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

Mr. Strat wrote:
In article , Scott W
wrote:

John do you know what we are talking about with the blink on over
exposure? From what you are saying it would seem that perhaps you
don't, the blink on over exposure show what parts of the image are over
exposed by blinking them, one quick look and you can tell just what
highlights are lost.

We're still trying to figure out just what it is that Navas does know.
So far, the list seems pretty short.

Mr. Strat: Both you and Mr. Navas are new to at least some of these
groups, but apparently not to each other.

Could you kindly killfile one another?

Sincerely and with all due regard,

--
john mcwilliams

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 04:22:51 -1000, Scott W wrote
in :

John Navas wrote:

I usually keep live histogram turned on -- it's cheap insurance -- and
with Contrast turned down to Low, the live histogram on my FZ8 is almost
always helpful -- I can usually get safety margin on both ends of
luminosity, and when there is a highlight problem the usual giveaway is
a tail that extends to the right of the graph. It's a useful feature
I'd be very reluctant to give up.

Whether you want to believe it or not your camera has a very small
dynamic range compare to many others, and as such getting the exposure
right is much more critical for you.

While the range isn't as wide as larger sensors, it's actually pretty
good, and sufficient for my needs.

(See my earlier reply for why your assessment of dynamic range from test
images is flawed.)

There was a time that I was using the auto bracket function of my
camera, exposing three shoots, one in the middle one 1 stop over and one
1 stop under. I stopped doing this when I realized that not only was
the center exposure good enough but I could almost always use the outer
two as well.

Me too.

Try and experiment some time with you camera, shoot a scene with the
best exposure you can then shoot it three stops down, do you get a good
photo?

I don't care about that.

What all of this means is that you need to be far more careful about
your exposure, kind of like shooting slide film.

When I use the proper settings I find the camera to almost always be
spot on, so it's not something I worry about. Slide film is much less
forgiving, yet lots of us got lots of great images with it.

--
Best regards,
John Navas
Panasonic DMC-FZ8 (and several others)

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 04:08:47 -1000, Scott W wrote
in :

John Navas wrote:

Specular highlights are actually easy to spot on a histogram as a far
brightness spike, whereas burned out highlights are a tail.

Ok, I don't understand the part of burned out highlights being a tail,
why not levels pushed up against the right side of the histogram?

Because then the whole graph is skewed to the right.

With Contrast set to Low, the camera and/or I rarely have any problem
keeping the histogram from hitting the ends of the scale.

I don't know what your histogram looks like, but when I am raw
converting the histogram will tell me if I have blown larger areas, like
the sky, but a small area, like a bit of white shirt on a sunny day will
often be too small to show up on the histogram. Most all raw converter
have a mode to show you where areas are blown, both in the highlights
and the shadows, and this often works far better then the histogram.

The histogram on my DSLR works about the same, I can get a good idea if
the sky is blown buy looking at it, but for small areas I need the blink
thing.

I'm guessing you're talking about the 1 in 100 image, whereas I'm
talking about the other 99.

My keeper rate with digital is even lower than with film (thanks to more
latitude to experiment), and I'm usually not worried about whether or
not a particular image is a keeper or not -- very few get rejected on
technical quality alone.

--
Best regards,
John Navas
Panasonic DMC-FZ8 (and several others)

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 04:00:52 -1000, Scott W wrote
in :

Neil Harrington wrote:

Unfortunately true. For John Q. Consumer, it seems "How many megapixels?" is
considered the most important question, even though he'll seldom if ever
have any prints made larger than 4x6 and actually will view most of 'em on
his computer monitor. In either case he won't need any more than 2
megapixels, but imagine trying to sell a 2MP camera today.

Heh. I can remember photo magazine articles with titles like Do You Really
Need Two Megapixels? -- back when that was about as much as you could get at
any price. In '96 or so they were selling a lot of cameras with half a
megapixel or less.

I have mixed feeling as the mega pixel race, when the sensor size is not
increased we get very bad cameras that cram 8MP or more onto a 1/2.5
inch chip.

We also don't seem to have cameras anymore with pixels counts in the
2-3MP range, I did a quick look at B&H and found one at 4MP, everything
else was either a toy with 0.3 or had 5 and above. A 2MP camera make
with a 1/2.5 senor could be a useful camera to have, I would want one,
but is is simply not made anymore.


My Olympus C-2500L has only 2.34 MP on a 2/3" sensor, and was pretty
much the state of the art in its day, but images from my FZ8 blow it
away, especially when downsampled to the same resolution.

