George Schaub

The annual Photo Marketing Association (PMA) Show is the US market's introduction to new products and services that will be appearing on store shelves and, increasingly, Internet sales shops in 2005. Coming on the heels of last year's photokina, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and the hoard of other trade shows that litter the calendar of late, this, the...

The
Sprint PCS Samsung Multimedia Phone MM-A800


Much ado has been made of late of how camera phones will gut the lower-end digicam
market and how everyone will dump their 1-3MP digicams for these amazing multimedia
products. Having shot with a sub 1-megapixel phone a year back I shrugged and
moved on, deciding it was a fun toy that some might find useful but that image
quality was poor, even when compared with the lowliest of blister-pack dedicated
cameras. Word has gotten around that new, higher-megapixel phonecams are coming,
with 7 MP being the figure touted on one model available now overseas. In addition,
we just got word that Kodak is finally going to release their EasyShare One,
subject of a press conference last January, which is said to be a camera first
and then a web or phone connecting pictuire sender second. With all that in
mind I was intrigued by the new Samsung 2MP camphone sent to us by the folks
at Sprint, one that links up with Sprint's PCS Picture mail service.

...

The question is—does anybody really know what a given image would look like if they shot it on Kodachrome 25, or Fuji Acros, or some obscure color negative film that even in film’s heyday was little used or appreciated? Perhaps the more pertinent question is—how many people have made photographs using film? But film references are what a number of so-called film emulation software programs use for describing presets that can be applied to a digital image. Half academic and half nostalgic, the programs use film brand names to describe saturation, contrast, color nuance, and grain structure variations that are then applied to an image. Perhaps using film names is better than poetic fantasy terms, like “misty blue dawn,” but then again entirely subjective descriptors, rather than supposedly clinical ones used in these software programs, might be just as handy for today’s photography crowd. In any case, I recently tested one such program, DxO’s FilmPack 3.1, to see if it offered up creative variations that could be used as is or as foundation images when interpreting subjects and scenes.