jim_todaro

All right, stand back and listen. Listen to the engineer.

 

First, I've been shooting medium format for thirty years. I was complete photographic support for a 3000 man Army post. I every kind of photography.

 

Next, I built the front end of the Dicomed CCD back that mounts on Hasselblads. That CCD array is 4100 x 4100 pixels and 2.25 x 2.25 inches square, digigitized to 36 bits with a 1 bit noise floor. A color shot is about 96 megabytes. That is our SMALL CCD Array. The BIG one is 9000 x 9000 pixels and about 6 x 6 INCHES! We make giant Electro-Optical aerial cameras with linear arrays 14,000 pixels wide and lenses ground to a 20th of a wavelength. We've tested Hasselblad lenses and found that they end up where ours start from. We can look out 40 miles and see a man while the we dynamically move the camera tiny distances to cancel the plane's shudders, jinks and vibrations as they happen at 600 miles per hour.

 

So all that says is that I know electronic cameras.

 

Hear this cleary: D O N O T T H R O W A W A Y Y O U R F I L M ! !

People have taken our old film aerial cameras from WWII, put 70mm film in them, laid them on their side and presently take enormously crisp, stunning, super-panoramic photos with them. 50 year old cameras! The message is simple, film will ALWAYS be of higher quality than Digital for the same film/sensor size.

 

Electronic arrays are used simply because they provide more rapid access, NOT because they produce better pictures. You will NEVER get a chromium print out of a digital camera.

 

As a final note, digital is fine for snapshots and other applications where ultimate quality is not the goal. Every serious commercial application, with the possible exception of catalogs and super market flyers, will be done with film, and film is STILL the best archival storage medium, without exception.

Yours broke too? That's a thin little piece there and cast metal at that, I wish I could find one too, or a pentaprism.

Got got my Mamiya Press second hand around 1970 after it had been around Viet Nam. I paid $150 for it and it came with 250 rolls of B/W film. All I have is the normal lens and one 6 x 9 back and it takes FINE sharp photos. I only have one scanned photo in my computer, which I just looked at, and it's not as high a resolution as the original so I won't mislead you by sending it. It's really a good, sharp camera.