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Kodak Gold Ultima Media FAQ

These Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) were last updated on 5 March, 2002.
How can I custom order KODAK CD-R Gold Ultima media? With KODAK's announcement on January 24, 2002 that it is discontinuing its CD-R media products, it is no longer possible to place custom orders for Gold Ultima media.

Quality is a dying industry.

Save it to film.

CCD sensors, create high-quality, low-noise images. CMOS sensors, traditionally, are more susceptible to noise.

Because each pixel on a CMOS sensor has several transistors located next to it, the light sensitivity of a CMOS chip is lower. Many of the photons hitting the chip hit the transistors instead of the photodiode.

CMOS sensors traditionally consume little power. Implementing a sensor in CMOS yields a low-power sensor. CCDs, on the other hand, use a process that consumes lots of power. CCDs consume as much as 100 times more power than an equivalent CMOS sensor.

CMOS chips can be fabricated on just about any standard silicon production line, so they tend to be extremely inexpensive compared to CCD sensors.

CCD sensors have been mass produced for a longer period of time, so they are more mature. They tend to have higher quality pixels, and more of them.

CMOS is generally used in lower quality equipaments.

Canon's SLR's CMOS are that good because their sensor is big. You'd also have an astonishing picture with a same sized CCD sensor.

...a more robust setup. I would recommend a monochrome laser printer for text operations, paired with a dye sublimation printer for color.

I use two Kodak 8650 printers (pick one up for a couple grand on ebay) for a commercial application that is probably beyond the scope of the submitter, but the quality (indistinguishable from a lab print), reliability (over 800 9x14" prints/week at times), and durability (light-fast for more than 20 years)

Olympus, Kodak, Sony, and others have items at more reasonable price points.

No doubt; for color, go dye-sub. Then again, I own an Epson 1280 photo that does really nice work as well. I have installed an Epson 2200 for a couple of clients and they are even better.

...a more robust setup. I would recommend a monochrome laser printer for text operations, paired with a dye sublimation printer for color.

I use two Kodak 8650 printers (pick one up for a couple grand on ebay) for a commercial application that is probably beyond the scope of the submitter, but the quality (indistinguishable from a lab print), reliability (over 800 9x14" prints/week at times), and durability (light-fast for more than 20 years)

Olympus, Kodak, Sony, and others have items at more reasonable price points.

No doubt; for color, go dye-sub. Then again, I own an Epson 1280 photo that does really nice work as well. I have installed an Epson 2200 for a couple of clients and they are even better.

On the other hand, MP3 players, digital cameras, and video cameras do not belong with integrated phones or PDAs. These media device require a lot more storage space, which at the moment, means a hard drive. My MP3 player, a Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 has a 20GB hard drive, which is fantastic! I love carrying around all the music I own on it. My digital camera, which is at the low-end of the spectrum (1.3 MP), currently has a 128MB card, which is adequate for a trip of approx 2 weeks or so. I can imagine that if I purchased a camera with a better resolution, I'd want a lot more storage on the camera, perhaps somewhere in the range of 1GB. (BTW, can the cameras that take CF cards use the microdrives?) I currently don't own a video camera, but have been working with digital video at my job, and it's fantastic. If I were to get a video camera, why not get one that has a HD built in? With the addition of a firewire or network port, you could transfer the video over quite quickly. Unite the media devices around the fact that they need a lot of storage, which requires a larger form factor.

I'm actually not convinced that a MP3 player should be integrated with anything, as I can forsee situations where that'd be really inconvenient. However, I'd love to have a combo digicam / DV cam, and hope that more device like that are produced. Sadly, all of the video cameras I've seen that also take still photos don't do a good job of that, and all the digicams I've seen that take videos don't do a good job of that.

Todd

I work for Kodak and I can say with some authority that Kodak is not very interested in the digital camera market. Kodak had always been, and would always like to be a consumerables company. Sales of cameras for Kodak always has meant moolah on the film and development-chemicals fronts, this is where the vast majority of Kodak's profits come from.

Since digital cameras have started eating into sales Kodak has spent a fortune on research and is anxiously trying to enter new imaging markets, for instance OLED technology is starting to look very promising.

Of course the RIAA numbers are going to be down where Eastman Kodak's are, people are turning to digital cameras and leaving film cameras behind in droves.

Kodak sells digital cameras too.

