Posted on 03/11/2002 12:24:59 PM PST by Don Joe
Hope you like them. I considered the Oly E10, but was concerned about the maximum 320 ISO and non-interchangeable lenses. It does take some great shots, though. Depreciation is true of any digital camera at this stage of the game. I waited until I could get the D30 for $1700, and now they're coming out with the D60 (same camera with 6mp sensor) with suggested retail of $2295, which means below two grand street price. You can pick up a Nikon D1 that was over five grand a couple of years ago for $2200 on EBay. I don't expect prices to stabalize for about another two to three years.
You can't use a silicon cell because the output is dramatically different from selenium, and, the spectral sensitivity is even more radically different. Selenium is a pretty good match for film, silicon is not. "Silicon blue" cells used in cameras are tiny cells with blue filters intended to correct the spectral issues. Those cells are not usable in a galvanometer type meter because they put out tiny signals rather than output sufficient current to directly drive a microammeter. The SB cells drive an amplifier which then interfaces with the camera's metering circuitry.
In some cases, the only repair a Master needs is to clean the photocell contacts. (The entire back is one terminal, the other is a ring of tinned lands around the circumference of the sensitized side. A springy contact presses against the lands, and if it becomes oxidized, it will build up resistance, and even if the cell is good, the meter won't work.)
Aliasing. Same thing is somewhat true, though not usually as badly, with monitors. Depending upon the image content being viewed, having a monitor which is a tiny bit blurry will often improve image quality versus one that is perfectly sharp, if the image does not contain meaningful data over nyquist(*).
This may seem like an odd restriction, since one might think 'of course there's no useful data over nyquist', but on low resolution displays there very often is useful data over nyquist, and this data considerably enhances legibility. For example, consider a 60dpi display which shows all-uppercase letters in a 3x5 matrix within a 4x6 cell. Nyquist would be 30dpi, and there would be ten rows of text per inch and fifteen columns. Legibility of such a display wouldn't be great, but would be quite adequate if there were no filtering (blurring). Even a perfect "brick-wall" filter at nyquist would make the text less legible; a filter whose cutoff was anything below nyquist would turn the text into an illegible blob.On a related note, what would be the characteristics of the optimal filter that could be produced if order was unlimitted but all coefficients had to be positive? To put it another way, if a monitor were constructed with 'optimal' blurriness, what would its spacial filter function look like, and what would be its frequency characteristics?
I suppose that was their intent, but as you pointed out, they failed to market them properly. The R&D and production costs on those machines must have been enormous, and to fail to promote them at all should have been a criminal act. I have no doubt that the marketing scheme that you outlined would work and even make a profit, but I fear that the bean counters at Kodak would not see it that way.
Kodachrome will always have a quality advantage over the chromogenic films out there for the reasons that you explained, and it is a real shame to see it fall by the wayside due to mass market preferences. My favorite film of all time was Kodachrome II; virtually grainless and amazingly sharp, with fantastic color fidelity. I never found a K-14 film that could compare to it, even though they are excellent as well.
Sorry for the delay in my response here, my FR pager failed to alert me to your replies. Must be a problem with the new software, and I'm not even sure if the pager works with general interest topics.
I got a good taste of how modern management strategy works when I did consulting for a government agency. I watched a unit of government be brought to its knees by a yuppie hustler on his way up. The plan is simple: Cut every corner possible, even to the point that secretaries have to beg for typewriter ribbons, regardless of the long term cost to the enterprise, so long as you can make it look good on paper in the short term.
Keep riding the horse hard until right before it's ready to drop dead soaking wet in place, then jump off, "grab a new horse" (i.e., take the documentation of your fantastic paper "success story" and use it to market yourself to another enterprise), and let the survivors deal with the dead horse and all the misery that comes due thanks to your mismanagement, while you bask in your "success" in the new venue. Repeat as necessary until you reach retirement age.
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