Visual impact of projected slides, lost?

[Wilt]

In reading a thread which debates the merits of digital vs. analog (film), I started to think that we now have a generation of new photographers who probably have never experienced the thrill of experiencing the visual, almost emotional, impact of a first generation slide image projected to enormous size on the silver screen. Digital images are now routinely 8-12MP images, but the BEST digital projectors that a consumer can afford can only manage 1280 x 1024 resolution!

They have seen images on their monitors, which have limited dynamic range. Or they have seen images printed onto glossy paper, which is not much different. The wider dynamic range of the projected slide may not have been appreciated by the new generation of photographer!

And seeing a first generation slide right out of the camera, where the photographer was able to grab a scene perfectly for exposure and for composition and for emotional impact, is now lost to the typical digital image which has been post processed to its perfection, a whole generation of manipulation of the final product!

It is unfortunate that this aspect of photography and its appreciation, is the sacrifice made to achieve nearly instantaneous gratification in our photos.

[WaltA]

I agree. Unless your a glass blower, their aren't too many crafts in todays world that have not been changed drastically by technology.

Mass production vs. Artisans and we know who's winning as the manufacturers race to the market with more pixels/ram/terrabytes.

I guess I'm becoming cynical in my old age.

[sugarzebra]

I'm and old Kodachrome guy Wilt so I'm with you here. You could project those slides with a $300 projector too......I'm still waiting for the DLP prices to come down :) :)

[WaltA]

We should start a new sticky here - call it Luddites Anonymous ;)

[RobKirkwood]

We should start a new sticky here - call it Luddites Anonymous ;)Sign me up then please - I still have a 15 projector rig in storage - Simda 2200 projectors, Berthiot lenses, AVL Genesis and Dove X2's, Chief stacker stands, etc.. Only reason I keep it is because as Wilt said there's a whole generation that's never seen the quality - and I harbour the notion in my head that one day I might actually get around to putting together a show and tour it or have it in a location somewhere.

Rob

[WaltA]

Yeah, I got boxes of stuff like that and old film bodies and lenses and every time we move my wife says "You packing that?"

[strmrdr]

on the flip side they haven't had the torture of going to a relative's house and having too sit thru a 3 hour slide session of someones vacation!
man that was torture!!!!!!

[Wilt]

We should start a new sticky here - call it Luddites Anonymous ;)

When the image presentation process of today is ten steps backward from what used to be commonly expected, that is not 'progress'! Perhaps you like the MP3 audio quality loss, compared with CD audio quality, too?! :)

[Moppie]

When ever I think of projected slides, I think of boring grand parents, or aunties and uncles showing the family holiday snaps, while the family looks for any chance to escape.

It would be more than fair to say then that I am part of the very generation you describe. :)




They have seen images on their monitors, which have limited dynamic range. Or they have seen images printed onto glossy paper, which is not much different. The wider dynamic range of the projected slide may not have been appreciated by the new generation of photographer!



Which raises a question:
Just how important is the paper we get Digital prints done on, just how much of a differnce is there?
Is there a difference between Matt and Gloss that is important?
I have some photos done on both, and I much prefer the gloss versions.
Sorry if its a little OT, but I think it's with in the orginal theme.

[DrPablo]

Great topic, Wilt. And count me among the luddites.

Yes, there are boring family slideshows, but there are also boring family snapshots, digisnaps, and for that matter stories and anecdotes.

What I really want to find some day is a slide projector that can project large format transparencies. I've got a lot of medium format and 4x5 transparencies that I'd love to project on a giant wall, and now that I'm shooting 8x10 Astia portraits it would be even better.

[Curtis N]

That's the thing.
You need a dark room, a screen, a projector, time to set it up.
You need enough viewers to make it worth the effort.
Then the people viewing the slides are at the mercy of the guy running the show.
There's no viewer control.
Because of these things, a lot of great slides were made that very few people ever got to see.

Nowadays, I can take a picture of a church function on a Wednesday night and it can be projected onto the screen before the service starts on Sunday. Hundreds of people get to see it, while the event is still fresh in their minds. Meanwhile back at the lab ... did you get that slide film processed yet?

Grandparents now get weekly pictures and videos of their grandchildren thousands of miles away.

I think it's a different kind of "wow factor".

[Wilt]

I hate boringly long slide shows, like everyone else! But when you experience a professional putting on a slide show, or you participate in a photography workshop where each attendee shows 2-3 of his/her 'best' from a photo shoot, you get to really appreciate the beauty of the work that can be presented in a form that puts prints and monitors to shame!

