Michael Meissner wrote:

The problem is most digital cameras have a lot less range than print
films do, between dark and light. Slide films have the same sort of
problems, and the solution is typically the same (expose to avoid
burning out the highlights and bring out shadow detail in post
processing). In the most common case of JPEG, there are only 8 bits
(values 0-255) for each color per pixel.

Yeah, but usually those 8 bits represent a value that you raise to the
power 2.2 to get luminance. When you work that out, 8 bits is a heck
of a dynamic range.

From what I can see, digital sensors (or at least those in DSLRs) have
more dynamic range than transparencies but less than print film. It
may be that with a drum scanner you can squeeze a bit more out of a
transparency.

With some cameras by going to the RAW formats, you get a bit more
range. I suspect that in general you will get better results under
a photo editor like photoshop or gimp than with the camera doing the
processing.

Yup.

Andrew.