--
Best regards,
John Navas
Panasonic DMC-FZ8 (and several others)

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:55:35 -0800, John McWilliams
wrote in :

Mr. Strat wrote:
In article , Scott W
wrote:

John do you know what we are talking about with the blink on over
exposure? From what you are saying it would seem that perhaps you
don't, the blink on over exposure show what parts of the image are over
exposed by blinking them, one quick look and you can tell just what
highlights are lost.

We're still trying to figure out just what it is that Navas does know.
So far, the list seems pretty short.

Mr. Strat: Both you and Mr. Navas are new to at least some of these
groups, but apparently not to each other.

Could you kindly killfile one another?

Sincerely and with all due regard,

Could you kindly direct your irritation more accurately?
I've been ignoring him.
Sincerely and with all due regard,

--
Best regards,
John Navas
Panasonic DMC-FZ8 (and several others)

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:53:42 -0800, John McWilliams
wrote in :

John Navas wrote:
On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:51:29 -0800 (PST), Scott W
wrote in
:

On Nov 30, 9:43 am, John Navas wrote:

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Since I am the one who owns both a compact camear, with a live
histogram, and a DSLR, I have both a hammer and a wrench, whereas you
have only a hammer and want to tell us that this does not limit you at
all.

Then why are you defending the hammer when the job calls for a wrench?

The job is calling for a marlin spike!

Perf -- I have one!

--
Best regards,
John Navas
Panasonic DMC-FZ8 (and several others)

In article , John
McWilliams wrote:

Mr. Strat: Both you and Mr. Navas are new to at least some of these
groups, but apparently not to each other.

I've been in the photo groups for...oh...over four years now. I used to
use my real name, but changed it a while back to conform to my identity
in other parts of the Net (this is really Ainsworth).

Mr. Navas posts the same crap about Motorola cell phone chargers in the
cell phone groups about every two weeks. He's a know moron.

In article , John Navas
wrote:

My Olympus C-2500L has only 2.34 MP on a 2/3" sensor, and was pretty
much the state of the art in its day, but images from my FZ8 blow it
away, especially when downsampled to the same resolution.

An Olympus *and* a Panasonic? You've made some pretty bad choices in
photography.

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 03:30:14 -1000, Scott W wrote
in :

John Navas wrote:
On Thu, 29 Nov 2007 08:24:29 -1000, Scott W wrote
in :

I base my number on this test photo of the FZ18
http://a.img-dpreview.com/reviews/pa...z18_ISO100.JPG
How far down the gray scale can you go and still have detail?, looks to
be that by 15 (density of 1.5) you are out of detail.

There appears to be something seriously wrong with that image -- the 19
(darkest) value on the gray scale (1.90 black) is considerably lighter
than the black in other parts of the image, which are just as black as
comparable parts of a dSLR image.

I'm basing my comparison on
http://a.img-dpreview.com/reviews/Ni...50_iso0200.JPG

The deep black on the neck of the Baileys' bottle is almost exactly the
same grayscale value in both images, even though there's a significant
difference in gray scale 19.

In addition, the FZ18 grayscale value of 18 is actually lighter than for
17, and the grayscale value of 19 is likewise lighter than for 18..

This strongly suggests the limiting factor on the dark end of the gray
scale in the FZ18 image is glare, not the sensor, and the equivalent
deep black on the neck of the Baileys' bottle makes your conclusion on
noise floor invalid.

I am looking at the noise content in the bars more then the levels. By
15 the noise is so high there is little useful detail left.

I don't think that's valid for the reasons I've already stated.

--
Best regards,
John Navas
Panasonic DMC-FZ8 (and several others)

"Scott W" wrote in message
...
William Graham wrote:


With me, I'd be wasting film, but I seldom shoot any slides that are so
far out of spec that Photoshop's tools can't make them good.....

I found slide to be just about the least forgiving for not getting the
exposure right, a little too much and you loss the highlights completely a
bit too little and the shadow detail disappears. If the slide did not look
good projected there was little I could do in photoshop to fix it.

Negative film on the other hand I could over expose by a huge amount and
still get a fairly good image.

Scott

Well, I never project my slides.....I view them against a very bright light
box (which I made myself, and has 8, 2200K fluorescents in it) and then scan
the ones I like into my computer, where I can view them on my monitor and/or
send them to friends and relatives. I tend to overexpose them slightly, but
Photoshop CS2 seems to have the ability to make them just right for my
taste.