The Electrical Engineer

  As I've been revisiting using a Digital Camera as a film scanner, I thought it might be interesting to see if using a Foveon Style sensor would have any advantages. While it only has 25 effective megapixels, for 35mm scans and smaller, the extra color information and sharpness of the foveon sensor should be more than enough under ideal conditions. One note is that the shutter slap on the sdqh isn't great and made getting sharp scans more difficult than a mirrorless with an Eletronic shutter. But what I am interested most in is if the color response would appear to offer any advantage.  For this setup it's more or less the same as my latest venture into film scanning: DSLR SCANNING sdqh with 105mm macro lens While there are three kinds of film I could test, I think slides make for the easiest comparison as they result in an image without any additional processing to compensate for the color base or being inverted. Because of the greater shadow noise of the sdqh at the same...

If you shoot film, the worst part of the entire process has to be getting the images into a computer. While there might still be some purists who preserve a completely analogue workflow between capture, development, print.  I respect people who do that, as it's becoming a much rarer art form itself. Most people these days want their photos to exist on a computer to edit and/or share. There are a few options to accomplish this, but the traditional method was to scan with a dedicated scanner. And scanning is its own entire subject with its own considerations separate from simply taking the photo. There is an entire process you have to learn for any given scanner to get results you can be happy with. I actually put together a short piece on that about a decade ago on my minor annoyance with people comparing scanners more-so then the film: Mindful of Film Scanning Which to bring this all back around is to say, scanning and scanners are really annoying, fiddly, and generally the worst s...

(Note: I am giving Medium a try as I find the layouts look nice. It's here ) Film often gets the short sell. Digital came onto the scene and it no longer made sense for the vast majority of photographers and snapshot shooters to keep buying rolls. But often I observe digital shooters taking cheap shots at the medium. They mistake soft scans for a soft medium. And while the nature of film inherently lacks the sterile clarity of digital, much of that softness comes from a different source. Which is why I wanted to attempt a visualization the impact scanning can have. But before that comparison we need to understand that the resolution of a camera or a scanner are not all created equal. The Resolution in MP(megapixels) or dpi(dots per inch) listed on the box often isn’t a literal translation to what is resolved (the fine detail we can see).  Shooting digital it’s very easy to take this distinction for granted but it still applies. Am image from a 24MP camera might onl...