But how much is digital photography cutting into Kodak's business? It's not as though they're exclusively committed to the film business, you know. They have excellent lines of both amateur and professional digital cameras themselves. And while they don't make film sales on the cameras, the base price is enough higher that there's a significant short-term profit potential. They also sell inkjet photo paper, online printing services, and photoCD. They were not exactly caught off guard by the switch to digital.

But how much is digital photography cutting into Kodak's business? It's not as though they're exclusively committed to the film business, you know. They have excellent lines of both amateur and professional digital cameras themselves. And while they don't make film sales on the cameras, the base price is enough higher that there's a significant short-term profit potential. They also sell inkjet photo paper, online printing services, and photoCD. They were not exactly caught off guard by the switch to digital.

Once slashdot was trumpetting the comming of futuristic flat plasma displays. (Read the comment, the number of naysayers is hillarious).

OLED are just around the corner:

Fuel cells are due for next year

And after years of slashdot ranting about true-3d displays, holodecks are finally on sale!

Once slashdot was trumpetting the comming of futuristic flat plasma displays. (Read the comment, the number of naysayers is hillarious).

OLED are just around the corner:

Fuel cells are due for next year

And after years of slashdot ranting about true-3d displays, holodecks are finally on sale!

The parent is correct, it certainly is not the first time that light has ever been generated from a molecule by applying electricity!

I refer you to the parent's link and Cambrige Display Technology. Both are well on the way in the development of applications for simple polymer molecules that emit light when a current is passed.

I know that the simplest LEP Cambridge Display Technologies discovered (PPV) is of a similar scale (if not even smaller in diameter) to nanotubes, however I can't compare efficiencies, nor do I know much about optoelectronics so I couldn't say how a wavelength of 1.5 microns (the emission quoted in the article) compares to those of LEPs (visible light so between 400 and 700 nanometers).

My point is that I dispute the article's claim that it is the first time that molecules have produced light when an electrical potential is placed across them. Perhaps IBM think that nanotube light emission is more suited to optoelectronics than OLEDS/LEPs.

If you want to learn more about LEPs I did a project on them as part of my Chemistry degree, it's hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry here and a slightly more up-to-date but not as pretty version is hosted here

Hrmmm.... lets look at the name.
OK, sorry, cheap shot. I work with this stuff... and carbon has been emitting light for a very long time. If the focus is a specific molecule, well, look at dopants- thats where the energy is released (hence the name)... and thats where the light comes from. Hosts provide the path.Kodak OLED information

A few people have suggested the Canon Powershot series - while they're semi-durable, they really aren't ruggedized, and underwater enclosures are expensive and clunky.

I used to be a sysadmin at an engineering company where our engineers would often need to take pictures out on job sites, and we found the perfect camera for the job: the Kodak DC5000. The interface is simple, they're 2MP, and they're tough as nails. They're weatherproof and could probably survive a dunk into water as all the doors and buttons are rubber sealed. There's a protective tube to protect the lens when it's extended. Battery life is pretty decent, and it works great on AA NiMH rechargables. Also, if you're in the field and you absolutely need power you can always stop by a 7-11 and get some AA alkalines.

Unfortunately Kodak no longer makes them, and there's been a service recall because a few people have gotten shocked while changing batteries. It's a shame Kodak (or anyone else) doesn't make a camera like this any more, especially in the 3MP+ range. There's a chance you could find one on eBay.

Dye-Sublimation is the way to Go for alot of printing - this one is under !K and prints a 8x10 in under 90 seconds. - Kodak Professional 8500

I agree whole heartedly, I have done research on OLED monitors and have discovered that at their final design stage (around 2010) OLEDs will be far lighter, thinner, cheaper, and will last have a lifetime equal or better than an LCD monitor. The approximate cost of the OLED monitors will be $0.50 per square inch. (around $5.00 in stage one around 2004)
For further information about OLEDs you might want to try either
Kodak
or PDF Detailing OLED

Here's a link if anyone is too lazy...

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/display/AM550L.jht ml

And of course, the info is on their website. Including ``Not currently available in the U.S.''

It stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode.

More info here.

The notice of its discontinuation can be found at kodak.com.

The ability to mix recordable and non-recordable data is built into the Orange Book standard. The ODC claim to cleverness (which you can see in the press release) is solely in their manufacturing technology.

