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Virtual camera club for grumpy gits who don't like the type of people who usually go to camera clubs.
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- Weather: Fail.
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6 comments:
As a Bad Science fan, sure Toby has seen this already:
We’re all suckers for a big number, and you’ll be delighted to hear that the Journal of Consumer Research has huge teams of scientists all eagerly writing up their sinister research on how to exploit us.
One excellent study this month looked at how people choose a digital camera. This will become relevant in three paragraphs’ time. The researchers took a single image, then processed it in Photoshop to make two copies: one where the colours were more vivid, and one where the image was sharper. They told participants that each image came from a different camera, and asked which they wanted to buy. About a quarter chose the one with the sharper image.
Then the researchers started to pile it on. Firstly they said that this camera had more pixels, using a figure derived from the diagonal width of the sensor: suddenly more than half picked it instead. Then, crucially, they told them that this camera had more pixels, but this time, they used the number of pixels as evidence: a figure measured, as you know, in millions. Suddenly, three quarters chose the supposedly better camera. Just a bigger number. Nothing more.
No, I hadn't seen that. But I can well believe it. This is noticable on lots of fields from hi-fi to organic food.
On mega-pixels, one of Sarah's friends took a picture she liked of her two kids. It was with a Sony Cybersomething 10mp camera. However, someone possibly in the interest of getting a squillion shots on and SD card, had set the quality to VGA (about 0.3 of a megapixel, I believe). She wanted to print it on one of these square canvas things, about 20x20 inches. I initially despaired of getting anything. But I played with it in photoshop (resizing using bicubic sharpening seemed to give best results) and she got it printed. It actually looks quite good. Admittedly a number of things work in its favour: it is usually viewed at a distance; the canvas print is textured which, I guess, hides some sins; and it's a portrait where a lack of definition can be OK.
Remembered I'd seen a test of this sometime back. NY Times tech writer David Pogue tried this here and here and it backs up what we'd been saying.
Having said that, I like my 12mps on the D90 'cos I can crop away without fear. (Someone will say I should probably take the photo composed properly in the first place.)
Ha! I love the people who think they've discovered this great way of getting hundreds more pictures on their card...without realising they're sacrificing all those precious MP they paid all that money for. Actually, I don't love them, many of them are CAMRA contributors who send me pictures at about 15K and wonder what the problem is.
Like you, for me more MP means I have more flexibility in cropping and resizing/zooming shots - but I'm not prepared to give up sensor performance just to get this, as like you say, you can get round through better composition. Looking at my current lenses and performance of the D300, I think 12-13MB is as far as I want to go!
I too think 12MP is great. At the moment.
Just as well, 'cos I can't afford one of these monsters.
And the real scary thing...the camera will appear cheap when you price up the lenses you'd need to get to be able to resolve enough to make use of the sensor!
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