the term analog

[Griffin]

Actually the sensor in a digital camera is an analog component.

 

[sevo]

Actually the sensor in a digital camera is an analog component.

That may be true at the scientific and chip engineering level, but even for engineers downstream of the chip manufacturer it is a digital only device. There are very few contemporary chips left for which you can still buy a analogue periphery - and quite a few, especially of the phone and compact camera class, have the conversion already on-chip.

 

[willie_901]

Is it non linear and not discrete in response? Analog.

This goes for film, vinyl, tape, etc.

I think the term analog is appropriate and necessary.

Any continuous means to model or record a state of nature (sound waves, light waves) is an analog process. Digital is derivative in that the model for the state of nature is incomplete (discrete, not all the information is recorded). The two terms are required to represent this difference.

The models for discrete representation are often excellent. But as we know aliasing of luminance and color information is a fundamental, unsolvable problem. Analog models have disadvantages in some circumstances, but they are not necessarily fundamental in nature.

PS I am not being critical of systems without AA filters. Aliasing artifacts in digital photography are not important in many situations. Other times they are filtered by camera shake, lens imperfections and other unintentional averaging processes. Occasionally aliasing artifacts are a factor. Unlike color artifacts, luminance aliasing degrades resoluion and contrast and is not as obvious to evaluate in a single image.

 

[rbiemer]

But film is not really continuous, is it? Either light has struck a silver grain or it has not. Film is binary but not digital? Discrete but on a very small interval.
Rob

 

[Bill Clark]

Recently my wife & I spent time with our daughters family. Brought a Leica M3 with a 50mm Elmar f2.8 version to make photographs. It has the half case on it that I bought from Mr. Gandy. For the first few snaps my 5 1/2 yr. young grand daughter wanted to see the picture, you know the one that comes on the screen located the back of the camera. I said no it's film, no screen. She had to see the back of the camera to believe me.

 

[clayne]

But film is not really continuous, is it? Either light has struck a silver grain or it has not. Film is binary but not digital? Discrete but on a very small interval.
Rob

Nope. Well known myth. At a certain level, yes, one has to have n amount of light to excite the halide past a threshold or it won't develop. But past the threshold it's not an on/off "dot." It's more like a non-linear bloom of completely indiscrete sizing.

What you visualize as grain is an optical illusion created by the brain finding patterns. Actual molecules are not perceivable by the eye and that's where the sizing differences are happening.

 

[Papercut]

For the same reason that (for the vast majority of Chinese under the vast majority of circumstances) 車 no longer means a cart with wooden wheels, pulled by a person or some draft animal, and now means an automobile with either an electric, hybrid, or internal combustion engine. 😉

How about calling it chemical photography? But seriously, we were perfectly happy calling it just 'photography' for over 150 years, why the sudden change?

 

[mdarnton]

Meanings of words are just consensus. If you don't like the consensus, don't use the word, but isn't it sort of silly to complain that the rest of the world doesn't agree with your more enlightened opinion?

 

[Sejanus.Aelianus]

Meanings of words are just consensus. If you don't like the consensus, don't use the word, but isn't it sort of silly to complain that the rest of the world doesn't agree with your more enlightened opinion?

A good point but who defines "the rest of the world"?

 

[msbarnes]

Meanings of words are just consensus. If you don't like the consensus, don't use the word, but isn't it sort of silly to complain that the rest of the world doesn't agree with your more enlightened opinion?

I'm not complaining.

I have just observed that certain people use film and certain people use analog to describe this medium. I don't know, I was just curious.

 

[Aristophanes]

Don't sensors are analog devices signal from which is converted to digital format? Just like CD's are.

A sensor is analog.

 

[btgc]

Well, CD itself is digital because of encoding. Right. But all music, even digitall encoded on media, reproduced or played through speakers is analog, right? Or there are speakers working strictly digitally, I mean, membrane oscillate in steps, defined by digital signal?

