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p.5 #9 · p.5 #9 · Canon EF 24-70mm f/4L IS Resolution Tests! | |
Gunzorro wrote:
My opinion is that you often raise artificial and arbitrary measurements to support your position, with repeated mantras regarding printing and print sizing and viewing distance. It's fine that you are print-centric in your approach, but to use that as a yardstick of acceptable resolution is foolish. Printed images, despite being desirable for display, offer some of the worst resolution and reproduction of digital images -- well, dot-gain in "4-color" litho printing is worse -- my point is, printed material should not be the yardstick for anything but exhibition prints.
I have no problem with you printing, or being interested in prints, or making a decent living off your prints. I'm a rarity I suppose and on the "other side" -- I never print, not since olden film days when clients final uses came from prints or transparencies. I never sell prints any more and don't get involved in the subject. More power to anyone who does, but it's not my thing. I have no special printing interest to protect that I'm making money off of. For me, it's all about computer screen viewing at X%, internet/email, and DVD burning for client use....Show more →
Resolution of current high end printers greatly exceeds that of computer screens, even when "dot gain" is taken into consideration. I can see more detail in a print that has a 27" diagonal measurement than I can see in the display of the same image so that it fills my 27" monitor. (Yes, I know about the new "retina displays" and similar, but the available versions are still relatively small.)
As my friend Charlie Cramer likes to say, an image that looks great as a print will almost always look good on the screen, but that the opposite is not anywhere near as certain.
As for the idea that the goal is to be able to view photographs at 100% resolution on the computer screen, I'll just say a couple of things:
1. To me, and I'm confident to most viewers of photographs, the point of all of the effort we put into composing and creating photographs is not to have small sections of them viewed at great magnifications on the screen, but rather to be able to view the photograph as a whole. (When I email a photograph or share one on the web, I cannot imagine sending or displaying a full resolution version, nor can I imagine that many people would want me to, since they want to see the photograph in its entirety on the screen.)
2. Since I've heard otherwise from a few people in photography forums, I'm will to concede that some of you may actually find that viewing the 100% magnification crop of a small section of the whole photograph brings you your greatest joy and strongest aesthetic response. I also admit that I do not understand this at all.
... your tone embraces a type of closed-minded pedantry...
Lovely thought... Thanks for that! ;-)
... championing mediocrity is not going to be a terrible fruitful strategy.
I most certainly do not "champion mediocrity" in any way or on any level!
Your comments are not all without merit, but your emphasis is to minimize some hard won technical points and interests among members, which not surprisingly raises hackles. In short, your balance and perspective seem often out of touch with "real life".
I believe that the other perspective is out of touch with "real life," at least in the context of making photographs. I ground my opinions - which others are certainly free to disagree with - in my experience with real photographs, and I try to check my theoretical presumptions against photographic reality. This has led me to give up some of my "beliefs" on many occasions. Some that I used to hold, but which I have given up after testing them include:
1. Printing must be done at 300 dpi or higher.
2. File resolution should be equal to printer resolution or some whole division of it.
3. Compensating for various kinds of distortion in post (barrel/pincushion, "perspective" tilt, CA, etc.) will degrade the image in significant ways.
4. Zoom lenses cannot produce high enough image quality for excellent prints.
5. Eliminating noise from photographs is always a good thing.
6. Sharpness is the most important lens characteristic.
7. "Perfect" technical quality is achievable and necessary.*
(* To deflect the expected response, this does not mean that technical quality does not matter nor that mediocre is good enough. )
In fact, right now as I write this, it occurs to me that there are probably other presumptions that I should reconsider and check against reality. :-)
Your views are your views. But when so many of us are trying to improve our imaging and gear, we don't want to hear why we are part of a resolution cult, convincing our brains that improvements are real and not imaginary.
I understand, but I encourage you and others in your situation to think more broadly about what it means to "improve your imaging" and what role gear does and does not have in achieving that goal. I can't speak for you specifically, but it is clear to me that we, as photographers, are often susceptible to the lure of gear as the answer to improving our photography. Gear is obviously not insignificant, but there is a real danger of focusing on gear for its own sake and at the expense of other things that make a bigger difference in our photography and which produce much larger rewards.
Take care,
Dan
Edited on Jan 05, 2013 at 02:16 PM
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