Pixels

[Cussy]

Originally Posted by Jeremy H

Also the nature of shot has to be taken into account - you'll probably get away with a 6mp action shot or a soft landscape as a mag front cover (and a bit of photoshop unsharp masking etc) but perhaps not a studio shot with lots of fine detail. (The commercial photographers I know tend to shoot a lot higher than 6mp - for example - an A2 poster size at 260ppi is about 70(ish)mb in RGB.) You really do need a big sensor for that kind of thing.

That's true, but comparing a print from a photolab (Peak Imaging being my preferred one) and an inkjet printer I find the photolab is a lot more forgiving on resolution.

The added benefit of higher MP counts is that you can crop a lot harder too.
Rob

[ChristianG]

Originally Posted by Jeremy H

Hi Rob, yep you're right. A printing dot doesn't equal a pixel.

There is also another matter to take into consideration here:If you have an A4 picture you are likely to read it at the same distance as you would read a book whereas if you have an A3 pic (double A4 297 x 420 mm) chances are that you are likely to read it at arms length and at arms length the resolution of A4 is not required for A3 because you can't see any pixellation except at A4 viewing distance. It follows that the larger the size of the print the further away you will be to comfortably view it - art prints excepted of course. If you go right up to a big advertising poster you will usually see what I mean.

Then we come to the vagaries of paper and whether we are talking about Vogue (an industry benchmark) or a colour pic in a newspaper printed on conventional rubbishy (but it has its values) newsprint.

Today's inkjet photoprinters are pretty marvellous (if expensive) devices. There, if you have a pretty good pic that, for example, you wish to frame, by all means print it out at high resolution on high quality, acid free, archival paper. Just don't expect that your eye will be able to resolve that resolution, much as you might like to think so, you don't have the eye of an eagle.

I'd better point out that the "you" referred to above is a general, non-specific, "you".

As a matter of interest it's amazing how the eye and the brain can play tricks. When the captain of the winning team holds up that gold or silver or chrome plated cup in the pic your brain tells you that that is its colour. Yet there is no gold, or silver, or chrome in conventional full colour printing so your gold is converted to yellow with a greenish tinge and your silver and chrome are usually the white of the paper. It is only when your brain cannot recognise the item that it will recognise the actual colour.

[Okeanos]

I've just got the F50, been playing with it all weekend. I took some sample images with the F10 & F50, of a small sign 3m away. Zooming in to make both signs the same on screen, I can still just read the F50's image, the F10's is just a series of random pixels. There is definitely and improvement in the image, playing with the image and reducing it to the F10's size, there is roughly an improvement of 1.5x per axis in the image. Both images were taken in low light with strobe forced, colour saturation and brilliance was similar, the F50 may just have had the edge.

It'll do for me.