Re: Digital vs analog for negs

rosebud (rosebud@why.net)
Wed, 21 Feb 1996 00:07:14 +0000

Judy and all,

I feel like I should respond to your recent posting about digital negatives
vs. analog proctices. Warning I'm a digital practictioner and I strongly
believe in the medium...I even teach it in a local community college!

The costs involved are nowhere near 6 figures. It should barely reach 5
even with a big system today. I just upgraded to a new FAST system that
would total out at around $7500, including a big monitor, lots of
removable media for trips to the service bureau, a low-cost color printer,
a big (4 gig) hard drive and 72 megs of RAM. Granted, I'm a ferocious
shopper for bargains, but anyone in academia has similar opportunities.

As to the question of control being surrendered to a SB...that depends
largely on what part of the country you live in and how close to a large
metropolitan area with a reasonably large printing industry. The "service
bureau" I use for enlarged digital negatives is a shop where desktop
publishing types "runout" high-contrast paper and film-for printing.
The cost for an 11X14 is $18 and 16X20 cost $32. There's nothing magic
about the quality of the film runout. It's a grayscale image, converted over
to pure black & white information...nothing but random dots. I can create a
similar negative with a fine-line developer and Kodalith.

The real secret and power is in perfecting a negative response curve that
will match the image I have on the screen of my computer monitor. The
transfer of the image to film is the easiest part; the calibration of the
monitor and the control of the (in my case multiple) images is where the
learning curve gets a little steep. But it's only another tool, not a medium.

Boy, did I get wound up;>

I used to make multiple negs and use Kwik-Print. It was incredibly tedious
and unreliable. The digital negative "should" solve most problems of a tonal
nature...if the system is calibrated and tested.

Thanks for listening.

Darryl Baird, University of Texas at Dallas...grad student