gdanmitchell Offline Upload & Sell: Off
|
Mark_L wrote:
Anyway, I have contributed my experiences and won't post further in this thread.
Since there is at least one experience I haven't contributed to this thread yet, let me share one that illustrates why I hold my point of view. I could share others, but this one is recent and telling.
I'm part of a print review group that meets about every six weeks or so to share and critique members' recent prints. Among the members of the group are several whose work is well-known and well-regarded. You may have seen their work in books or galleries, taken a workshop from some of them, or perhaps travelled with them to international destinations in Asia or Antarctica, etc.
One member cut his teeth on large format film (working with that AA guy in the 1980s for a while, along with a few other important photographers), eventually becoming expert at dye-transfer printing, then moving to scanned film printed digitally, and then to medium format digital using a 80 MP system. He brought something odd to this meeting. In addition to his "real" prints he brought a small group of letter-sized prints of a very boring urban scene. Without telling us anything about them he simply asked us to look closely at them and share whatever we observed.
Among the group, all of whom are good to excellent photographers and printers, there was agreement that the prints did not all look exactly the same, but we couldn't quite quantify the difference, nor did we agree about which examples were the best. We did agree that all of them looked fine.
My friend then revealed that he had set up a careful test of two camera systems. One was his 80MP Phase One back system with his usual high end MF lenses. The other was a 36MP Nikon with a high quality zoom lens. The photographs were just test images made under very controlled conditions from the tripod.
There are a few interesting things about this test. First, if he had said "Compare these prints. Group A comes from my Phase One 80 MP system and Group B comes from my Nikon DSLR," I'm pretty certain that we would have begun with the presumption that the MF system images would be significantly better, and we would have looked to evidence to back up our preconception. Second, given no indication of what the underlying difference was, we were unable to detect a consistent correlation, even after very close hands-on and up close inspection. I know that is hard to understand — and we were surprised, too.
Oh, making it more interesting, here's a bit more background. In each case he had taken the images though a typical post-processing workflow, including re-sizing them to make 30" x 40" prints. The samples we saw were crops from these much larger image files — e.g. we were looking at letter-sized crops taken out of 30" x 40" prints.
Unlike some photographs, these issues are not entirely black and white. Does FF 36MP perform identically to 80MP digital MF? No. If you exhibited large prints from both systems side-by-side, would the differences be striking? Little evidence that this is true. Can a 80MP MF system sensor out resolve a 36MP FF system? No doubt. ;-)
Dan
Edited on Jun 08, 2015 at 10:28 PM · View previous versions
|