Slashdot Mirror
Beyond Megapixels - Part III
TheTechLounge writes "Beyond Megapixels - Part I & Part II have both been posted here at Slashdot, and now it is my pleasure to bring to you Beyond Megapixels - Part III. This is the final part of this series of editorial articles examining current digital photography hardware. In this segment I will be focusing on function, filetypes, and features."
...purchases in the last few months and I have to say that the "megapixel race" is becoming like the megahertz race in that many people use that feature alone as their determining factor. Rarely do they want to discuss optical versus digital zoom (something that Kodak is addressing with their DX6490, a 10X OPTICAL zoom in an inexpensive, well-built camera), output format, etc.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
Have you ever tried printing those 2 megapixel images? 2.0 may be all well and good on a monitor, but printing is a whole 'nother ballgame. You won't be getting any kind of acceptable 8x10's out of that. And we're not even talking professional use here, just simple at home printing, when you start talking about actually selling your images or doing other serious work with them, the need for 5+ megapixels becomes painfully clear.
So yes, 2.0 is enough if all you're doing is posting the images online or archiving them for the heck of it, but when it comes to really putting them to work, whether it be printing just for at home framing or for professional work, you'll quickly see the need for those "hyped" high megapixels.
I remember watching a review of digital cameras on a gadget show a year or so ago. The reviewer pointed out that the key to the image was the lens, if that is bad, then nothing else matters.
Don't talk pixels, talk optics.
You don't need a lab to make mud.
Yeah but when you convert you lose the ability to do all of the advanced image manipulation stuff based on sensor information. There are tons of different transforms that work MUCH better if they have the info directly from the sensors rather than a pixel value extrapolated from those values. Personally I think I would run Photoshop and my camera vendors RAW utilities under xover office before just dumping the data to TIFF, otherwise why not just use superfine JPEG?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You mean sloshing chemicals around in a closed tank? I didn't find that very interesting :-) Making prints was a different ballgame though.
If you want the ultimate B&W print, I don't think you can beat all-chemical process.
But making color prints was a real pain in the butt. I did prints from color negatives and Ilfochromes from slides, but most of the time I ran out of patience before getting everything just right. Sending the images over the net to a printing service, where they are printed straight onto photographic paper, and sent to me via the post, is so much easier and produces so good results that I don't want to go back to the color chemicals ever again.
--
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
Don't good LCD viewfinders make SLRs redundant for digital cameras? There really isn't much point in having all that moving-mirror hardware; if you must have a bigger image for focusing, electronic viewfinders are available. I speak as someone who also uses a medium format SLR, by the way.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Firstly, there are no good LCD viewfinders...especially when we're talking about still frame quality of any kind. Secondly, there is no need for an SLR mechanism on a digital LCD viewfinder, since the picture is being fed from the imaging CCD anyways. Cameras such as the Canon D300, 10D or any other digital SLR don't use LCD viewfinders, because that's not what their customers really want or need...and it would defeat the purpose anyway.
:) More or less, I can do more serious amateur photography without spending my entire livelihood on film/development/printing, which allows me to take many, many more pictures.
When I was in the camera market, I was going for either the Digital Rebel or the gigantic Sony 8MP thing...and eventually settled on the rebel. (Okay, its was the EF Lens capability that won me over). I find that being able to make image adjustments is a lot easier when I'm looking at exactly what will be photographed, instead of some downsized representation. That, and I take good pictures from anywhere in the ballpark with an additional zoom lens.
Granted, this works because I bought my camera to be a camera...not some kind of camcorder...which is one feature most LCD viewfinder cameras offer.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
There's a lot more to a lens than the F-stop . . . 2.8 is pretty darn good in a lot of the pro-lense market for SLR's. Getting larger aperatures than this often causes significant distortion in the lens . . . hence the super-expensive cost of the really fast lens, or in the case of a lot of consumer level digital cameras, crummy optics that result in a loss of sharpness . . . this is going the way of the megapixel wars . . . uninformed consumers think that larger aperature and bigger zoom = better camera . . . typically the truth is larger aperature and bigger zoom = crappier overall sharpness and more lens distortion . . . which amounts to crappy looking pictures.
Personally, I'll take my Nikon Coolpix 5000 with its slower lens (3.3) over just about any faster lens consumer digital camera any day . . . I know that the optics aren't perfect, I bought it 4 years ago, but even by today's standards, the optics are a lot better than most consumer digi-cams I've seen. And I'll take my Digital SLR over that . . . any day.