Film v Digital

[sideshowbob]

You're twisting my argument. I'm not saying that if you work in the specialised area of magazine and hoarding advertising you must use super-MP backs. I'm arguing that the notion of 18MP limiting you to A3 is commplete rubblish (sorry Cliff if I've overlooked what was tongue-in-cheek humour, and I've suffered a sensayuma failure), and that 6MP is sufficient for most people; not limiting to A3 output, but well beyond.

Well, what you said was:

the number of megapixels is not a limiting factor to enlargement in the real world.

and that is just false, because number of megapixels is a limiting factor. Resolution is a limiting factor to enlargement in both analogue and digital photography. Sometimes loss of resolution is no big deal and works artistically, and sometimes it doesn't, but that's an entirely different question, and one about which it is impossible to generalise.

Anyway, an uninterpolated A3+ print (13 x 19 inches) requires, at 300 PPI, about 22 megapixels. So Cliff is not wrong when he says:

18 megapixels does limit you to around A3+ prints without some kind of post processing to scale the image

Anything printed larger than that either needs interpolation (post-processing) or to be printed at smaller PPI. Sometimes this works just fine, sometimes it doesn't, it depends entirely on the content of the image. Absolutes are bullshit.

I have no horse in this race, since I shoot film, but there's no need to be inaccurate about the basics.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/digital-camera-pixel.htm

 

[Rico]

We are clearly not going to accept each other's viewpoints.

You make a strong argument, yet cannot explain why 6MP looks so good from a D70 printed at A0 without interpolation at 300ppi; good enough that people pay for the art.

In a hifi parallel, it's like the 1970's fixation on %distortion. You explain the theory and it all makes good logical sense. Yet in the real world, the rule is broken. or the 1980's - How could a 14bit CDP possibly have sounded good when faced off with an 18 bit one?

Results count; which is why I referred to the real world.

cheers

 

[dan m]

6MP looks so good from a D70 printed at A0 without interpolation at 300ppi

I don't doubt you can get a good image from 6mp at A0, but simple math says you must be interpolating to get 300 ppi. That's 33.1 × 46.8 inches where a 6mp image is ~2000x3000 pixels, so roughly 60 ppi or approx. screen resolution (which can look really good). But to get 300 ppi, at a minimum it would be necessarily to interpolate by a factor of 5. I suppose you could not interpolate and have every 5x5 pixel block be identical, but I doubt that wouldn't be noticeable in a print.

 

[cliffpatte]

Rico, I'm going to rest on what I previously said, because simply maths says you can't print bigger than A3+ at normal print pixel densities without upscaling an 18mp image. It isn't anything to do with this being mainly a hifi forum - it is simple arithmetic.

I have seen wedding photographers still using the likes of the D100 and D200, but I suspect it was for purely financial reasons rather than artistic choice. I would suggest that actually the Fuji S5Pro is a better bet for artistic integrity than a D200 anyway owing to the wider dynamic range even if the number of actual resolving pixels is lower. But nobody to my knowledge has ever suggested that you can print the same sized image with both cameras without some kind of post processing (ie generating missing print pixels by some kind of interpolation).

cheers
Cliff

 

[sideshowbob]

You make a strong argument, yet cannot explain why 6MP looks so good from a D70 printed at A0 without interpolation at 300ppi; good enough that people pay for the art.

I would happily pay for that, because it's impossible

The prints must be interpolated or printed at a very low DPI, it's not possible to get A0 prints out of 6MP any other way. Either can produce good looking results, but only sometimes. (At the moment I'm experimenting by enlarging onto rough textured paper sensitised by painting liquid emulsion onto it, using reasonably rough brush strokes, so I'm not a resolution freak. But this approach certainly wouldn't work for everything.)

 

[cliffpatte]

I reckon you would need 139417200 pixels for A0 at 300DPI

 

[prowla]

I realised a fundamental flaw of digital cameras yesterday...
You don't automatically get a hardcopy!
No sh*t Sherlock, you may say.
But we've got some photos on a window sill, and I realised there's not one of our youngest there.

 

[Anex]

You want a Polaroid.

 

[cliffpatte]

You want a Polaroid.

or an Instax from Fuji

 

[Anex]

Instax is a bit too blue for my liking, Polaroid Spectra is my favourite at the moment.

 

[prowla]

You want a Polaroid.

You offering?

Actually I have a photo printer but it's a bit of a faff, I could take the memory stick to a shop to get printouts, and I have a digital picture frame thingy that's waiting for me to buy (another!) memory stick. And of course, the problem with a polaroid is that it's a one-copy system.

 

[Anex]

Nah sorry, I use all of mine. Lots of cheap ones on ebay though and the Impossible Project are manufacturing film again.

 

[sq225917]

guys, all printer interpolate, there's nary one you could force to print at the image DPI if you wanted it that way, at least in the pro-sumer market.

Anything bigger than A0 is going to use a 'rip' of some sort or newsprint style halftoning at the very least.

 

[Cav]

Why doesn't someone (Rico?) try it at a non-specialist printer and tell us what the result is?

 

[cliffpatte]

Why doesn't someone (Rico?) try it at a non-specialist printer and tell us what the result is?

try what exactly?

If you set your image resolution to 300ppi in photoshop/lightroom and select print at actual size (ie deselect fill whole page) when printing it will be 5212/300 inches by 3468/300 inches which is 17 and a bit by 11 and a half or slightly longer and narrower than A3 (16.5 * 11.7). My printer's lowest resolution is 720ppi so it will end up interpolating the data in the image.

 

[Anex]

guys, all printer interpolate, there's nary one you could force to print at the image DPI if you wanted it that way, at least in the pro-sumer market.

Anything bigger than A0 is going to use a 'rip' of some sort or newsprint style halftoning at the very least.

RIPs are available for a number of home printers.

 

[Cav]

try what exactly?

Printing a large print from a 6 meg camera, or have I misunderstood that the argument is that it can or cannot be done?

 

[Anex]

It's not that it can't be done, it's that the resolution will suffer as it's not designed to be done that way.

 

[cliffpatte]

Cav

I suspect Rico didn't read what I wrote as it was intended to read. You cannot print bigger than A3+ from an 18mp image from a Leica M9 without using some software to up the resolution even if you use a fairly low ppi setting like 300. I have printed A3+ images from a Nikon D3 (which is a 12mp camera), but I upped the resolution in CS4 first. It came out OK but if you look closely rather than from the other side of the room you will see a difference between that image and one taken using an MF camera, Velvia 50 and scanned using the highest resolution settings on the coolscan 9000. As I said earlier upscaling DVD to 1080P does look different to DVD without upscaling but it still doesn't make it BluRay.

Another thing: if you compare images from the 24.5mp D3X to those from the D3, you will not see twice the resolving power, but more like 30% more. Whether you print at A4 or A3+, a D3X image of someones hair will show more individual hairs, or more hair pairs will be capable of being differentiated by the viewer. Give that my printer can print at many thousands of pixels per inch, the limiting factor is definitely in the sensor, not the lens or paper size.

 

[Rico]

It's not that it can't be done, it's that the resolution will suffer as it's not designed to be done that way.

I think that's a technically incorrect statement. the resolution is the resolution.