Unfortunately, Kodak does not seem to have information about this technology on their web site anymore. The only thing I was able to find is this discontinuation notice.

a company called "Kodak". In fact, lots of people have been working busily on commercializing this, and there are probably some OLED products on the market. It's not quite competitive with LCDs or CRTs yet.

Which part of "self luminous" is causing you problems? Or did you not actually read the submission, let alone the article.

The above links both point to "e-paper" type systems, which are monochrome, and require an external light source. These are great for a lot of applications, but I wouldn't want a laptop display built out of one.

OLEDs and their ilk will produce their own light, and opperate with many colours at high speeds.

Essentially it is horse-for-courses. E-ink is great for certain applications where power is critical (watches, cell-phones, even e-newspapers) and where update speeds are not critical (I beleive they are all 'mechanical' in some way), but OLEDs and similar will be necessary if you want full colour rapidly moving images. To equate the two technologies is to be somewhat disingenuous.

A random googled OLED link.

Paul

It's really too bad that so much effort was put into USB 2.0 when FireWire was available.

They have virtually identical practical transfer rates, so the additional capabilities of USB 2.0 go to waste - unless, I suppose, you find yourself doing huge amounts of simultaneous data transfer to multiple USB 2.0 devices on the same bus.

FireWire also sports two great benefits: more power (requires the 6-pin verion that is sadly not found on many smaller devices and x86 laptops) and no host-specific controller. People talk about putting Linux on a PDA and using USB to control devices from it, but until USB On-the-Go becomes pervasive, this cannot be a reality. On the other hand, Any FireWire device can communicate with any other.

FireWire is a more flexible standard, and with planned upgrades to 800 Mbps and higher, there's no shortage to it's possibilities.

If someone would just make a drive that doesn't use an IDE/FireWire bridge but actually has an on-drive FireWire interface, the benefits could be substantial.

*sigh*

As a note, you can get FireWire hard drives, , scanners, printers, and the Kodak DCS Pro 14n 14 megapixel camera will use FireWire

That's funny, I posted a link to the appropriate info yesterday, here it is again

Here is a good article that covers a lot of this
The "Authenticity Crisis" In Real Evidence
Scientific Evidence Review
10.1.2001

You might also be interested in the KODAK Picture Authentication Module [kodak.com] which uses PKI in a camera.

If I post before the story goes up is that a "Zero Post "?

Having been involved in traditional analogue photography for 30 years, I can tell you that I'd trust one of those Kodak cameras more that say a 35 mm Ektachrome Transparency, or worse yet, a color print. A while back Polaroid was blowing out a digital printer that output on spectra film for 30 bucks. I considered buying it for all sort of practical jokes and parking ticket disputes.

Here is a good article that covers a lot of this
The "Authenticity Crisis" In Real Evidence
Scientific Evidence Review
10.1.2001

You might also be interested in the KODAK Picture Authentication Module which uses PKI in a camera.

When properly stored, this paper will suffer no degradation for 200 years. And that's even with complex color photo development. Something like storing binary data or barcodes should be readable on such paper for much longer than that.

Actually, the Corona program did use Kodak film. Due to static problems with early film (which caused arcing on the exposed negatives), Kodak developed polymer-based film.

I work in an electron microscopy lab and the film used for the EM systems is Kodak 4489 "ESTAR Thick Base" -- which means that my paychecks depend directly on something that was developed for use in space. (As a space buff -- Buran is/was the Soviet space shuttle -- I'm quite pleased with that situation.) A spinoff, as they're commonly called.

The EM film is mounted on metal plates for exposing and when developed yields 8cmx10cm transparencies using Kodak D-19 developer. For Corona, the exposed film was placed in a reentry capsule which parachuted back to earth and was retrieved midair by a C-119 Flying Boxcar aircraft. It doesn't take that long to develop at all and can be ready for analysis the same day.

According to the Kodak EM film page:

"KODAK Electron Micrography Film 4489 has approximately half the speed of KODAK Electron Image Film SO-163 film, but exhibits less curl and shorter pump-down times. Coated on a 7mils Estar support, KODAK Electron Microscope Film offers exceptional dimensional stability and eliminates the use of traditional glass support products."

