6 megapixels good, 12 megapixels bad
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Images on December 13, 2007 at 2:37 pm
The American Library of Congress is an enormous resource of free images here containing pictures from all aspects of life involving America, colour and black and white.
The Brady-Handy Collection here, just a tiny corner of the LoC, contains the work of Matthew Brady. The 5,000 glass photographic plates are predominantly from the era of the American Civil War and society at that time. They are scanned at high resolution and can be downloaded from the LoC, usually with no copyright restrictions.
Below are two low resolution samples, top is a detail from the Yorktown battlefield, below a rare image of Samuel Morse, a painter and photographic pioneer whose invention of Morse Code occurred in the latter stages of his life. He taught Matthew Brady about photography.
Digital images
The great depth of field of these early photographs means they can be enlarged to huge proportions with no loss of detail. If only the same could be said of modern photographs and images. Unless they have been taken with high quality film and paper, the average 35mm transparency or photographic print do not bear a high degree of enlargement. With the rise of digital imagery, things got even worse.
Most digital images are what is technically termed as crap. More to the point, camera manufacturers would like us to believe that the more pixels a camera will take, the better the image quality. That belief also falls into the same technical terminology, as demonstrated in the research here done by Image Engineering an independent, testing laboratory.
They noticed that as camera technology moved forward, image quality got left behind. The reason for this being that today’s sensors are divided into more and more pixels, presumably so the cameras will be chosen over rivals. Image Engineering have discovered that for compact cameras, the best compromise is a 6 megapixel sensor. Things improve for 35mm single lens reflex digital cameras whose larger lenses, sensors and better optics can take an image up to 96 megapixels.
It just goes to show that size isn’t everything, as you’ve probably often exclaimed.
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Jacques Daviault - December 13, 2007 on 8:45 pm
I wonder if there’s a stock footage equivalent of the LoC? I’ve been to this collection more than once and always manage to get lost searching through the archives.
Comment by Mark Tennent - December 13, 2007 on 9:13 pm
The search fields need a lot of information to be successful. So for example, to find that picture of the Yorktown mortars you would enter: Brady, Civil War, battles, Yorktown, guns. Then be prepared to refine the search even more. There are advanced search options if you dig a little deeper but it still takes hours. Thankfully I’m not the picture researcher.
Or you could buy the book when it is published. It has excellent design inside, hum hum.
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