THE BIG PICTURE: THE MEASURED SECOND, THE RANDOM GRAIN.

The article begins with a history of the social aspects of inventing, and the effect that patent law had on inventors in the nineteenth century. Augustin Le Prince invented a single-lens motion picture camera in the 1880s, but failed to register his invention due to a suspicion that the patent offices would steal his idea. The rest of the article is concerned with the random nature of film grain. The mixture of grain sizes in motion picture film results in more image detail. In modern digital images, every pixel has the same sensitivity, it lacks the scatter of ranges that grain gives to film.