3 Ladders

Follow this link for an explanation of these three images. All the images were scaled to 500 pixels vertically, 72 dpi. No color correction was applied to any of the images. The ladder is purple, not red.

The first image is from the Canon S100 digital camera. (69616 bytes). Starting image size 2020 KB. The color of the ladder is not correct, the two images from film are much more accurate. The pixels seem to have a different height than width. The shot is slightly distorted. As a result the same magnification could not quite be achieved for the film shots. This is typical of at least the lower tier of digital cameras.

Below is the second image from film, scanned by Wolf Camera on a Kodak PhotoCD (60253 bytes). The starting image size 760 KB. A 1488 x 992 at 72 dpi image compressed to fit into a file of less than a megabyte is not of high enough quality for anything other than casual WEB images. The Kodak scanner is more contrasty than the CanoScan. We conclude that these PhotoCDs are not useful in our environment. The quality is just not good enough.

The third, below, is again from film, scanned at maximum resolution by the CanoScan FS2710. (62617 bytes) Original file size 27,500 KB, 3888 x 2720 pixels at 2720 dpi, 8-bits per pixel then downsized to 500 pixels vertical for the WEB image. The original image can be blown up to 11 x 14 in. Although a 4000 dpi scanner would be nice, the increase in quality is beginning to compete with the other limitations of the entire process such as focus, camera shake, lens quality, and printer limitations. This is the least contrasty of the images - a characteristic of the CanoScan.

The compressed JPEG image is 63K vs 60K for the PhotoCD indicating more detail in the image. This is visible even in the downsized WEB images.

The color is accurate, although we have seen bad color from the local mini-labs. Obviously they are not rigorous on maintaining the quality of their chemicals.

Last modified: Wed, 07-Nov-01 08:03:21 PST