Race Cars digital image resolution example

2400 DPI - Low Quality

Zoom in on a low resolution image, and they look blurry.

These companies promise high quality but deliver 2400 DPI.  

For a little more money, you can have a DpsDave Hi-Res image, and this is what it looks like

Race Cars digital image resolution example

4800 DPI - Good Quality

Increasing the resolution makes a dramatic improvement

Our competitors charge much more for this resolution if they offer it at all.  

6000 DPI - Great Quality

This ultra high resolution preserves the finest details.  

Only available from DpsDave!

Often priced below our competitors' Economy scanning.  

Digital ICE vs. DpsDave Deep Vision color correction is shown below

Our Premium resolution scanning uses equipment with more sensitive light sensors than our Economy (and all our competitors) has.  This makes quite a difference as shown below!

Our 10x more shades of gray capability really matters!

The film scanning process must capture the smallest detail on the film.  The finest film that exists has “dye clouds” which can be as small as 6 microns in diameter.  

At 6,000 DPI, each dot that we image from the film is about 4 microns in diameter. Therefore, we can capture all the detail from the film, but further increases in resolution would not make a difference.

35mm Film Resolution for Sharpness and Focus:


When scanning film to digital format, higher resolution makes the scanned picture look sharp and in focus. Knowing that computer screens at best have 150 pixels per inch (ppi) resolution, while most have 72 ppi, people are confused. It may seem that if you scan your slides at 2,000 ppi they should look great on your computer. However, this is not true, and here is why:

  • Your computer magnifies the images to put it on the screen.  A 35mm scanned slide or negative gets magnified 100 times to fill the screen on a notebook computer.
  • In days gone by, people got up out of their chairs and got closer to the screen when they needed to see more detail when viewing projected slides.  Today they zoom in to meet the same need, increasing the slide scanning resolution requirements.
  • We humans look for the edges in a scene.  Sharp edges appear to be in focus, whereas fuzzy edges appear to be out of focus.  If you zoom in a lot on an edge, you will see “digital artifacts”, the checkerboard edges of all digital images.  If you zoom back out, it looks like they disappear, but they don’t really.  The checkerboard is still there, but we don’t see it as a checkerboard anymore, we see it as a fuzzy edge, which looks out of focus.  The finer the checkerboard, the more in focus the image appears.

For these reasons, digital image quality improves exponentially with more resolution.  Film scanned at 6,000 DPI will look almost 10 times better than the same slide scanned at 2,000 DPI.

A Word About Metadata Resolution Numbers…

Metadata is “Data about Data”.  Every film scanning service embeds metadata in the image file when they scan the slide.  This is where information about the picture (like name, date taken, etc.) is stored. You can view this information by right clicking on an image in Explorer and clicking on “Properties”, or choosing “View Metadata” in a photo editing program.

There are hundreds of data items available. Three data elements which are relevant to resolution are resolution, width and height. Resolution values range from 72 to 9,600. To understand the resolution of the scanned slide or negative, a 35mm film scanning service must also look at the height or width of the image. For example, I have a scanned image of a 35mm slide. The physical dimensions of the slide are 1.37 x 0.90 inch.

The metadata is as follows:

Resolution: 72 dpi (dots per inch)
Width: 3145 pixels
Height: 2072 pixels

Do the math, and the picture size works out to 43 inches wide by 29 inches high. Digital cameras assign resolution numbers depending what the manufacturers think you are going to do with the image. A resolution of 72 dpi corresponds to computer monitors. Other cameras assign a resolution of 300 dpi, as this is what a lot of printers use.

Now, back to the 35mm slide or negative scan. The resolution that the image was made at can be calculated by dividing one of the image dimensions (in pixels) by the actual size of the 35mm slide. This reveals that the image was scanned at (2072 / 0.9) = 2300 dpi.

