Re: DSLR vs P&S a replay of Film vs Digital?

David J Taylor wrote:

Once you have saturated the electronic sensor, it delivers no more information about the highlights beyond the clipping limit, Film can. That's why I agree with those who say it has more dynamic range. How it's processed, and how you want to present that information on a print or a display is another matter. It may be that with 14-bit processing, and deliberate under-exposure with digital, that the dynamic range is equalled for practical scenes.


I have don't a lot of film scanning and for practical scenes digital has far more range. Film has extra range only on the over exposed end but losses the shadows very fast. The only way to make use of the extra range is to over expose film, by a lot. Say shooting your iso 100 film at iso 25, not you will have good shadow detail but your mid tones will have noise.

Film people often make a big deal about film not clipping the highlights, but the only scene where you have very small area of very high highlight, say a scene lit with street light where you have the lights in the image. Lets say the street lights are 6 stops brighter then any other part of the scene, what you going to do with the data in the negative that captured that detail, if you make a print that is going to look even close to right you will need to clip the highlights anyway. Same thing if you display the image on a computer screen.

If you goof with film and over expose my 1 stop you can still get a good looking image, but just don't try to under expose my 1 stop. If I under expose my 3 stops I still get a good looking image, if you over expose film by three stops you can get an image but it will not look all that good. But also remember this, say the right exposure for a scene is 1/60 sec, and I under expose by three stops, I am exposing at 1/480 sec,
with film to over expose by three stop you would have to be shooting at 1/7.5 sec.

Roger Clark did some test on the range of film vs. digital and digital came out looking far better.
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/dynamicrange2/

Now a careful read of Roger's test shows a possible flaw, he did not over expose the film, had he over exposed the film a couple of stops it would have came much closer to matching the digital image. But not many of us are, or in my were, willing to over expose our negatives by a huge amount just to try and get a more range.

Scott
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