Digital BW, The Print

Jerry,

The Canon D60 may have a chip with 6.3 million 'sensors' that after
processing in the camera produce 6.3 million 'pixels', but my point was that
each of those sensors only measures luminosity and one color. A red sensor
measures luminosity and red light; to produce an RGB pixel from it the
program in the camera has to look at the values of the green and blue
sensors around the red one, and guess (interpolate) what the red sensor
might have seen if it could sense all three colours. The same goes for all
the other 6.3 million sensors on the chip. None of them has the complete
('real') information on the scene you have photographed - not a single
sensor in your camera can record the real detail in the picture!

So the color program in your D30, D60, Nikon D100, etc has to do exactly
what Photoshop does when interpolating, look at the existing info and by a
sum of varying complexity (linear, nearest neighbour, bicubic, etc)
calculate the missing information that you want.

That is not to say that all interpolation is bad; after all our eyes operate
on exactly the same principle (I think), interpolating from the rods and
cones in our retina that have different sensitivities to red, green, and
blue light.

I will eventually get a digital camera, of that I have no doubt (because of
all the advantages that Robert Morrison pointed out), but at the moment the
quality is not good enough for what I want. I want to be able to hand-hold
my camera much of the time, crop my slides, and then print them at 11x16
(A3). The prints I've seen from a D30 and Fuji S1 are just about OK
(slightly soft) when uncropped at 8x10 (A4), but not at any greater mag
unless it's the sort of image that is OK with soft focus.

Bob Frost.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jerry Olson" <jerryolson@...>


> Bob, where did you hear that the pixels were interpolated? the Canon D60
>  has a real 6.3 Megapixel chip. Wouldn't Nikon do the same, just to keep
> up with Canon?