wrote in message
...
Alan Browne wrote:

A major attraction of digital is that you can shoot a lot
more, with no cost, loss or penalty and of course
convenience.

This is one of the reasons for me to stop shooting
digital.

On the analog issue, when you shoot film and optically
print it in the darkroom, that's pretty much an analog
process don't ya think? There isn't much analog about a
digital camera other than the light hitting the sensor.
After that point, it's all digital. The image is converted
to digital data before it ever leaves the sensor.

Stephanie

Digital properly refers to a method of storage and
transmission that samples the original continuous data in a
discontinuous way and further codes it into numbers. There
are discontinuous methods that are not digital such as pulse
coding. These can have some of the advantages of digital in
that they are immune from non-linearities in the storage and
transmission system. For instance, pulse coding can be
adapted to magnetic recording. Digital goes another step
from simply sampling the data, it codes it into numbers
following some set plan so that the original data can be
exactly reconstructed. In practice, because of limitations
of bandwidth in both transmission and storage media digital
data is often compressed. Some compression methods loose
some of the original information and some don't. The common
JPEG compression scheme used for digital images on the
internet is a "lossy" compression method. It assumes certain
statistical characteristics of the original in order to
reconstruct an approximation of it. A low compression JPEG
can be nearly as good as the original but, if its decoded
and recoded some additional information is lost so it can go
only a limited number of generations. By this I mean
generations where decoding and recoding are required such as
editing. Other compression schemes are do not have data loss
and can be reapplied essentially without limit.
The main advantages of "digital" photography is that it
is electronic and would have many of the same advantages
even if digital encoding were not used. However, properly
applied, digital encoding and decoding can eliminate many
problems with imperfect transmission and storage methods.



--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles, CA, USA