Even putting photos on HDTV is a poor excuse...scarcely competes even with a 1280 x 1024 projector for resolution, let alone dynamic range!

But lest I am called a luddite, again, I should point out that one CAN get slides created from digital files at a fairly reasonable cost per slide. I haven't investigated into the resolution available within those reproductions yet, though.

[DrPablo]

People who make digitally-enlarged negatives (like for platinum/palladium printing or cyanotypes, or whatever) have them printed on imagesetter or whatever other high end printer, usually on some kind of acrylic transparency material. I think that like other printers they will go up to around 360 dpi. This is far under the resolution of a digital file when you're printing it at capture size. At capture size high res digital cameras are resolving what 4000 dpi or whatever, so to print it digitally is to sacrifice a lot of resolution.

Remember that slides are projected very large. If it's 4x4 feet on a screen, that is worlds larger thjan your typical 11x14 or 16x20 print. Actual slides don't lose much resolution through the projector, but to make a huge enlargement like that from a 1024 pixel projector is going to leave you with what like 10 dpi on the screen or so.

[Wilt]

Remember that slides are projected very large. If it's 4x4 feet on a screen, that is worlds larger thjan your typical 11x14 or 16x20 print. Actual slides don't lose much resolution through the projector, but to make a huge enlargement like that from a 1024 pixel projector is going to leave you with what like 10 dpi on the screen or so.

<calling 'Ralph'!>

[DrPablo]

Hehe.

Well, I present my work a lot of meetings, and occasionally I'll throw in some of my pictures into the slideshow. I never put in anything more than an 800x600 image. It's sometimes as large as 12x12 feet on the screen, which would translate to single digit DPI. But in an auditorium it looks great. It's the same effect as billboards, which are printed at 10 dpi or less.

[Wilt]

I got curious and did a small bit of web research and found a site that claims, "The resolution on our film recorder is 2731x4097 and 5462x8192, sending images larger than the output size will not improve the output quality." Sounds to me that capturing the full resolution of even a 1DsII is possible.

[Wilt]

I just got back a reply to an inquiry to another place, about the resolution of reproduction in the digital-to-slide:

"All of the digital information that we receive is used to expose the film (and we do not crop any one's images). The theoretical maximum amount of analogue information that the film can register is about 30 megs. Any digital amount of information past that that amount is beyond the accutance [resolving ability] of the film and thus is superfluous. However, given these facts, we accept many larger digital file sizes when they are sent. If you have larger files than 8 megs you should get better quality 35 mm color slides. Finally, sending us Tiff files will also result in slightly higher quality slides because there is far more digital information in Tiffs than in Jpegs. A last note. 35 mm slide film has a tremendous amount of analogue capacity. An ASA 100 slide when drum scanned at 9,000 dpi optical scanning resolution will produce a full color range digital file of about 650 megs. "

So, branching this discussion a bit into the 'digital vs. film' discussion, digital cameras have a very long ways to go before they can even equal a good scanned film!

[Moppie]

So, branching this discussion a bit into the 'digital vs. film' discussion, digital cameras have a very long ways to go before they can even equal a good scanned film!


Heres a qustion then, just how much of that scanned information in the 650mb file is actualy useful?

[Wilt]

Heres a qustion then, just how much of that scanned information in the 650mb file is actualy useful?

Good question!

Interestingly, the reply which I had received mentioned exceeding the acutance of the film at 30Meg file size. One could surmise that 620Meg of that 650Meg file size is wasted, if you follow that logic.

[mikerault]

I have projected my 8 meg images to wall size (I mean in an auditorium, not home) and got plenty of WOW from the audience.

[DrPablo]

Heres a qustion then, just how much of that scanned information in the 650mb file is actualy useful?

Depends on your scanner and your underlying file.

A 4x5 in an Imacon scanner is quite a bit different than a 35mm slide on an Epson flatbed. So you can't judge detail content by file size or pixel count alone.

[Moppie]

Then lets phrase it differently.

How much of the detail that can be gathered by scanning a slide is actually detail that is not visible to the human eye, or is simply beyond what could ever be needed, short of projecting an image onto the side of a planet?

[Barb42]

And here I thought these discussions were long over. I can't say I will ever, in my lifetime, need a 650mb file. I have a 5D, a Epson 3800 printer and manage to print some stunning images - and the 5D provides some great projected images. Can't see that I could ask for more. I do remember slides, however. I avoided shooting slides like the plague because I found them so darn boring. Prints were always so much more tactile and easier to share. But, thats just me.