We are still using film because (1) electron microscopes are very expensive, so ours are from the mid-1970s, (2) it's not that easy to retrofit them, at least as far as I understand it, for full digital, and (3) it's not all that hard to put the negatives on a lightbox and shoot them with a professional digital SLR, which is how we get the images into computers for processing. And, of course, (4) digital camera technology still hasn't beat out film for quality yet, though we're hoping to get a Canon EOS-1Ds soon that will start to close the quality gap.

(The film is kept in a vacuum once in the microscope -- something else which I'm sure was a benefit for Corona.)

If you want to see some sample EM images taken with the Kodak film, see our lab's image gallery. Don't bother with Kodak's sample images, they suck. ;)

I'm pretty sure that Kodak also designed the Corona camera system, though I'm not certain who the actual builder was.

Actually, the Corona program did use Kodak film. Due to static problems with early film (which caused arcing on the exposed negatives), Kodak developed polymer-based film.

I work in an electron microscopy lab and the film used for the EM systems is Kodak 4489 "ESTAR Thick Base" -- which means that my paychecks depend directly on something that was developed for use in space. (As a space buff -- Buran is/was the Soviet space shuttle -- I'm quite pleased with that situation.) A spinoff, as they're commonly called.

The EM film is mounted on metal plates for exposing and when developed yields 8cmx10cm transparencies using Kodak D-19 developer. For Corona, the exposed film was placed in a reentry capsule which parachuted back to earth and was retrieved midair by a C-119 Flying Boxcar aircraft. It doesn't take that long to develop at all and can be ready for analysis the same day.

According to the Kodak EM film page:

"KODAK Electron Micrography Film 4489 has approximately half the speed of KODAK Electron Image Film SO-163 film, but exhibits less curl and shorter pump-down times. Coated on a 7mils Estar support, KODAK Electron Microscope Film offers exceptional dimensional stability and eliminates the use of traditional glass support products."

We are still using film because (1) electron microscopes are very expensive, so ours are from the mid-1970s, (2) it's not that easy to retrofit them, at least as far as I understand it, for full digital, and (3) it's not all that hard to put the negatives on a lightbox and shoot them with a professional digital SLR, which is how we get the images into computers for processing. And, of course, (4) digital camera technology still hasn't beat out film for quality yet, though we're hoping to get a Canon EOS-1Ds soon that will start to close the quality gap.

(The film is kept in a vacuum once in the microscope -- something else which I'm sure was a benefit for Corona.)

If you want to see some sample EM images taken with the Kodak film, see our lab's image gallery. Don't bother with Kodak's sample images, they suck. ;)

I'm pretty sure that Kodak also designed the Corona camera system, though I'm not certain who the actual builder was.

1. Lower power, due to being reflective (passive) rather than light-emitting.
2. Visible even in direct sunlight, for the same reason.
3. Blue elements don't wear out after a few hundred hours (the biggest problem with OLEDs).

Overview and demonstrations of these are available here ->
Universal Display Corporation and Koda Research

Kodak and Sanyo are unveiling a prototype 15" OLED screen which should knock the props out from under LCD monitors, and possibly plasma displays as well.

Article Here

OLED monitors are bright, sharp, and only a few thousandths of an inch thick, with a virtually 180 degree viewing angle. If they can scale the technology up (in the last 2 years it's gone from 3" screens to 15"), LCDs are dead. There's no vacuum or high voltage issues, either, so I'm betting plasma screens will follow soon (and rear-projectors).

The only drawback I've heard about is short life span (about 3-4 years before they start to lose brightness), but that might have improved.

Of course, the picture in the artical your talking about shows white and purple. So I'm not sure where you get the idea that this display can't show blues very well.

They have blues - just not in that particular shot. But hardly a testament to overcoming the issue.

In addition to red, green, and blue OLED materials, Kodak researchers have successfully formulated white-emitting materials. Using a dual emitting layer--each emitting in a complementary color--they have produced white OLEDs that yield not only an excellent white hue, but a good color stability over a wide range of light levels. The white hue is easily adjustable to any shade from pale yellow to light blue. The device life exceeds exceeds 20,000 hr (Figure 2).

Better pictures, more info

In photography brightness is defined in f-stops. Opening up the lens aperture by one f-stop results in twice as much light hitting the image sensor/film.
Films such as this one record an effective brightness range of 11+ f-stops. Video/Digital has a long way to go to match that, although resolution is getting similar. Id also like to see a purely electronic camera shoot 3000+ frames per second like this one.
Video/digital is a whole lot easier to use and is quite good enough for most applications, but film has the advantage in every *measurable* quality. Dont forget that.

