Luis, I'm prepared to believe that the finished negative can compete with
silver film (like Deep Blue gave Kasparov a chill), but I do not believe
an ordinary person can by themselves MAKE such a negative without
equipment into 6 figures and/or long waits and/or trips to service bureau
and/or much study.
I have the Dan Burkholder "Making Digital Negatives" book by the way. It
strikes me as coherent and comprehensible, a good value for the price,
and DEFINITELY needed. For those who are close to competence in the
equipment/terms/ processes involved, I strongly recommend it.
However, I quote from the letter that came with it from Burkholder:
"....That's one of the reasons I wrote the book: to provide a full throttle
description of the process without spending long hours on the phone. Now
after three printings of the cover and after going through two
professional labs who couldn't make a calibration print of the quality
needed, I'm beginning to feel that a 900 number might have been a better
way to go after all.
"Though you shouldn't need to do so, if you follow the instructions in the
book and use a service bureau that knows what they're doing, should you
decide you could use an actual calibration negative for testing or to
show to your service bureau... send $5 to me ....etc."
In other words, aside from everything else, one is in thrall to the service
bureau, and if we think loss of film types is bad -- does anyone have a
comment about obsolescence of software/hardware leaving them in the dust?
But a much bigger hurdle: I have done computer graphics, am adept at
Pagemaker, and spent many hours using Adobe photo shop. Yet I feel I
couldn't go through the processes described without MUCH more work and
study and brain loss. This may be somewhat generational -- perhaps young
folks all take to that stuff just like they can program VCR's...
Or not. But I can teach anyone who has had basic photo (developer here, fixer
there) to make a pretty good enlarged negative for contact printing using
either $2- $3 contone film or 32 cents worth of lith film in a morning.
Many of my students are painting majors (yes, PAINTERS!), and some of
them scarcely speak English. Some, not all, need from half an
hour to an hour extra handholding each, then they, too, are up and
running. All in one room. And the enlarger would cost about $200 today...
Judy