The Gadget Show on C5

Ive always wondered how you get huge picture blowups from a standard camera. Surely once the image is increased above a certain size you are only blowing up the original pixels or film grains. Even a 15mp picture is going to look really blocky blown up to that huge size? How do they maintain the image quality?
 
chameleon said:
How do they maintain the image quality?
Click to expand...

The short answer is 'They don't'

Image quality is about perception of quality, and in prints etc. it's all about 'viewing distance'

Consider your television for example, from 6ft away the picture is fine, good even, but from 3ft away or closer it's just a series of dots - akin to pixels or grain in film

Those huge prints would look crap at anything less than 20ft away, but at such a distance you couldn't see the whole image anyway without scanning up & down it. Move to a better distance, say 50ft and the pixels merge and hence quality reappears

:thumbs:

When digital first took off I wrote to the then Photo Editor of Practical Photography and asked 'How many pixels are needed to equal film?', his answer at the time was 'about 20mp'. So I delayed buying into digi at that time, a year later the D100 with 6mp blew me away so I bought one. Now, it's seems clear that the type, rather than simply the number, matters most and by 12mp we're certainly there or surpassing 35mm film for resolution - and moreso at higher ISO

:thumbs:

As for Lensflare's 'emotion' comment, I can sort of see where you're coming from. But it seems a bit like those car-nuts who like to tinker with their engines, whereas the rest of us simply want it to work

I'm in the latter category myself - I want my cameras to do their job as well and easily/reliably as possible so I can capture/create emotion from my photography, rather than the process of taking/making photos

Each to their own I guess

:thumbs:

DD
 
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