--
Jóhannes Tryggvason
Filmmaker

Well, here's the closest to a press release I could find.

If this is wrong, and the dye-stabilized gold-backed CD-R's are still in production, then... HOORAY! It's a good thing to have more than option in the market. Here's to hoping I'm wrong...

* quality of final print (photo printers haven't caught up yet)

Apparently you haven't heard of the latest photo printers that expose photo paper the same way an enlarger does. They're not injkets, dye sub, or laser printers. it's a Photo printer. So, it's A PHOTO! The new minilabs take file inputs now, and print directly up to 12x18" photos.

* artistic manipulation. Photoshop does not count.

Photoshop does count. Do sythesizers not count over regular instruments in music? Does paint not count over pencil in art? Do movies created with computer animation over hand-drawn cells not count?
Just because the tools are getting better doesn't justify straight-out rejection. Maybe it changes the standards for the medium, but that's life.

Digital will obliterate film in almost all commercial applications, and it will only remain an artistic technique. It's already happening.

There are plenty of reasons to shoot slide film, but a supposed wide exposure latitude isn't one of them. The wide exposure latitude of negative film may still have an advantage for the moment, but digital imaging technology is rapidly closing the gap with its analog counterparts in terms of exposure latitude, and I expect film's latitude to be exceeded by consumer quality CCDs within a few years. It's already happening in the digital video arena, Sony claims that their DVW-700 camera has 11-stops of exposure latitude (on par with the best negative stock), and directors of photography have managed to get at least 7-stops from the latest professional video equipment.

I'm not planning on selling my Canon pro 35mm gear in the next few years, but I bet in 5 or 6 years there'll be no good reason left to bother with film, and I'm talking about both cost and quality.

Pixel pitch and dots per inch are different measures, camera pixels are used like display pixels; that is 100dpi monitor looks great, and a camera that can fill that 100dpi monitor 1:1 will also look great, both on screen and in a continuous tone print.

100 dpi binary printers would look pretty horrible. Most inkjet printers and most laser printers are binary, some are continuous tone to various degrees. The easy way to think about it is that each pixel on screen (typically) shows 8 bits of information, whereas each "dot" from a binary printer shows 1 bit (or 24bits per pixel vs. 3 bits per dot since each dot can be C/M/Y (black doesn't really add in this analysis, it's used to replace equal values of CMY which look grey, but should theoretically be black). A 400 dpi continuous tone laser printer makes vastly better looking prints than a 2400 dpi binary color laser printer.

Screen printing combines groups of dots into patterns called rosettes (because of the way they look, except random screening which looks smooth) with various complicated mathematical functions starting with what's known as a screen frequency. The screen frequency is far less than the resolution of the printer: typically a 2400dpi linotype machine can produce a 150lpi screen (but milage varies). Roughly you have a 150 pixel per inch printed color image (that's about what National Geographic uses, for example). One can trade off screen frequency (spatial resolution) for the screen detail (color resolution) in a fashion analogous to having to set a lower bit depth to get a larger frame buffer in a memory limited display card.

So if you want a good continuous tone print, 150 pixels per inch is a good number, meaning roughly 1500x1200 pixels for that 8x10... but wait! It ain't so simple.

The math to construct the screen craps out if the screen frequency is the same as the pixel density, it needs to be far more. The conventional wisdom is to use a pixel pitch between 1.33 and 1.5x higher than the screen frequency, or 3k X 2.4k for the 8x10 print to come out nice and sharp...

BUT that's not all - that's right there's more! Digital cameras (and consumer camcorders) have one detector pixel per output pixel (at best). But each detector pixel is EITHER R, G, or B (maybe a Y thrown in on some). That means that even the best digital camera (except the Foveon) is interpolating data at the very least in the color space, and depending on the image this can be painfully obvious. To eliminate the artifacts thus introduced, one must frequently downsample the image. If the RGB (or RGBY) pattern is approximately 2x2 (it's not usually, but close enough) this requires a 2x downsample to clean up the image.

So that means if you want a print that's (as far as spatial resolution goes) equivalent to ASA 64 Ektachrome shot in a really good camera and printed out at 8x10, you'd need roughly 6k x 5k starting pixels (the ektachrome has about 8k equivalent pixels, though that's debatable: it's definitely more than 4k and almost certainly less than 16k equivalent, the MTF of film decays gracefully without aliasing).

