 BetterPhoto Member |
Best quality prints Which will result in the best print: 1 35mm color slide either positive or negative - scanned and then printed. OR 2 Digital camera direct to a digital printer. 3 Obviously several things are important - #of pixels for camera - printer capability etc. However there must be a trade off - wonder that it is??
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Ken Pang |
The 35mm film scanned will generally provide best quality, all else being equal. Of course, a cheap scanner compared to a good camera will change that. There are a lot of things to take into account here: Quality of the lens - digital camera lenses except for Digital SLRs tend to be poor. Quality of the CCD. Tend to be much higher in film scanners which can take as long as it wants to do progressive scans on the film, as opposed to cameras which have to "scan" instantly Quality of the film used to take the shot. A cheap film might provide a poor contrast/sharpness image to be scanned. Then you get things like size of the CCD. You get more raw pixels from a scanner. There are one heck of a lot of variables to be considered here, so don't take my answer as authorative - but scanning a neg or a slide is usually better in quality for the image, but the trade off is cost and convenience.
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doug Nelson |
Ken hits the nail on the head here. Image quality still depends on the quality of the optics that focus the image onto film or a CCD. Some digital cameras have decent optics; the Nikon Coolpix 995 has been taken on assignment by pros. The trouble with most of these small digital camera optics is that they are zooms with too ambitious a range. You may take a hit in resolution or distortion somewhere along that range. The initial cost of a quality film scanner ($1,700 for Nikon 4000, $900 for Coolscan IV) throws most people. My SLR and 3 lenses didn't cost that much. The payoff is total control over your image quality. You use the best optics you can afford to shoot the best film for the situation (Kodak's Supra negative film scans beautifully, Fuji Provia for slides), do your cropping and tonal adjustment in your own digital darkroom, and print better prints on your inkjet than any commercial processing. A $300 printer prints true photo quality. Epson has a new one for $150 (C80?) that is getting rave reviews. For another opinion on digital cameras, see Michael Reichmann's review of the Canon D30 digital SLR ($3,000, plus lenses) at luminous-landscape.com.
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