not a single pixel difference.
And of course, JPEG works much better for photos. Computer generated graphics are much better in GIF. But we’re talking about photos here.
And with the current crop of 3 Megapixel cameras, you can do excellent print work. For anything under 8 x 10, you’ll be hard pressed to notice any difference.
