So...it has the size of a medium format or even large-format camera...but the resolution of a DSLR that is 5 years out of date. Doesn't seem too impressive to me.

There is nothing wrong with comparing different formats. There are things that you can do with a large-format 4x5 that you still can't even get close to doing with a full-frame DSLR, nor even really with a medium-format digital camera. But of course there are advantages for digital too.

There is really no direct comparison between 4x5 film and a scanner-back. The scanner back requires a much longer exposure, it is not a sensor. For something very static, it would work fine.

A 4x5in piece of film, assuming that 3.75x4.75in of it is usable, has 17.8125 sqin of area. A 36x24mm (1.42x0.94in) digital sensor has 1.3392 sqin of area. That's 13.3x the area and 3.55x the diagonal.

Many lenses for 4x5 will resolve close to the diffraction-limit (1600/32 = 50 lp/mm) at f/32*, maybe they'll resolve ~46 lp/mm, or 92% of the theoretical diffraction limit). f/32 on 4x5 is equivalent to f/9 on 35mm film (in terms of DoF at an equivalent angle of view & distance from subject, i.e., same framing). To match the resolution of 4x5, you'd need to have to come achieve 92% of the diffraction limit of 178 lp/mm at f/9: 164 lp/mm.

My Olympus ZD 50/2 macro lens, one of the sharpest lenses ever made, resolves "only" 123 lp/mm at f/4 (31% of the maximum theoretical diffraction limit). At f/9, it resolves 96 lp/mm (54% of the theoretical diffraction limit). Good luck finding a lens that resolves 164 lp/mm at f/9 and that is suitable for general-purpose use.

*http://www.hevanet.com/cperez/testing.html/

PS: That 600 lp/mm 28 mm f/1.8 Ultra-Micro-Nikkor lens I mentioned has an image circle of just 8mm and is optimized for 1:10 magnification (e.g., it resolves an 80mm subject size on an 8mm sensor or piece of film). Reversed, it would be optimized for 10:1, but would only produce 60 lp/mm (600 lp/mm are still "resolved" on the 8mm object side (4800 lp total), but this is all that can be produced on the image side (4800 lp / 80mm = 60lp/mm).

So this is a very limited application lens to get that kind of resolution.

The APS-H sensor is 28.7 x 19 mm. To resolve 13,280 pixels along the length of the sensor, you'd need a lens that could resolve 463 lines per mm (232 lp/mm). According to the laws of diffraction, this is impossible for f-stops greater than approximately f/3.24. (1500/463 = 3.24). That doesn't give you a lot of depth of field to work with, if you want to resolve all of those pixels. And you don't have a bellows design capable of tilts and shifts, as do 4x5 large-format cameras, so that compounds the problem.

The practical problem right now is that there just aren't any lenses that resolve 232 lp/mm for normal photographic use. There are some very specialized lenses that deliver many hundreds of lp/mm. e.g., the 28 mm f/1.8 Ultra-Micro-Nikkor resolves about 600 line-pairs per mm or 1200 lines/mm: http://www.naturfotograf.com/lens_spec.html/. The conditions under which the lens resolves that many lp/mm are very limited, however (macro only, at a very specific magnification).

It just requires that everyone have a flash plugin or browser capable of using flash. Too bad the iPad doesn't support Flash (well, one good thing about Apple).

This is silly and overly dramatic. The market has tended to favor moves towards open web standards.

and what CMS would you recommend that has been security tested by an outside firm? One that is as general-purpose as CMSMS?

Torvalds has done more for peace than President Obama, who was nominated for the prize just a few weeks after taking office (he couldn't have done anything, still hasn't, and won't). In fact, Obama had a chance to do something for world peace -- get US troops out of the 150 different countries they're in. He didn't. He's actually expanding US-imperialism. Thus, he's done plenty for world discord, not peace.

I use Linux for everything, including scanning and manipulating 4x5 large-format shots. I haven't found GIMP to be insufficient. In some areas (like effects-layers), Photoshop might be more convenient. But I haven't been unable to do anything I want to do in GIMP.

I really don't care about the legal technicalities. Mazerov is an evil jerk for arguing against Amazon, and the entire tax-structure is just thinly veiled robbery. It is all evil -- sales taxes, property taxes, income taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. It is allegedly justified by the non-sense of the "social contract", a very weak justification which has been thoroughly rebuked by Lysander Spooner and others. What it really is is just an argument of "might makes right". The bums in the government have done nothing to earn my money; if they did something worthwhile, they should ask for voluntary contributions, or sell services to the market, like hard-working people in other fields. All that they do is legislate the use of force, and have brutes enforce their will. Very similar to mafia bosses, except that mafia bosses and common robbers don't pretend that they are righteous.

Right, because murderers deserve to be walking around with the rest of us, as if they aren't dangerous. That isn't the entire motivation behind my post though; the points I made apply for any crime, and actually any non-crime as well. For any information you make available about yourself through your public actions, you can have no legitimate legal objection (via what should be law, or natural law) to others recording that information and judging you by it.

The _murderer's_ rights aren't violated by people knowing what they did. They should have been executed anyways. But irrelevant of that, non-aggressive people also have the right of freedom of association. I for one choose not to associate with people I consider dangerous.

In a free society, criminals would owe restitution to their victims, and victims would be also entitled to request retribution against the criminal. Then people at large could make their own associative or dis-associative decisions regarding the criminal.

One thing is clear, however. It doesn't violate anyone's rights for other people to know information about them that they've made publicly available through their actions.

Note that I'm not saying I have, per se, the right to know information about other people. That would imply positive obligations on the part of other people. However, no-one has the right to stop the various people at Wikipedia from recording and maintaining an account of history. That is their private property right.

The _murderer's_ rights aren't violated by people knowing what they did. They should have been executed anyways. But irrelevant of that, non-aggressive people also have the right of freedom of association. I for one choose not to associate with people I consider dangerous.

In a free society, criminals would owe restitution to their victims, and victims would be also entitled to request retribution against the criminal. Then people at large could make their own associative or dis-associative decisions regarding the criminal.

One thing is clear, however. It doesn't violate anyone's rights for other people to know information about them that they've made publicly available through their actions.

Northgate Omnikey Evolution. To my knowledge, one of only a very few ergonomic clicky keyboards (at least among the original generation); there was also a Model M15 ergonomic keyboard, I think.