Demise of medium format?

[Red Dawn]

Hi

Digital photography on a steamroll, first 35mm, now even 120 film is in danger now??

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/1ds/1ds-field.shtml

 

[sriram]

And this was the same guy who said the D60 could beat medium format Provia 100F, and that you could print dead neutral B&W prints from the Epson 1270 with Epson OEM inks.

Please... give me a break.

 

[Ian]

In my opinion medium format film is under attack from the digital revolution, but it's not under attack from piddling little 35mm DSLR's but more from damn large MF and LF scanning backs which have already caused most leading edge commercial studios to make the swap over to digital.

One shot backs are getting there .. a couple of generations and MF 120 based backs will out perform colour emulsions. B/W is another kettle of fish however.

 

[Jed]

Eh? IMHO scanning backs were already creaming LF a few years back, let alone MF. Had a quick squiz at the 1Ds samples, nice, but possibly not all that nice, in the sense that I expected more. Put it this way, if Nikon did finally get something out, I'd hope their pixels to be better on a pixel to pixel front. We all live in hope.

 

[Ian]

Originally posted by Jed
Eh? IMHO scanning backs were already creaming LF a few years back, let alone MF.

Lol mate, the reason I said 'under attack' is because of the time it takes a scanning back to produce an image ... 3 minutes or so for the big units... so film still has an edge there .. once they get a 120mp one shot back LF is essentially toast in 4x5.

 

[Red Dawn]

Originally posted by sriram
And this was the same guy who said the D60 could beat medium format Provia 100F, and that you could print dead neutral B&W prints from the Epson 1270 with Epson OEM inks.

Please... give me a break.

Hi

Sririam, i honestly don't remember him saying D60 could beat medium format Provia 100F. If i remember correctly, his previous testing done on the D60 with medium format output gives the edge to Provia 100F on his Pentax 645..........

for the 1Ds test, however, he did firmly state that the output is better than the medium format system........

don't know about the B&W prints. i think he did close his wet darkroom several years ago though.

 

[Jed]

Originally posted by Ian


Lol mate, the reason I said 'under attack' is because of the time it takes a scanning back to produce an image ... 3 minutes or so for the big units... so film still has an edge there .. once they get a 120mp one shot back LF is essentially toast in 4x5.

Yeah. But I'd trade that anyday for the joys of double dark slides!

 

[Ian]

Originally posted by Jed


Yeah. But I'd trade that anyday for the joys of double dark slides!

Haha!!! Ever comitted the big sin of loading sheets back to front in the holder?

No a more serious note, the only real limitations apart from cost, scanning speed and the inability to deal with flash (yes folks u gotta use gazillions of watts of HOT tungsten, quartz halogen or carbon arc etc with scanning backs .. melt the model's makeup in 90 seconds .. hot wax treatment anyone?) of LF backs is the no one shot ability and the difficulty of taking them in to the field.

 

[sriram]

Originally posted by Red Dawn
for the 1Ds test, however, he did firmly state that the output is better than the medium format system........

Great, for the rich kids who have $15,000 to spend on the 1Ds and a PC/server upgrade. In the mean time I'm going to shoot with my el-cheapo manual SLR. (which, btw, is worth not much less than what it was 20 yrs ago).

 

[Jed]

Originally posted by Ian


Haha!!! Ever comitted the big sin of loading sheets back to front in the holder?

Can't say I have thankfully. But I do have the bad habit of not marking my DDSs properly. Which means I always end up second guessing the type of film loaded, which is daft. But that's solvable with a quick trip to the darkroom and a fumbling around with film notches...