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Wednesday, 12 January 2005 |
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Sometimes I feel that digital (from digit, "number") photography is just that : photography by numbers (just like paint-by-numbers...).
It's not only pixel number but also zoom range, writing speed, resolution, percentage distortion, crop factor, file size, image quality, card capacity, battery power, battery life, and so on... And camera makers sometimes seem to rely only on incresing one number or an other as a sales argument. Now, for all intents and purposes, as far as the end user is concerned, the "quality thershold" of being able to get a 4x6 print that looks good (which, for a minilab print at 150 dpi, means 600x900 pixels, which is pretty good, even a little largish for the web...) has been reached long ago, and 3, 4, 5, 6 or 16 megapixels is both marketing hype and useful only for those very few shots that ever get printed larger than 4x6...
But camera companies need to sell cameras to survive, and they need to keep users upgrading their toys every other year or so. The only way to do that is to keep putting higher and higher numbers on their cameras...
If you want to get a digital camera, and keep waiting for the next set of numbers : don't. Digital photography already offers amazing creative possibilities and it's all good, as good at least as it's gonna get until they start producing CCD with larger pixels, which is basically the limiting factor for digital photography now...
More on that tomorrow... |
