On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 10:53 +0900, John Summerfield wrote: > The more pixels does translate to better printed images, and my local > camera vendor assured me 3.2 Mp is good to about A4. Which probably > translates to marginal to the trained eye. I found my 4 meg camera to just about manage an A4 sized print, but only for distance viewing, and only when the source photo was taken under good conditions. Close up, you could see JPEG artifacts, and artifacts from the camera and printer (I use the local photo mini lab for my prints) that try to sharpen the picture more than it really is. Unfortunately they nearly all try to crispen pictures, rather than print pictures as they are, or use a camera which has better native resolution (that's optical and electronic, in combination), in the first place. Nearly all electronic imaging relies on artificially peaking the resolution. Turn off the detail enhancement, and you think "yuck, it's very soft," like the old soft filters used on female movie stars, even on $20,000 cameras. Conversely, for film, back when you could still get your photos processed optically, and you had a decent camera, even a moderately priced consumer camera, we had better looking prints (from the decent labs). Granted that enlargements tend to be viewed at a distance, and that does hide some defects, but some are not viewed that way. Such as family photos sitting in a frame on the desk. They'll probably not be A4 sized, but still can be big enough to expose some failings in the system. Never mind someone who wants to be arty, and do big blowups that will have people gazing intently at them. -- (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
