My wife just ordered a bunch of new prints for her office, and the quality was astounding. Especially since many of the prints she chose were photos taken in 2007, using a Fuji S2 Pro that was released in 2002. This camera captured a “huge 12 megapixel image” that we all know actually contained maybe 9 megabytes of information (no need to go into the Bayer layout vs SuperCCD debate), but these 20 year old images looked good. Like, really good. At 20×30 inches.
So why the hell am I shooting with full frame and medium format?
The Source of my Bias
I’ve been taking photography seriously since the 1990’s. I learned on black and white film in a darkroom, earned my living shooting portraits and weddings on film (mostly) and early digital, and I was always driven by image quality. So, I was drawn to the equipment that produced the best images – this generally meant really expensive lenses and the largest piece of film I could reasonably carry.
With digital the struggle continued. Costs went up, and quality was marginal but “good enough,” with the real shift coming from cost reduction – shooting 1,000 frames at a wedding on Leica M gear produced much better images than shooting on that S2 Pro that produced the images in this article, but just having my lab process and print 4×6 proof prints was $1,000. Compare that to the $3,000 cost of that Fuji digital camera, and whatever it costs to burn a CD of the images it produced along with a set of “contact prints” run off on an Epson printer.
Digital photography, to me, was about efficiency and cost. Not quality.
Wall Prints
These are some vacation prints of mine. They aren’t amazing, but they’re good memories. I enjoy taking vacation photos and I print them at up to 30×40″ in size, and so I tend to carry a big bag of gear with me because that was the price I thought I had to pay for image quality.
That photo on the left of the sculpted stairwell? Gorgeous architecture shot on a m4/3 camera that I tried to use to replace the bulky DSLR I was otherwise using. That was a camera with an honest 12 megapixels of capture, built a decade after that S2 Pro, and the details in the stairwell photo are just about nonexistent to my eye. It’s disappointing to walk up to it and not see the detail I know was in the original frame. Luckily that’s not how we view wall prints, so these images work on the wall like this.
But I’ve been shooting with “better” gear (full frame DSLRs with prime lenses, or a Fuji GFX camera) so I’ll have the resolution I want for the next wall print.
The Re-evaluation
But these prints, from 20 year old images that don’t look amazing in Lightroom have me rethinking all this.
Here is a closer shot from that print. It’s not amazingly sharp, but it doesn’t need to be, as the canvas doesn’t really have the resolution to show more detail than is there.
So you’ve got this image, taken on a 23 year old 6 megapixel sensor with illusions of grandeur, and it holds up at 20″ x 30″ in an office environment. Look at the setae (call them hairs) on the bee’s legs and abdomen – plenty of detail there for my eyes. And all of the prints are coming out that good.
So Why are these Prints So Good?
Well, to start with these prints from from mpix.com, which is the consumer division of the image processor I used years ago for my portrait and wedding work – they’ve always done a great job.
But I think to a larger degree we are looking at a couple of changes that have happened over the last two decades:
- I’m printing on canvas rather than a glossy print, and as a result the resolution of the canvas is hit before the resolution of the image runs out.
- Software, and our understanding of digital imaging, is simply an order of magnitude better than it was when these images were taken. It’s possible to produce prints from the same source image that are simply better. Ai-based sharpening and upscaling software, digital workflows at the printer that are optimized to start with a mediocre image and apply settings to really bring out the best in that image, and so on.
I think, when it comes down to it, the biases I developed in the early 21st Century may have been invalidated by the march of technology. I no longer need what I thought I needed to produce a quality large print. Or at least, the photo equipment I had was producing images that were capable of much greater enlargements than I realized, and I can scale back and still get the quality of output I need.
Downsizing and Testing the Results
So this will start a new series of posts here.
I’m currently shooting with full-frame and medium format kits (Pentax and Fuji, respectively.) I just ordered a m4/3 replacement setup from Pentax that should be here next week. I went with 3 Leica-badged zoom lenses (and I traditionally hate zoom lenses and always wish I’d had a prime instead) this time because I want to test what a light, portable kit can do.
This is about embracing compromise (in sensor size and giving up prime lenses for the compromises zooms always entail) and checking to see if the output is still “good enough” by my standards. I’ve got a new photo printer coming in that prints 13 x 19 inch prints affordably, so I should be able to test without a whole lot of effort.
At the end of the day, for me, the final product of photography is an actual photograph, preferably hanging on a wall. So that’s what I’ll be judging this on.
Stay tuned.
