Toronto Photography Meetup Group

!848! Astonishing! or what? Forget film forget digital.
http://www.tedxcincy.com/2011/01/26/patricia_vanskai/
http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_0 ... w.mp3/view
http://1848.cincinnatilibrary.org/

That's impressive really impressive
164 years later of advanced technology and even with $5000 of gear and were still unable to capture images with such detail when blown up

But then again archival seems to be a joke to some quarters defined as something that shouldn't outlive the photographer's lifetime or who cares. Well thanks to those who do we get to see this!

Thanks for sharing.

Using a conversion calculator that $10k in 1848 works out to almost $250k in todays money. Now thats a camera!

whats camera would come close to that with today's technology?

Wow, that was awesome! Thanks for sharing and just fascinating!

They don't make 'em like they used too...in my day we had to take 8 photographs to get 1

Which is by the way sort of cheating...we could combine 8 now as well.

Well, I had a few minutes to spare so bare with me. I was curious to see if the daguerreotype would be better – correction – perhaps not better but provide more resolving power than a high end modern medium format camera.

They said the clock measured 1mm in the original image. So, if a medium format image was scaled to 8.5" wide at its longest side (as was the daguerreotype) what would its resolution per mm? Based on an iQ 180 and its maximum pixel dimension of 10,338 pixels wide for a single exposure. That works out to 48 pixels per mm. So the clock face would be about 2/3" in diameter at 72dpi. My guess is an IQ 180 image would deffinately be readable too and thats even before pixel sharpening (the daguerreotype images have been pixel sharpened). You could further speculate that the iQ 180 would be much sharper with the advantage of a shorter exposure time to freeze camera shake and in the case of the street candids – greatly reducing motion blur.

In the end it is all relative. An iQ 180 costs 1/5th as much as its 1848 daguerreotype nemesis and shoots with far better dynamic range, colour, and other features that couldn't possibly have been imagined in the 1900's.

Still, the daguerreotype was awesome for its time. Don't hate me for liking digital