Nikon D800 DSLR with 36 MP to be announced on February 7, 2012

Darrell Larose writes:

nospam wrote:
In ,
wrote:

I shot film since 1970 and a dSLR will blow high ISO films out of the
water. I see many cameras now with in-camera HDR to address dynamic range
(the other weak area of digital!)

Not compared to film it aint, and it's getting better thanks to that low
noise. Hopefully we'll see true 16 bit capabilty soon, well beyond anything
film could manage. HDR is just another useful tool, because you can, not
because it's necessarily a particularly weak area.

digital is already well beyond anything film could manage, and has been
for many years.

Generally film and digital can't really be compared, these points are
based on real world opinions.

From my experience in photo labs, a 2004 6-8 megapixel APS-C dSLR
camera beat the larger 35mm ISO 100 Kodacolor negative, as there was
always a bit of quality loss in most machine prints. And considering
the APS-C format was closer to a 35mm half-frame, that is very
telling. The 4x6" print was a large as 75% of all prints made. The
film may have recorded more lp/in but suffered losses in machine
printing. Color slide film like Fuji Velvia and Astia was 8-10
megapixels. Kodak Techpan was around 15-20 MP. Again comparing a
24x36mm film frame with the 15.7 x 23.6 mm (APS-C).

Resolution is important for aerial and scientific photos and such. For
pictorial uses it's much less important.

Generally, with film, "acceptable enlargeability" (subjective, of
course) was limited by grain artifacts well before lack of resolution
became a visible problem. With digital this is much less the case.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, ; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info