8x10 digital capture back

[Frank Petronio]

It's all for show anyway, the art directors are impressed and that's about the only reason. Even looking through his portfolio, there is nothing that speaks to being 8x10 versus 4x5, and even for the finest Swiss-printed posters it'd be hard to run out of information....

[Nathan Potter]

With accurate color and tone?

Well Kirk, I'm being a bit facetious here. I meant to imply there is more to it than just substituting an Xray panel. Static (non scanning) Xray panels provide B&W digital images only. But so do color separation negatives. In that sense, in principle, the same technique can be employed using Xray panels with fast CCD or CMOS sensors without any Xray absorption scintillator layers. The basic semiconductor material is sensitive to RGB. Thus one can use the Technicolor three filter technique or even more efficiently separate RGB channels in the computer using software. One then reconstructs the separate RGB images in registering software to recover a color image.

Can this all be done instantaneously during a normal shutter speed? Probably yes given the speed intrinsic in small decently biased CCD or CMOS devices. For example Dalsa claims rep rates of 10^7 per second probably so fast that the software processing cannot keep up.

Maybe this is the technology that was used and modified - don't know.

Note some of the Xray flat panels currently available:

Varian PaxScan - 8X10 - - 3.0 MP
Dalsa Helios 10 MD - 8X10 - 96um pixels - 5.1 MP
Dalsa XR4 - 6X6 - 36um pixels - 17.3 MP

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[jayabbas]

Hmmm... My mortgage payment for a proofing tool -- too rich for my blood! This dude must run in the "stratosphere of clients" circles; you know - the ever rare uber- budget for photography. Nice gig for him.

[Ari]

It's all for show anyway, the art directors are impressed and that's about the only reason.

That's most of the battle.

If I was doing his kind of work, this back would be great to have for proofing, and I'm sure he's amortized most of the cost by now.

[Frank Petronio]

Hell most of the time you get the shot right before they come over, then you move a light off so you have something to "fix" so they feel like they're getting their money's worth ;-)

Nowhere near his level but I used to have to shoot a lot of 4x5 chromes of tabletop that actually got reduced for repro, lol.

[Ramiro Elena]

Hell most of the time you get the shot right before they come over, then you move a light off so you have something to "fix" so they feel like they're getting their money's worth ;-)

So true.

Why? Because he can. That's about it.