For my own purposes I'll trade off the extra resolution of a monochrome sensor for the flexability that a colour sensor provides, even when shooting for final monochrome output.
Puff Clouds is a good example. Using the Grayscale Conversion function in Lightroom I was able to use a very complex combination of colour filter equivalents to create the tonalities that I wanted in the print.
Megavision has a new monochrome back coming, which they previewed at Photokina. I'll have details in the weeks ahead.
Michael
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Michael
I understand your position and to an extent I think you are also reflecting the way that most manufacturers are going to see the situation (I almost wrote problem, but chose situation).
However, you have also illustrated the very thing which is wrong with much of this digital stuff: ''able to use very complex combination of colour filter equivalents to create the tonalities that I wanted in the print.'
Well yes, that's all very nice if you are a computer/software enthusiast and truly enjoy working things around to get to where you want to be. For myself and, I suspect, a lot of other photographers this becomes anything but a pleasant way to achieving black/white prints of quality. It is simply too complicated and demanding of talents/interests that are NOT photographic; photography in b/w has always been a very gut instinct driven sort of medium, even in the professional world, as you have probably experienced for yourself and I most certainly have.
With all my many years - too many, perhaps - in this industry I know that one craves simple, easily repeatable techniques that leave not a lot to chance. This has been the case with transparencies for as long as I can remember because the chemistry has been a fixed process, unless you dig visibly false colour. In b/w there was the added bonus of the ability to push if required, though yes, things did get lost if you went that route. But, in general, you set your film speed and learned how to read the meter and with D76 1+1 you were on your merry way, the prints being pretty much as you thought they were going to be. (In this, I do assume one does one's own processing; I believe that much of the trash that some of our stars produce is because they never have to do it, so how can they understand what it means to over- or under-expose or develop?)
Scanning both b/w negatives, colour transparencies and working off digital capture too, I get a sense that each of these mediums delivers different notions of what b/w prints should be. It also seems to me that scanning b/w original negs works best for b/w prints because I suspect that it is intrinsic in the very way in which film reacts to light that the tonality is created and also why filters can be used with faith!
In the quest for that simplicity lies my hope for a black/white only sensor/camera combination. Perhaps it will have to be a niche player to do it - I can't see Canon or Nikon doing so, their eyes firmly on turnover and the essentially amateur market which will supply those numbers, and I don't think that market is interested in black/white anyhow. Maybe Leica can re-invent itself in this direction or even Olympus be tempted...
Dreamin' on - Rob C
