I, and others, I believe, have said before that a 2mp image from a good
digital camera is capable of producing a really excellent 8x10 print. A
lot of the bad things you hear about digital quality are the result of
assumptions and resulting experiences and like you had. A good part of
the problem is simply learning curve. If you were getting really lousy
results from 35mm and a wet darkroom, you would know from the general
experience/knowledge all photographers share as a group that some part
of the process was failing, and likely have some idea where to look.
This isn't the case yet with digital and there is a lot of
misunderstanding and misinformation floating around.
If you read the interchange between me and Joe Gwinn, you know some of
the issues of grain (granularity) aliasing in digital scanning. It
appears that, with certain films, upgrading from 2700 to 4000 dpi could
actually give worse results! There is, however, another technical issue
that can greatly affect the quality of digital prints from digital files.
When I got my Epson 1280 and then my 2700 dpi scanner, I was puzzled by
my first results. I made a nice 8x10 from about half of an APS negative.
Grain was visible if I looked for it, but it was a good looking print
and equivalent to about an 18x27" print from a full 35mm frame! Then I
made a print from a different frame with very little cropping and it
came out with a strange granular look, almost like some kind of subtle
solarization mixed with lots of graininess. I fussed and puzzled a bit
before coming to the idea that it was probably a software problem.
Thinking it through, I realized that arbitrarily sizing of a digital
image could easily lead to strange results. If the dpi of the image at
the set print size is not an even divisor of the dpi of the printer, the
printer driver has to interpolate. Lets say it has to print 11 pixels
from each 7 or 9 pixels in the source. There is no mathematical way to
do that and maintain the integrity of the image! The software will do
it's best, but the result will inevitably be poor. On the other hand,
converting 10 to 5 pixels or 3 to 9, etc. isn't a big problem to do.
So I tried letting the size of the image decide the actual size of the
print. I made a chart of dpis that are even divisors of the 1400 dpi
resolution of the printer and only printed at those dpis. So an 8x10 may
turn out to be 7.7x10.2, depending on how it is cropped, etc. The
immediate result was uniformly good prints, so I've stuck to this
procedure. When downsampling scanned images for the web or other
purposes, I also only downsample by simple integer divisors of the image
resolution, never to arbitrary sizes. I'm not claiming that this is the
specific solution to your problem, only that pixel resampling and
interpolation is a crucial part of the digital darkroom that needs to be
understood and addressed in order to get good results.
I got a call from my older son a few days ago. He just got a new iMac
with iPhoto software and wanted to know why the pictures he was printing
from his 3+mp camera mostly looked so much worse than the ones I made,
not only from 35mm, but from my 2.1mp camera, and why they were so
variable, some looking almost decent and others quite bad. When I asked,
sure enough, he was cropping and then arbitrarily sizing to 4x6 (or
whatever).
I know some of us would like the digital darkroom to get us away from
all that complex stuff with choice of developer, dilution, times, yada,
yada, yada. Maybe that time will come, but for now we have to learn how
to use the new tools to get the results we want. I think software needs
to get smarter and warn us when we are making choices that will degrade
the image. My print driver should say "Printing this image at 5x7" will
not give good photo reproduction. Print at 5.17 x 6.93 inches?" or some
such.
I've made really good looking 8x10 prints from cropped digital images of
around 1000x1200 dpi, or about 1.2mp. That means to me that 5mp is good
for 16x20 prints, as our E-10 and E-20 users have said. Why ask for
cameras with huge output files if they aren't needed for the desired end
result? An Olydak 4/3 with 5-7 mp and a line of good quality
interchangeable lenses would make me quite happy. Even better, how about
greater dynamic range, greater sensitivity and less noise in the
sensors, rather than piling on the megapixels? Those kind of
improvements would be much more useful to me for improving my ability to
make the images I want.
Moose
Chuck Norcutt wrote:
My first impression of the Olydak was negative based on the perceived
low resolution of the current 5 megapixel Kodak 4/3 sensor. I have
heard some of you E-10 and E-20 users praise the enlargement quality
of your 4 and 5 megapixel sensors but it didn't seem like it could be
so great. After all, here I am scanning film at 9 megapixels on my
Acer Scanwit and an 8x10" is about as large as I can go since the
"grain" begins to show much beyond that. I've placed "grain" in
quotes since it's not clear to me that's actually what I'm recording.
For the past several months I have owned a Nikon CoolPix 800 which I
bought refurbished from B&H for $199. It's a 2 megapixel camera which
I bought just to get my feet wet in digital and to be able to make
quick snapshots and web quality shots. I've always considered that I
needed to print at 300 dpi for good quality output and this camera's
1200x1600 resolution should (in my mind) only support a 3x4" print.
Well, a couple of weeks ago I decided to try a 5x7" print which
required dropping the resolution to 225 dpi. I was amazed since it
still looked pretty good. I never considered going beyond that until
this morning when I tried an 8x10" print at 150 dpi. Amazing! This 2
megapixel image still looks very good even at 8x10". So, now it seems
to me that a 5 or 6 megapixel sensor probably is capable of handling
any size enlargements I'm likely to need.
And now the last point. I assumed that the Olydak would be built with
Kodak's current 5 megapixel sensor which happens to have a 4/3 size
ratio. However, after visiting their site this morning are reading
what they had to say about their deal with Olympus it's not at all
clear that this is the sensor to be used. Their official statement
says only that details of the 4/3 sensor will be released in the
future. That's a pretty strong implication that the sensor to be used
is not the current one. Perhaps that sensor will have an even higher
resolution.
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