Halide emulsion vs digital. Was RE: Warning of major NHS IT overspend

["Owen Lewis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Brian Beesley
> Sent: 02 November 2004 15:30
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Warning of major NHS IT overspend
>
>
> On Tuesday 02 November 2004 14:57, Owen Lewis wrote:
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of
> Brian Beesley
> > > Sent: 02 November 2004 14:38
> > > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > > Subject: Re: Warning of major NHS IT overspend
> > >
>
> No-one can afford a 2 million pixel square detector (4 Tpel).
> Even 10 million
> pixels in total is unusual and expensive, giving an effective
> resolution of
> 400 mm / sqrt(10,000,000) = 0.126 mm.
>
> Silver halide grain technology is cheap for resolutions to around
> 0.01mm. In
> fact making grain bigger than 0.01mm is hard, which is why X-ray
> film plates
> may require more exposure than relatively low-resolution digital sensors.
>
> You can't have it both ways ... with digital sensors you can get more
> resolution - provided you can afford the cost of a large sensor
> array - or
> more sensitivity - provided you accept relatively poor resolution
> - but not
> both. As usual, there are physical limitiations.

If you say so. For myself, I think that the writing has been on the wall for
emulsion since the late 80's at the least. (When did satellite
reconnaissance stop sending emulsion capsules back to Earth?). The happy
snappy market is something else again.

One of my boys decided that his thing in life would be to make films. He has
a fair artistic bent but had a very limited technical education. He insisted
on making his first short on 35mm stock (the professionals' choice and soooo
much superior to anything else. Digital? Spit!).  He now has a business that
digitally edits video and hasn't touched emulsion for some years.  Does
anyone still shoot movies on 35mm stock?


Owen