Did any of you see the Jan. 11th cover of Sports Illustrated? That illustrates one of the things wrong with digital photography. It was a low light photo of a football player made at night at one of the bowl games. It was loaded with "noise", what used to be grain, except the noise in a digital photo underexposed a little like that makes the "grain" red and blue and green as well as black and white. When I was shooting digital at the newspaper we never used an exposure index of more than 1200. I sure like my film....

-- Joe Cole (jcole@apha.com), January 21, 2000

Answers

Joe,

I can completely agree with you -- I shoot an Olympus C-2000Z for digital, and it's a great, flexible camera for shots were I have a lot of light. However, in a low-light situation, there's nothing like my EOS-1n loaded with TMax p3200...

I would expect that we will start seeing some of the noise-reducing things that TV camera manufacturers have done applied to still-camera CCD chips in the near-future. Ikegami's CCD video cameras can apply a significant level of gain without gaining unattractive levels of noise, and other manufacturers seem to have gotten to roughly the same level.

Neil

-- Neil Carpenter (primate@mindspring.com), January 23, 2000.

Actually, you are correct... the grain in traditional photography has evolved into noise. This is usually an occurance in the blue channel predominantly. However, there is hope. www.camerabits.com has a solution which blurs the channels, without losing details, with one click. Try it for free and see for yourself. To my eyes, this is often better than grain from traditional film. Also, digital is so new, not everyone is using it correctly. If you can shoot at a lower ISO, do so. Save headaches in the future.

www.linear-systems.com

-- Thom Meredith (thom@linear-systems.com), January 29, 2000.

Thom,

I'm trying out the camerabits filter right now; however, with 1600x1200 images taken from my C-2000Z at ISO 200 (if my memory serves), I'm not seeing a huge difference. Looking at pixels one-for- one, comparing before & after, I'm not seeing significant difference.

What were you testing on?

-- Neil Carpenter (primate@mindspring.com), January 29, 2000.