is analog digital?

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aniMal

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I was just lying here in the bathtub, totally immersed in thoughts about analog and digital...

We tend to think of analog as some old process that will not be developed any further, and of digital as some kind of endless developmental curve which goes off into the infinite...

But, what are the limits to digital? That is, digits in rows representing the image? Will we some time reach the level where the sensor will be the atoms? What will digital be then - something quite close to film really?

Or if we were able to develop film until the level of graininess equals the molecular or atomic resolution?

What I mean, is that if both mediums were developed to the extreme end of possibilities, would they then turn out to be the same? The same in the way that they would still not be able to describe a perfect curve as a vector, but as an image made out of digits?

Is perhaps our idea of analog just an idea? Like the world of ideas that Plato claimed lies behind the shady phenomena of the mundane world...

On the other hand what attracts most people with film is the organic feel of it. This is what keeps Tri-x alive, and what makes young people on flickr experiment with all kinds of film and old cameras...

I find these kinds of musings very interesting, what about people out there?
 
aniMal said:
But, what are the limits to digital? That is, digits in rows representing the image? Will we some time reach the level where the sensor will be the atoms? What will digital be then - something quite close to film really?

Or if we were able to develop film until the level of graininess equals the molecular or atomic resolution?
Click to expand...

There's a strange paradox here.

Digital images can be considered quite solid. There are no gaps between the zeros and ones.

Film on the other hand is full of holes. There's lots of space between those whirling atoms, so the negative you hold in your hand is actually more space than solid.
 
Interesting - never thought about the gaps... Which are of course present in a digital sensor too!

A laugh is always good - especially when it goes along an inquisitive mind...

Which is why there is this brilliant subsection of the forum, is it not?
 
Reality about digital is quite opposite, in general it's the digital capture/sampling which has "gaps" by it's nature. You sample "real world" with some frequency (in time, in plane) and what you get is set of separated values. These values are not connected and there might be more information hiding in spaces between them (that's the reason why low-resolution sensors cause aliasing and thus need anti-alias filters). The solid feel is created by the analog representation of the digital values (that's the way we are still used to perceive).
 
Very interesting idea, aniMal. We know that analog silver emulsions actually do function in sort of a digital fashion-- grains are either ON or OFF. If we logically extend digital sensors to their limit (and there IS a limit), then the technology might approach the level of silver halide chemistry.

Of course, you can always increase resolution by building a larger sensor, or larger film format.


But you know, I still don't like the digital crap.
 
Another way to put it, is that there is a difference in what we want.

One part of us want that ideal world where everything is defined to a resolution that is infinite, like a vector image of a letter from a font.

Another part of us know that this ideal world is just an ideal, and therefore enjoys the organic world that appeals to us in a more bodily way.

Is not a lot of great art aligned along this axis? With an ideal image that is portrayed with earthly colours and on a canvas / paperbase that is decidedly not part of that ideal world?

Somehow I wonder if the smoothness that digital has acquired by now triggers the first part... I myself feel both happy at getting really crisp images with a small and handy M8, but on the other hand I feel much better emotionally with an M7 and grainy film...

Is this a property of reality that mirrors in us? Or does it come from our own setup?
 
I am so tempted to say that despite the OPs point, there is a difference between analog and digital -- but I can't quite put my finger on it.

But I won't for fear of being booed off the monitor.
 
Of course there is a lot of difference, what I am driving at is more underlying principles of technology and philosophy...

I might not be very clear, I am perhaps leaning more towards Heidegger than Kant when it comes to style! Or perhaps Nietzsche, hehehe...

Its not the most important thing in the world, but I somehow find trains of thoughts like these very interesting - and entertaining...
 
"I was just lying here in the bathtub, totally immersed in thoughts about analog and digital..."


You spend too much time in the bathtub......and I hope there was water in it!


😀
 
crawdiddy said:
We know that analog silver emulsions actually do function in sort of a digital fashion-- grains are either ON or OFF.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, this is actually not quite correct. Any particular molecule of silver compound may be turned to silver metal by light-and-development, or removed in the fix, but the degree that any crystal/grain structure (containing millions of atoms) is affected and/or 'grown' after being exposed is very analog.

There seems to be some sort of digital-forum guy who came up with this binary idea and it has been propagated all over the place as an internet-myth thing.

Have a search on APUG for the chemists who have been explaining what really happens. I am only an Applied Physicist, so I defer to the guys from Kodak, Ilford etc.
 
aniMal said:
But, what are the limits to digital? That is, digits in rows representing the image? Will we some time reach the level where the sensor will be the atoms? What will digital be then - something quite close to film really?

Or if we were able to develop film until the level of graininess equals the molecular or atomic resolution?
Click to expand...

No digits in digital. It's all one and a zeroes, on or off, etc., in a happy binary world.

Frankly, I think it is inevitable that, in the future, atoms will be used to represent a single pixel of data. Whether or not that kind of resolution adds anything to the photograph is another issue.

I have no idea if conventional film can approach that kind of resolution. Nor do I know if the human eye can even detect it. It seems pointless to go after levels of resolution we can't notice.
 
aniMal said:
I was just lying here in the bathtub, totally immersed in thoughts about analog and digital...

What I mean, is that if both mediums were developed to the extreme end of possibilities, would they then turn out to be the same?

I find these kinds of musings very interesting, what about people out there?
Click to expand...

Very Zen. I shall have to take a bath and meditate.
 
MartinP said:
Unfortunately, this is actually not quite correct. Any particular molecule of silver compound may be turned to silver metal by light-and-development, or removed in the fix, but the degree that any crystal/grain structure (containing millions of atoms) is affected and/or 'grown' after being exposed is very analog.

There seems to be some sort of digital-forum guy who came up with this binary idea and it has been propagated all over the place as an internet-myth thing.

Have a search on APUG for the chemists who have been explaining what really happens. I am only an Applied Physicist, so I defer to the guys from Kodak, Ilford etc.
Click to expand...

You may be correct.

Embarrassingly enough, I am a (mainframe) systems programmer. Sadly, I earn my livelihood digitally. And perhaps thats why I prefer analog stuff.
 
What we see in a positive print isn't the film's grain. It's the spaces between the grains that let the light pass through the emulsion, and it's that light that exposes the silver in the paper's emulsion.
 
More like Digital Electronics are Analog, Just thresholded. But if you ever screw up the voltages--- the end of the world as we know it, replaced with a computer's hallucinations.
 
Film is made up of silver halide crystals of varying size. Higher speed films have more variation. Digital is all the same size. On the other hand, the old litho film used for printing process tried to have the crystals as uniform a size as possible. With film, it only take 4 silver atoms produced by action of light to make a stable latent image. This is then amplified with chemical development. Hence you can raise the speed of tri-x with different development. Development can also dissolve grain, create edge effects and change the tone curve. All these are not possible without software in digital.

Digital is all the same size. So digital is like trying to use litho film and develop for a continuous tone image.

In the big view, film runs by chaos, digital is totally ordered. my 2 cents
 
Chaos is a Digital phenomena caused by round-off errors when computing iterative calculations.

That's not film.
 
I used to love the effects you could create with litho film and a pin registration board. For awhile I had a modified 5x7 Kinderman contact printer set up with registration pins. Together with a copy stand and a macro lens you could make "posterized" 35mm Kodachrome slides. Someplace around here I have bunches of them I did back in the early seventies.
 
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