It's still not quite that simple because of the response curve of film vs. the response curve of solid state detectors. Silicon responds almost linearly from the first photo-electron until the detector well is filled to saturation - quite unlike the human eye. Whereas chemical film is more stoichiometric, and responds gradually to increasing light, with increasing response around the optimal reaction rate, and then slowly decreasing to a soft saturation. The result is that details are captured in the shadows, the properly exposed section has good contrast, and there are details captured in the highlights. With digital photography the shadows are filled with electron noise and the highlights are blown out.

So not only do you really want about a 6k+ camera to get good prints, you want it to capture at least 30 bits per pixel. The Kodak captures 36 bits per pixel, 4.6k pixels across, which (remember there's a trade off between color fidelity and spatial fidelity) means that it should print a very nice 8x10, to all but the most arbitrarily anal, as good as any 35mm film.

Pixel pitch and dots per inch are different measures, camera pixels are used like display pixels; that is 100dpi monitor looks great, and a camera that can fill that 100dpi monitor 1:1 will also look great, both on screen and in a continuous tone print.

100 dpi binary printers would look pretty horrible. Most inkjet printers and most laser printers are binary, some are continuous tone to various degrees. The easy way to think about it is that each pixel on screen (typically) shows 8 bits of information, whereas each "dot" from a binary printer shows 1 bit (or 24bits per pixel vs. 3 bits per dot since each dot can be C/M/Y (black doesn't really add in this analysis, it's used to replace equal values of CMY which look grey, but should theoretically be black). A 400 dpi continuous tone laser printer makes vastly better looking prints than a 2400 dpi binary color laser printer.

Screen printing combines groups of dots into patterns called rosettes (because of the way they look, except random screening which looks smooth) with various complicated mathematical functions starting with what's known as a screen frequency. The screen frequency is far less than the resolution of the printer: typically a 2400dpi linotype machine can produce a 150lpi screen (but milage varies). Roughly you have a 150 pixel per inch printed color image (that's about what National Geographic uses, for example). One can trade off screen frequency (spatial resolution) for the screen detail (color resolution) in a fashion analogous to having to set a lower bit depth to get a larger frame buffer in a memory limited display card.

So if you want a good continuous tone print, 150 pixels per inch is a good number, meaning roughly 1500x1200 pixels for that 8x10... but wait! It ain't so simple.

The math to construct the screen craps out if the screen frequency is the same as the pixel density, it needs to be far more. The conventional wisdom is to use a pixel pitch between 1.33 and 1.5x higher than the screen frequency, or 3k X 2.4k for the 8x10 print to come out nice and sharp...

BUT that's not all - that's right there's more! Digital cameras (and consumer camcorders) have one detector pixel per output pixel (at best). But each detector pixel is EITHER R, G, or B (maybe a Y thrown in on some). That means that even the best digital camera (except the Foveon) is interpolating data at the very least in the color space, and depending on the image this can be painfully obvious. To eliminate the artifacts thus introduced, one must frequently downsample the image. If the RGB (or RGBY) pattern is approximately 2x2 (it's not usually, but close enough) this requires a 2x downsample to clean up the image.

So that means if you want a print that's (as far as spatial resolution goes) equivalent to ASA 64 Ektachrome shot in a really good camera and printed out at 8x10, you'd need roughly 6k x 5k starting pixels (the ektachrome has about 8k equivalent pixels, though that's debatable: it's definitely more than 4k and almost certainly less than 16k equivalent, the MTF of film decays gracefully without aliasing).

It's still not quite that simple because of the response curve of film vs. the response curve of solid state detectors. Silicon responds almost linearly from the first photo-electron until the detector well is filled to saturation - quite unlike the human eye. Whereas chemical film is more stoichiometric, and responds gradually to increasing light, with increasing response around the optimal reaction rate, and then slowly decreasing to a soft saturation. The result is that details are captured in the shadows, the properly exposed section has good contrast, and there are details captured in the highlights. With digital photography the shadows are filled with electron noise and the highlights are blown out.

So not only do you really want about a 6k+ camera to get good prints, you want it to capture at least 30 bits per pixel. The Kodak captures 36 bits per pixel, 4.6k pixels across, which (remember there's a trade off between color fidelity and spatial fidelity) means that it should print a very nice 8x10, to all but the most arbitrarily anal, as good as any 35mm film.