Shades of Grey

Our eyes can distinguish a million different shades of grey.  Usually measured as a ratio of the brightest to the darkest part of a digital image or D-range (a logarithmic measurement), this is a measure of the sensitivity of the sensors in the scanners. This element starts to dominate image quality as resolution gets higher, and really drives up the cost of the scanning equipment. Below is a comparison of a dark slide scanned on the DpsDave Deep Vision system versus the Nikon system. The grainy appearance of the Nikon image is a result of sensors trying to see in the dark, but its like they have night blindness.  

Deep Vision doesn't have night blindness, and the result is an amazing ability to see deep into the dark areas of the film.  This effect applies to over exposed film too!  Deep Vision can usually pull details from really bright parts on the photo like clouds in the sky.  

Need the technical details?   Here they are!

Deep Vision is an advanced image digitizing system that uses the DpsDave Neural Engine to produce digital images with better texture, detail and color.  It's called Deep Vision because it allows you to see into the deep dark parts of a photo, and we've gotten a lot closer to the natural vision capability we humans have.  

Others

DpsDave

More Resolution

Resolution is the most important thing.

Others

DpsDave

Race Cars digital image resolution example
Race Cars digital image resolution example

More Clarity

Resolution plus edge contrast creates sharpness. 

More Color

The color, hue and saturation make up the color space and more is better

More Shades of Grey

Contrast is the measure of how many shades a grey can be seen, and this is more important than color.

Resolution

 Usually measured in Dots Per Inch (DPI) this is the most important part of the digitizing process.

Our eyes are amazing, as we see the world around us as a 50 million dots per inch image.  Apparently, we take a bunch of snapshots of the word around us and stitch them together to form the image we see.  The brain fills in blank spots from memory, and even makes guesses as to what should be there.  

Deep Vision can't do that, but it produces amazing images which are far better that what others can do.  Deep Vision starts with a very high resolution:  6,000 DPI, as lower resolution makes the edges of objects jagged, and our eyes interpret this as loss of focus. Below is an example.

Deep Vision

Deep Vision is an advanced image digitizing system that uses the DpsDave Neural Engine to produce digital images with better texture, detail and color.  It's called Deep Vision because it allows you to see into the deep dark parts of a photo, and we've gotten a lot closer to the natural vision capability we humans have.  

Clarity

High resolution digital images can be unclear- this happens when edge definition in insufficient.  It takes lots of shades of grey and high resolution to produce the sharp images we seek.  In addition, printers have developed a big bag of tricks over the last 2 centuries, and amazing results are produced by knowing when and how to apply them.  Deep Vision can sense when a particular technique will improve the image, and is empowered to automatically apply it.

Below is a chart comparing how leading film (slide, negatives & positives) scanners perform.  The Dynamic Range and Drange are different ways of representing how many shades of grey can be detected. The maximum resolution is what the machine is capable of.  Here's the problem everybody is dealing with: to get high resolution takes forever to do.  The DpsDave Deep Vision system changed that, and produces high resolution and good productivity.  

Color

Our eyes can distinguish 30 million or so different colors, hues and saturation.  This part is really, really hard to get just right, as the colors in the film change over time.  To make matters worse, people can see a lot more colors than machines can, as depicted in the chart on the right below.  Finally, our world is reflected light, which uses different base colors than the display you are going to look at your digital images on.  (Reflective uses Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black base colors, where your electronic display uses Red, Green and Blue).  Machines have to record and display colors in the RGB color space.  It's enough to make your head spin, but Deep Vision handles this with ease, to the extent possible.  Deep Vision uses statistical techniques to tell which colors have faded, combines that with knowledge about which colors dyes in the film tend to fade faster (it's not red!) and does an amazing job of the seemingly impossible.  

Get in Touch


Call
(541) 609-6810


Email
Support@dpsdave.com

Best Option

PRIVACY PROTECTION: We are concerned about the Privacy and property of all our clients.  we will protect your Property at all times while it is in our possession, and the Privacy of your information and images to the best of our ability.
convert slides to digital

DpsDave.com LLC - Philomath Oregon 2010 - 2024      |    PRIVACY POLICY   |    TERMS OF SERVICE