[filmscanners] RE: Newish Digital Tech

["Paul D. DeRocco" <pderocco@ix.netcom.com>]

> From: David J. Littleboy
>
> Exactly. All Foveon does is hide the artifacts so you can't recognize them
> when you look at the image. In the res test charts, it "resolves" a 9-band
> image as 9 bands for some frequencies, 7 bands for other frequencies, 5
> bands for other frequencies; all with the same contrast. This is seriously
> unacceptable. Without an anti-aliasing filter, it's not a camera, it's a
> random data generator.

Oh, come on. No digicam meets those standards. The only way to eliminate
aliasing in a pixelated sensor is to put a diffuser over it, and I don't
think anyone does that. There's certainly no intrinsic reason why such a
thing would be easier to do on a Bayer chip than on the Foveon. One of the
advantages of the Foveon, as I already stated, is that the aliasing matches
for all three colors, so you don't get colored moire from a monochome
texture.

> So? Most serious photographers take RAW images and postprocess on their
> PC/Mac. Several seconds per image is no big deal. Also, special-purpose
> hardware is always orders of magnitude faster than
> general-purpose hardware.

I shoot raw, too, but only because it's the only way to get all 12-bits of
A/D resolution out of the camera. I'd much rather shoot JPEG2000 files,
because I wouldn't have to wait ten seconds for each file to be written to
the Microdrive, and I'd be able to fit several hundred more files on it.

> Again, all the cameras use special-purpose hardware. Hardware is cheap and
> fast. The processing time issue is completely bogus.

Are you saying that the typical digicam has more DSP horsepower than my
1.7GHz Pentium 4? I suppose it's possible that all digicams have some really
clever custom parallel processing chip, but I doubt it.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@ix.netcom.com


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