Monte,

Your "what if" was already designed and manufactured, and has since failed in the commercial marketplace. Applied Science fiction, now owned by Kodak, invented a system which actually read directly what the latent image was on an exposed film and recorded it as a digital image file. Unfortunately the sensing/reading process destroyed the film image, so no physical negative could be produced.

It failed not because it was'nt technically viable, but because people who are the great masses of consumers voted with their dollars for digital cameras, and now cell phones with digital camera sensors as large as five megpixels.

Sadly those of us who are serious photo enthusiasts are at the mercy of a much larger snapshooting public whose buying power dictates what is available to our miniscule community of really committed photographers.

David
Thanks for the history lesson. My thought soundes so original, but I guess someone else tried and failed. The minority is just stuck with what we have which is okay because I know there will be a day when all is satisfied. Thanks again. Monte johnson.

I agree, there should be a compromis. And I think it was a good idea. May be it will catch on given enough demand and time. Take care and thank you for sharing the information!

Actually considering what I have been doing digitally the last 15 years I would have to say the most effective and rewarding compromise is to shoot on 35mm color negative film (or C-41 process chromogenic B&W) and use a store mini lab processor (best: Fuji Frontier), and then a Minolta 5400 II scanner to scan the film. I have been able to obtain surprisingly good 16x20 print images this way printed on an Epson Pro 4000.

In other words the film/scan hybrid strategy has provided reasonable cost, superior print image quality, and a lot of satisfaction also recovering old film images and making ever better images from them. A lot of fun and satisfaction. and even though I also use digital SLR camera's, film scanning remains competitive and just gets better and better. So as long as 35mm C-41 process film is available, which I expect will continue for some time even though volume has dropped off, you can have the best of both worlds, film and digital.

David,
I never really thought about that. we have Fuji frontier in town, but i never shoot much C-41 BW. Might give that a try. I am sure the 4000 produced some nice results. I have read much about it since I will never afford one. Interesting enough though last year when I shot a lot of 35mm velvia. Scanning on the 4870 then converting to grayscale and adjusting levels I produced some nice BW prints with very dark blacks and bright whites. Fuji is very saturated and it only worked good on some subjects. Mainly where there was a lot of contrasting difference in the subject and the background. Thank a good idea on the C-41. Monte Johnson.

Monte

RE: digital to film

I've read that there is technology now which allows for taking a digital file and making a film negative from it. I don't know how it's done but I belive it uses the usual chemicals to process the negative but I'm not sure about this. It would be interesting to do a google on it which I might just do.