Pixel pitch and dots per inch are different measures, camera pixels are used like display pixels; that is 100dpi monitor looks great, and a camera that can fill that 100dpi monitor 1:1 will also look great, both on screen and in a continuous tone print.

100 dpi binary printers would look pretty horrible. Most inkjet printers and most laser printers are binary, some are continuous tone to various degrees. The easy way to think about it is that each pixel on screen (typically) shows 8 bits of information, whereas each "dot" from a binary printer shows 1 bit (or 24bits per pixel vs. 3 bits per dot since each dot can be C/M/Y (black doesn't really add in this analysis, it's used to replace equal values of CMY which look grey, but should theoretically be black). A 400 dpi continuous tone laser printer makes vastly better looking prints than a 2400 dpi binary color laser printer.

Screen printing combines groups of dots into patterns called rosettes (because of the way they look, except random screening which looks smooth) with various complicated mathematical functions starting with what's known as a screen frequency. The screen frequency is far less than the resolution of the printer: typically a 2400dpi linotype machine can produce a 150lpi screen (but milage varies). Roughly you have a 150 pixel per inch printed color image (that's about what National Geographic uses, for example). One can trade off screen frequency (spatial resolution) for the screen detail (color resolution) in a fashion analogous to having to set a lower bit depth to get a larger frame buffer in a memory limited display card.

So if you want a good continuous tone print, 150 pixels per inch is a good number, meaning roughly 1500x1200 pixels for that 8x10... but wait! It ain't so simple.

The math to construct the screen craps out if the screen frequency is the same as the pixel density, it needs to be far more. The conventional wisdom is to use a pixel pitch between 1.33 and 1.5x higher than the screen frequency, or 3k X 2.4k for the 8x10 print to come out nice and sharp...

BUT that's not all - that's right there's more! Digital cameras (and consumer camcorders) have one detector pixel per output pixel (at best). But each detector pixel is EITHER R, G, or B (maybe a Y thrown in on some). That means that even the best digital camera (except the Foveon) is interpolating data at the very least in the color space, and depending on the image this can be painfully obvious. To eliminate the artifacts thus introduced, one must frequently downsample the image. If the RGB (or RGBY) pattern is approximately 2x2 (it's not usually, but close enough) this requires a 2x downsample to clean up the image.

So that means if you want a print that's (as far as spatial resolution goes) equivalent to ASA 64 Ektachrome shot in a really good camera and printed out at 8x10, you'd need roughly 6k x 5k starting pixels (the ektachrome has about 8k equivalent pixels, though that's debatable: it's definitely more than 4k and almost certainly less than 16k equivalent, the MTF of film decays gracefully without aliasing).

It's still not quite that simple because of the response curve of film vs. the response curve of solid state detectors. Silicon responds almost linearly from the first photo-electron until the detector well is filled to saturation - quite unlike the human eye. Whereas chemical film is more stoichiometric, and responds gradually to increasing light, with increasing response around the optimal reaction rate, and then slowly decreasing to a soft saturation. The result is that details are captured in the shadows, the properly exposed section has good contrast, and there are details captured in the highlights. With digital photography the shadows are filled with electron noise and the highlights are blown out.

So not only do you really want about a 6k+ camera to get good prints, you want it to capture at least 30 bits per pixel. The Kodak captures 36 bits per pixel, 4.6k pixels across, which (remember there's a trade off between color fidelity and spatial fidelity) means that it should print a very nice 8x10, to all but the most arbitrarily anal, as good as any 35mm film.

Pixel pitch and dots per inch are different measures, camera pixels are used like display pixels; that is 100dpi monitor looks great, and a camera that can fill that 100dpi monitor 1:1 will also look great, both on screen and in a continuous tone print.

100 dpi binary printers would look pretty horrible. Most inkjet printers and most laser printers are binary, some are continuous tone to various degrees. The easy way to think about it is that each pixel on screen (typically) shows 8 bits of information, whereas each "dot" from a binary printer shows 1 bit (or 24bits per pixel vs. 3 bits per dot since each dot can be C/M/Y (black doesn't really add in this analysis, it's used to replace equal values of CMY which look grey, but should theoretically be black). A 400 dpi continuous tone laser printer makes vastly better looking prints than a 2400 dpi binary color laser printer.

