Why do people use hand saws and chisels when powered table saws, compound saws and biscuit joiners are available to us?
As someone who shoots film, there are a number of reasons, one being the asthetic you get from film that you can't (even with x hours in Photoshop) get from digital. I shoot large format and there are no (within my budget, at the very least) 8" x 10" digital sensors.
Film also more or less forces you to make prints. I would hazard a guess that a small percentage of digital photos ever make it to print and half of a photograph for me is a tactile thing you can hold in your hands and give to someone else.
Lastly, it's the process. That's something I can't explain.
> Why do people use hand saws and chisels when powered table saws, compound saws and biscuit joiners are available to us?
That analogy breaks down a bit because in the former case, there are very many circumstances where the small unpowered tool is the best fit for a job (touching up an area, finishing off a mortise, trimming off something by hand where a power tool would not be able to give the proper feedback).
In photography, the preference is a lot more subjective, at least when it comes to 35mm formats.
Most carpenters will carry hand saws and chisels with them even if they have all the top of the line power tools because they remain relevant and immensely useful.
> I shoot large format and there are no (within my budget, at the very least) 8" x 10" digital sensors.
You can make a scanner back out of a normal CCD film scanner. It comes with a lot of downsides since you have a giant "rolling shutter" that works on the scale of 10s+ but it does give you an image.
Not a single wafer, but the sensor built for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is a ~64x64cm 3.2-gigapixel CCD, made of 189 4x4cm chips on the same sensor bed[0].
I suspect the cost was in the millions of dollars for the one-of-a-kind sensor, but I bet you could get a great deal on a second one since they've already done the R&D!
The LargeSense LS911 features a single shot 9×11-inch monochrome CMOS sensor with a 75-micron pixel size, a high base sensitivity of ISO 2100, and a maximum sensitivity of ISO 6400.
You can turn any black and white camera into a color camera by taking 3 pictures with a red, green, and blue filter. Obviously only works with a static subject.
I must admit 12MP is lower than I expected. It seems the intent was to use large pixels to get huge tonal range rather than small pixels for resolution.
They might be going for people who shoot and print at 8x10, so 12mp is ~400dpi... "probably" high enough for that. Or maybe the color resolution and response is amazing. Or maybe it's all about the lens you'd use. Not sure exactly what the market is for this, even after perusing their site.
There is a mathematical relationship between the sensor size and the optical properties (particularly focal length) of the lens that affects the result.
Bigger sensors tend to have shallower depth of field for a given aperture, which requires stopping down the lens further or using lens movements to compensate to keep the subject in focus. But that can be desirable where you want to isolate a subject or otherwise create an effect.
However, stopping down further also tends to cause an increase in diffraction as the Airy discs become larger and start to engage each other in constructive/destructive wave interference which reduces the theoretical resolution of the system. This particularly affects smaller sensors but since you stop a larger lens down farther it also affects them as well.
And in contrast - smaller sensors need wider apertures for a given amount of subject isolation, but they are also subject to diffraction at much wider apertures. This means you need a lens that can deliver maximum resolution at very wide apertures. This is why your cellphone camera has a f/2 or f/1.8 lens, the sensor is tiny and it needs a very wide aperture or diffraction will rob the image of all sharpness. It's also why, for the most part, cellphone cameras haven't gone much above the 10-12mp range.
(I've always suspected there is probably some asymptotic limit to the amount of resolution that can be extracted for a given amount of depth of field, even with an infinitely large film/sensor size. as you increase the sensor size you have to stop down further and the diffraction becomes stronger and limits the lp/mm)
Yes for me when making large prints. You don't get good prints at less than 150 dpi enlarged, generally, and 300+ dpi is preferable and more comparable to a large format negative, so you'd like a ~75 megapixel camera just for poster sized prints, and more for prints larger than that.
Note some people use large format negatives for ultra-sharp small prints, in that case you might be looking for 1000 dpi or higher to match the fidelity of a large negative.
Diffraction and airy disks have an impact as mentioned by a sibling comment, but the simplest explanation I've used is that ultimately you're capturing photons, and if you have a larger sensor you can capture more photons. More photons are better. Of course you need a larger lens with a longer focal length to match the same field of view, but that's the basic idea.
As someone who shoots film, there are a number of reasons, one being the asthetic you get from film that you can't (even with x hours in Photoshop) get from digital. I shoot large format and there are no (within my budget, at the very least) 8" x 10" digital sensors.
Film also more or less forces you to make prints. I would hazard a guess that a small percentage of digital photos ever make it to print and half of a photograph for me is a tactile thing you can hold in your hands and give to someone else.
Lastly, it's the process. That's something I can't explain.