Not that I'm too worried by terms. I remember audio records indicate how it were done, abbreviating steps by either A or D (say, AAD). Recording, mastering...can't recall all of them.

 

[nikkor-watching]

A good point but who defines "the rest of the world"?

The rest of the world would probably be as many as can dance on the head of a pin.
I think AAD means recorded in analogue and mastered in it to the final cut. ADD means someone's had a go with the original studio recordings to produce a digital mixdown. One assumes with the original take notes.
I don't hear people talking about analogue cameras anyway, only film cameras. I don't think there's anything magic about the film roll-off response anymore now that digital sensors have so much dynamic range and the electronics can shape the straight line response to a curve.

 

[one90guy]

Recently my wife & I spent time with our daughters family. Brought a Leica M3 with a 50mm Elmar f2.8 version to make photographs. It has the half case on it that I bought from Mr. Gandy. For the first few snaps my 5 1/2 yr. young grand daughter wanted to see the picture, you know the one that comes on the screen located the back of the camera. I said no it's film, no screen. She had to see the back of the camera to believe me.

Sounds familiar, have had to show the back of camera on many occasions. All grandchildren and lots of young adults. I also use the term analog, do use digital also.

David

 

[Godfrey]

Anyone find the term analog kind of weird? ...

Analog, smanalogue.

I work with film and digital capture.
I develop film into negatives, and I process images.

Life's too short.

G

 

[sevo]

I don't hear people talking about analogue cameras anyway, only film cameras.

The term is appropriate for analogue video cameras, and these even had a few offshoots into still photography (Sony Mavica, Canon ION). Film is film - but if people insist on categorizing it among analogue I have grown much too polite (or senile) to fight over picking a nit. Twenty years ago I'd have been rude over it...

 

[Contarama]

In the sense that it produces an analog voltage that is run through an A to D converter.. yes.

More non photo bs on here, the camera crazies (not directed to you Aristophanes) are busy. Rather than taking pictures, I think I'll worry about the kind of nylon weave used in my camera strap.

Yes the weft and the warp are very important...

 

[nikkor-watching]

Rather than taking pictures, I think I'll worry about the kind of nylon weave used in my camera strap.

But do you use the plebeian camera loop or the Nikonjutsu loop in your strap? Mmm?

 

[Richard G]

The recording medium for still photography, was, until recently, a chemical complex adherent to a long perforated acetate band, commonly called film. Film, whether 120 roll film or 135 format (the specific designation for the common 35mm variant) or other formats, needed to be kept in the dark until exposed and quickly returned to the dark after exposure and until development. (Open the camera back of a film camera while the roll has yet to be rewound and see how many pictures of your kids can be printed). The film, or frame for each picture constituted virtually a brand new 'sensor' for each picture. (Tell this to someone cursing their clumsiness in cleaning their digital sensor and see what reaction you get.) Dust, the bane of the digital photographer with an interchangeable lens camera, is not unknown in the darkroom, however. Store scans and cheap prints can be ruined by dust and lint adherent to the acetate after development. (Return your scans four or five times to your usual supplier and see how long the relationship lasts.) The smoking photographer once delighted in the tactile and the corporeal, his cigarettes, his Dunhill lighter, and the rewind crank and advance lever of his favourite SLR or Leica. Now, enjoying the pinnacle of technological advancement, he turns out banal, sterile images of startling sharpness, with no grain and no 'noise' (a grain like particulate distortion of tonality peculiar to digital photography) and he longs for the advance lever and the enveloping womb of the film chamber, but is thwarted by the meagre offerings of SD card slots and the mean excrementa of spent digitial batteries, denied also the olfactory wonders of freshly opened foil and precious contact with the film leader signalling the magic within the canister he can hold in his hand. The photographer is remembered as analog, but he is already dead.

With apologies to Susan Sontag.

 

[Godfrey]

Yeesh, I'll have to take out the Nikon F, and buy a cigar, after that. 🙂

G