Briefly, I am trying to learn about the process of converting digital images to film. Would you all please suggest where I might find such information? Thanks Paul

-- Paul F. Swinford (pfswinford@aol.com), April 23, 2000

Answers

Film recorders are just printers, as far as computers are concerned. There is very little information available on film recorders because the market is dying. I used one for about a year recently at a one hour photo lab, and I can tell you quite honestly that I'm glad to see them dying off. Film recorders were good for slide presentations and business cards, and that's about it.

The process, however, is simple. Scan an image into a computer. Do your thing in PhotoShop. Print to film. I also created some business cards from scratch using Macromedia FreeHand and these turned out very nice. We did some work where we scanned negatives, places the photos on a business card and printed them to film to print the cards on photo stock.

The problem with film recorders is the resolution is simply not good enough for high quality work. They're fine for text and line art, but if you print a continuous tone photo to a 35mm negative and enlarge it to 8x10 you can easily see the scan lines from the recorder.

Since you already have the image on your computer it is much better to skip the intermediate step and print on paper right out of the computer.

-- Darron Spohn (dspohn@photobitstream.com), April 24, 2000.