[filmscanners] Re: IV ED dynamic range... DYNAMIC RANGE!

["Arthur Entlich" <artistic-1@shaw.ca>]

I would agree with your comments IF:

1) indeed the competitors spec usage could be PROVEN to be in opposition
to either standard practice or was indeed a misuse of terms.

Based upon the "discussion" which occurred here recently regarding the
use of "density range", "dynamic range", etc., it seems fairly hopeless.

Partially speaking, this is because there have not been agreed upon
definitions or standards within the industry.

2) the cost of the "educative" process would be shared among the players
within the industry

There is more than one way to damage a competitor.  You can indeed play
with the numbers to make your product spec out better and not play by
the same "rules" as you competitors, or you can goad your competitor to
spend their advertising budget on trying to prove that their competition
is being dishonest... Individual companies lose when they try to prove
someone else in their industry is being dishonest, and that is why you
almost NEVER see these types of advertising campaigns used and even less
often are they successful.

And law suits are usually equally unsuccessful, again because the terms
are intentionally slippery enough so no one is actually "lying".

It ends up sounding like sour grapes, and the "correct" party is often
more damaged by it than helped.

In almost every case where the public was educated in these matters it
was done through either neutral third parties, or by institutes which
are specifically developed (and financed by a whole industry sector) to
standardize specs because chaos ensured and the public was ignoring all
stats and specs, since none could necessarily be trusted to be meaningful.

Art



Clark Guy wrote:

> HI, Constantine!
>
> I disagree--- if the competition insists on using bogus specs, you should
> stay above that, and point out the fact that the competitor's specs ARE
> bogus, and why.
>
> Educate the consumer, don't try to BS us!   It's been tried before by all
> sorts of industries, with generally bad outcomes in the long term.  (look at
> the High Fidelity Audio community for example!)
>
> Thanx!
>
> Guy Clark
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kapetanakis, Constantine [mailto:KAPETAC@polaroid.com]
> Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2002 9:58 AM
> To: Clark Guy
> Subject: [filmscanners] RE: IV ED dynamic range... DYNAMIC RANGE!
>
>
> You are right. The max optical density of our ss120 scanner as an example is
> about 3.6~3.7. We measure this we a slide we made in house on Velvia film.
> Each step on the gray scale is .1 density units different and we look at the
> point of clipping as the maximum density.
>  However, when Nikon starts advertising theoretical maximums of 4.2 ( 14
> bits) then we have to start advertising the same way.
>
>
>


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe by mail to listserver@halftone.co.uk, with 'unsubscribe 
filmscanners'
or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or 
body