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[OM] [OT] This Idiot's Back, Kodachrome, and Digital Olys

Subject: [OM] [OT] This Idiot's Back, Kodachrome, and Digital Olys
From: Garth Wood <garth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 14:01:58 -0600
After Giles' and Tom Scales' e-mails to me (and some others), I decided "Oh, 
what the Hell..."  Thanks for actually giving a rat's patootie about my 
membership.

Checked the Digest first before re-subscribing, and found Oben fulminating 
about how there were "only" 235 List members.  Actually, including Digest 
subscribers, and eliminating known duplicate addresses (as well as a couple of 
strong likelies), there's 561, give or take a few.  There were about 
half-a-dozen other possible duplicates (i.e., close matches), but I wasn't sure 
about those.  So, let's call it 550.  That's respectable.  And if there were 
any more, poor ol' Zuiko wouldn't be able to keep up, I suspect.  Then we'd all 
have to buy Shawn a bigger server.  ;-)

On to better things.

Once again, I'm falling in love with Kodachrome 64, after having shot a couple 
of rolls for old times' sake.  Awesome colour fidelity and rendition.  Nice 
saturation.  Incredibly fine grain.  I know very little about the genius(es) 
who created this stuff around 60 years ago, but I tip my hat to 'em.  Now I'm 
gonna blow a few rolls of the stuff on the fall foliage around these parts.  My 
only regret is that fewer and fewer places anywhere are processing Kodachrome, 
so turnaround times are long (I'm averaging two to three weeks) and costs 
remain high.  (And the included mailers are virtually useless in Canada.)

**HEAVY SIGH**

I even like Kodachrome for portraiture, certainly as much as any "dedicated" 
portraiture film like Portra.  I wonder if Kodak would ever consider 
*improving* the stuff, or if digital has it doomed.

Speaking of digital and the new Oly E-20, I engaged my professional 
photographer buddy in a short e-mail conversation about the merits of digital, 
and mentioned the strong rumour that Oly was going to produce a digital SLR 
with interchangeable lenses which would *not* accept OM series lenses.  He owns 
a Fuji FinePix S1, which takes Nikon SLR lenses.  Here's his reply:

>Makes sense to me. The biggest problem with my (and other) digital SLRs is a
>weird and poorly understood lens-CCD interaction where there can sometimes
>be a colour shift with the centre of the frame being magenta and the
>edges green.  It becomes visible in high flare situations with a continuous
>light toned background.  It's both less strong AND more camouflaged in all
>other situations, so can normally be ignored or is "under the threshold of
>detection."
>
>Moving the rear lens element away from the CCD and making the light approach
>the film as perpendicularly as possible is the solution, which doesn't help
>with existing [retrofocus] lens designs that often have the rear element very 
>far back.
>
>So, yeah, it looks to me likely the rumours have a basis in fact. As
>manufacturers gradually redesign existing lenses, their "new" models are
>addressing this problem, without mentioning it [or] alerting the public that
>there IS a problem.  Heh.

His empirical experience would seem to buttress Olympus' arguments that they 
didn't want to glom existing OM lenses onto a digital design due to the 
retrofocus design of most typical SLR lenses.  For those unfamiliar with the 
argument, a PowerPoint slide presentation can be had from the following URL:

   http://www.taiga.ca/~gallery/digital.html

Later, d00ds and d00desses.

Garth (who's on his f-f-f-f-fourteenth cup of c-c-c-c-coffee today...)


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