William Clark wrote:
As someone who studies product markets for a living (I am an economist
you know..oh no!!!) I think that digital still has barriers.
1. First. There needs to be an affordable way of getting pics
printed at home that look great without any retouching. if you read
the forums on the internet, you will see that nearly everone does some
re-sharpening or something. NO "regular" consumer wants to shoot in
RAW mode and then post-process.
I think you are confabulating two issues here; the ability of regular
digicams to make prints that meet or exceed the quality of regular
consumer prints from 35mm without computer manipulation and the
adventures of digiholics. Is your observation based on actual experience
or the maunderings of lost souls on the internet? All digicams have
sharpening and other image enhancement algorithms built in. Some high
end ones allow adjusting them and/or skipping all in-camera processing
altogether with a 'RAW" image.However, when you can't or don't disable
them, they provide print ready images that can be of excellent quality
with no further adjustment.
You may recall a list member providing a direct comparison between a
digicam (E-10?) and an unadjusted scanned image from an OM and remarking
how much better the digicam image looked. Another member (C.H.?)
correctly pointed out that the digicam image already had been optimized
in the camera for viewing at the resolution presented, while the scan
had not.
I have a Can*n S110, 2.1mp camera. I print 8x10 images direct from the
JPEG files it produces (nope, no TIFF, or RAW options) that are just
plain excellent. The only thing I usually do to them in the computer is
cropping. In fact, there is something about them that seems to draw
people's attention in a way regular 8x10s don't.
I think the real barrier is in needing a computer to get the image from
the camera to the printer. That's the reason for all the printers coming
out that can print direct from the camera, or even from the memory card
without camera or computer. Remember too, that digicam images don't have
the dust spots that account for a lot of the time spent in photo editing
programs.
I had a BA in economics once, but I think I lost it decades ago ;-)
Moose
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