[Glenn NK]

And here I thought these discussions were long over. I can't say I will ever, in my lifetime, need a 650mb file. I have a 5D, a Epson 3800 printer and manage to print some stunning images - and the 5D provides some great projected images. Can't see that I could ask for more. I do remember slides, however. I avoided shooting slides like the plague because I found them so darn boring. Prints were always so much more tactile and easier to share. But, thats just me.


Good point about the boring stuff.

I started using slides, and was "convinced" by family members to use colour negative film for prints, because it was easier for them to see the pics.

However, I NEVER EVER saw a print that rivalled the pure "WOW" that a projected slide evoked. It can be stunning.

EDIT: Perhaps now a large giclee print might come close. Anyone have any experience with this? I have seen artist's watercolours printed this way and it's impressive.

[DrPablo]

Giclee, as I understand it, is mainly useful for reproducing art. It's not especially useful for photographic printing (as opposed to using any old other kind of high-end printer). It uses very tiny droplets of ink, which helps reproduce texture of brushes and canvas and thick paint, etc.

The real way to make prints, which I plan to do at some point, is to find someone who uses a Lightjet. This is a printer that actually exposes RA4-process photo paper, which is then chemically developed. So rather than droplets of ink, it's optically exposed, and you can do this from a digital file.

[Wilt]

The real way to make prints, which I plan to do at some point, is to find someone who uses a Lightjet. This is a printer that actually exposes RA4-process photo paper, which is then chemically developed. So rather than droplets of ink, it's optically exposed, and you can do this from a digital file.

I am starting to drool at the thought of something like the Lightjet being something in the home, and I can print Ilfochromes from digital and process them in my Jobo, like I make from slides!

[DrPablo]

Yeah, I think that's a very appealing idea. It's got to be less expensive to make a projector than to make a printer. I haven't heard of Lightjets being used for Ilfochrome -- only for RA4. I guess that means making a digital negative, right?

[Glenn NK]

Giclee, as I understand it, is mainly useful for reproducing art. It's not especially useful for photographic printing (as opposed to using any old other kind of high-end printer). It uses very tiny droplets of ink, which helps reproduce texture of brushes and canvas and thick paint, etc.

The real way to make prints, which I plan to do at some point, is to find someone who uses a Lightjet. This is a printer that actually exposes RA4-process photo paper, which is then chemically developed. So rather than droplets of ink, it's optically exposed, and you can do this from a digital file.


Thanks Doc.

(to myself): now which airport has a Lightjet?;)

[Wilt]

Yeah, I think that's a very appealing idea. It's got to be less expensive to make a projector than to make a printer. I haven't heard of Lightjets being used for Ilfochrome -- only for RA4. I guess that means making a digital negative, right?

Actually I read that they had something printed on Ilfochrome, and that the use of Fuji Crystal ultraglossy paper produced results which were as vivid as the Ilfochrome in saturation, yet had the advantage of 60 year archival life...double Ilfochrome!

[RedHot]

I am in the middle of scanning 3000 or so slides from of my siblings and I growing up. We are now aged range 51 to 34. And last christmas, someone started showing these slides and everyone that entered the house went up there to watch too. My siblings and nieces and nephews were all up there. I think they were shown for 90 minutes and I'm sure everyone would have stayed to view every cube of slides, but there just wasn't time for it. :)

[Fotoshooter]

My pet peeve about digital projectors is the horizontal chip. Slide projectors display horizontal and vertical images the same size. When the digital projector shows horizontals full frame the verticals are smaller with big borders on the sides. To show both formats the same size, you have to make the horizontals the same smaller size as the verticals but now they project with borders around all four sides. And the projection must be done at a higher magnification to fill the screen with a loss in resolution.
A square chip in the digital projector would allow for a uniform presentation of both horizontal and vertical images at maximum resolution. However, the chip makers seem to have little interest in catering to photographers. Business presentations are the larger market, and photographers have not been vocal in their dismay.

[Wilt]

My pet peeve about digital projectors is the horizontal chip. Slide projectors display horizontal and vertical images the same size. When the digital projector shows horizontals full frame the verticals are smaller with big borders on the sides. To show both formats the same size, you have to make the horizontals the same smaller size as the verticals but now they project with borders around all four sides. And the projection must be done at a higher magnification to fill the screen with a loss in resolution.
A square chip in the digital projector would allow for a uniform presentation of both horizontal and vertical images at maximum resolution. However, the chip makers seem to have little interest in catering to photographers. Business presentations are the larger market, and photographers have not been vocal in their dismay.

Doh! you'd think the geniuses who design these things would realize that. The problem is that the nerds only think about Powerpoint presentations when they design those projectors!

[mikerault]

Sounds like a market niche needing to be filled...