Screen printing combines groups of dots into patterns called rosettes (because of the way they look, except random screening which looks smooth) with various complicated mathematical functions starting with what's known as a screen frequency. The screen frequency is far less than the resolution of the printer: typically a 2400dpi linotype machine can produce a 150lpi screen (but milage varies). Roughly you have a 150 pixel per inch printed color image (that's about what National Geographic uses, for example). One can trade off screen frequency (spatial resolution) for the screen detail (color resolution) in a fashion analogous to having to set a lower bit depth to get a larger frame buffer in a memory limited display card.

So if you want a good continuous tone print, 150 pixels per inch is a good number, meaning roughly 1500x1200 pixels for that 8x10... but wait! It ain't so simple.

The math to construct the screen craps out if the screen frequency is the same as the pixel density, it needs to be far more. The conventional wisdom is to use a pixel pitch between 1.33 and 1.5x higher than the screen frequency, or 3k X 2.4k for the 8x10 print to come out nice and sharp...

BUT that's not all - that's right there's more! Digital cameras (and consumer camcorders) have one detector pixel per output pixel (at best). But each detector pixel is EITHER R, G, or B (maybe a Y thrown in on some). That means that even the best digital camera (except the Foveon) is interpolating data at the very least in the color space, and depending on the image this can be painfully obvious. To eliminate the artifacts thus introduced, one must frequently downsample the image. If the RGB (or RGBY) pattern is approximately 2x2 (it's not usually, but close enough) this requires a 2x downsample to clean up the image.

So that means if you want a print that's (as far as spatial resolution goes) equivalent to ASA 64 Ektachrome shot in a really good camera and printed out at 8x10, you'd need roughly 6k x 5k starting pixels (the ektachrome has about 8k equivalent pixels, though that's debatable: it's definitely more than 4k and almost certainly less than 16k equivalent, the MTF of film decays gracefully without aliasing).

It's still not quite that simple because of the response curve of film vs. the response curve of solid state detectors. Silicon responds almost linearly from the first photo-electron until the detector well is filled to saturation - quite unlike the human eye. Whereas chemical film is more stoichiometric, and responds gradually to increasing light, with increasing response around the optimal reaction rate, and then slowly decreasing to a soft saturation. The result is that details are captured in the shadows, the properly exposed section has good contrast, and there are details captured in the highlights. With digital photography the shadows are filled with electron noise and the highlights are blown out.

So not only do you really want about a 6k+ camera to get good prints, you want it to capture at least 30 bits per pixel. The Kodak captures 36 bits per pixel, 4.6k pixels across, which (remember there's a trade off between color fidelity and spatial fidelity) means that it should print a very nice 8x10, to all but the most arbitrarily anal, as good as any 35mm film.

Am I mistaken, or does this camera by Kodak have 16 megapixels?

Digital backs like this, this and this have been available for medium and large format cameras for quite a while, although at that sort of price they're out of the range of your average amateur photographer. SiliconFilm has been promising digital backs for 35mm cameras for as long as I can remember, but they're still "under development" - read vapourware. They are showing two new models on the website (4.2 and 10 megapixels), although the product "photos" on their website leave a lot to be desired.

For those who are wondering what a digital back is and why you'd want one - it's a device which is attached to the back of the camera and provides an imaging surface in place of a roll or sheet of film. They can also have onboard flash storage or they can be wired to a computer. Pros may add digital backs to their kits because they already have thousands of dollars worth of camera bodies, lenses, filters and other accessories. Rather than buying a whole new camera system and associated accessories, they can get a digital back to fit on their cameras and keep their existing kit.

The display looks to be the biggest power-hog which current technology has no really good solution for. It may be possible the electronic paper displays will use less power than a current TFT display (which needs a strong backlight to go through 3 layers of LCD display).

Slightly off-topic, but what ever happened to OLED displays? Aren't these supposed to be thinner, cheaper to manufacture, clearer/brighter, and less power hungry?

wow, 11 megapixels is the highest ever? I better go take back my (16 MP)

I have a Contax 645, and the digital backs available for that camera [ Kodak and Phase one ] are 16 megapixel. That is more than adequate to rival film resolution, but no digital solution will rival the contrast range of film and the low light performance and shadow detail of film.