[muglo] Re: Camera Zoom

> I bet you still use your Apple lle it was a very useful machine in
> it's time.

Hehehe.  I just couldn't resist responding to this, because your implicit
assumption that "that would be absurd" is interesting -- and actually it's
wrong in my own case.

Although I understand the point you're making, the absolute truth is that I
actually only just got rid of my Mac SE30 a couple of months ago, and only
then due to its age, not its functional range.  The SCSI hard drive had
started failing.  But the machine still met a bunch of my needs in terms of
its workings.  Useful computer, even today.

For whatever it's worth, I still use my older PM7600 all the time (daily
basis) and it's sooo solid.  I haven't had one problem with it in any
respect since last summer.  My B&W G3 however, although arguably "better" in
some ways than those other machines, just partially died yesterday (HD
failure, again), and this makes the third such failure since last summer.
It does a lot of cool things, but it also makes me fix it a lot more often,
like all day today for instance.  I suppose it gets a bit hard to generalize
about complex things.

Here's the cool thing about photography which makes (in my opinion) a fairly
critical difference from computers themselves -- the actual objective
requirements for ample functionality in photography isn't moving at all.  A
"good photo" in 1994 or 1894 is (from a technical perspective) the same
quantitatively and qualitatively as a good one today in 2004.  The files
still have the same specs and the images still have the same requirements.
Aesthetics, maybe not so, but technically, yes.  Nothing has changed in a
long, long time.

The central point I was hoping I was making is that digicams have moved into
the same space where they have overlapped with those static standards.  I
didn't mean to imply that the cameras won't continually get better -- only
that the average person probably shouldn't care about that -- and over in
the film-based photography world, that's demonstrably true.

Of course, if you actually believe that it takes more information *beyond
the point we're at* to make an even somehow *appreciably more good* photo,
and that there is something real and useful to be gained from any more
megapixels, we're probably having two seperate conversations.  I personally
don't believe in that at all.  Haven't seen and don't know of that sort of
development in photography really.

>  Advances will always be made just to have the competitive edge > if
nothing else.  Who said 128 kb of memory is all anybody will
> ever need?  Bill someone or other and he was proved wrong!

Yeah, understood, I definitely get it, but also take my point well -- in the
world of *photography* I've done and continue to do a lot of my professional
work on a 1981 manual focus camera made by Canon, and I still use it all the
time.  Incidentally, it still, after all those frames, consistently and 100%
reliably makes images that are 110 megapixel, approximately, or at least 20
times the information from any of these digicams.  I haven't needed to
replace that camera either, and I won't until it breaks too.  It's a truly
great camera, and that fact also won't be changing with next seasons'
digicams.  :)

For that matter, the absolute best camera I ever owned was thirty years
older than that.  But then, I've actually also shot and sold some truly
beautiful photographs using only a cardboard cracker box outfitted with a
pinhole.

Incidentally, technically, those printed pinhole images will last centuries
longer than anything coming out of my digital camera -- but that's also way
in excess of what any of the people I know will practically require of their
cameras or prints in a totally different direction.

There's a lot of noise and confusion out there!

> Canon has already upgraded their pro line to 11 megapixels and
> Kodak has a 14 megapixel camera and I don't believe we have
> come close to the end of development, I certainly hope.  I have a
> Digital Rebel and I like it a lot but I don't believe for a minute that
> it is my last camera.

I didn't mean to claim that this somehow represents the end of the efforts
of technical development -- however, I personally could do very little with
all that information in terms of actually finding any way of applying it
anywhere, even though it will exist.  Almost everything I find I actually
output or see outputted falls into the range that a 6 megapixel digital
camera can mimic, or usually much less.  I also do make 100% of my living
from my camera, and a lot of that consists of oversized prints and posters.

I'm interested -- what do you think any person would be able to do with a 14
megapixel camera that they couldn't do amply with a Canon Digital Rebel?
Can you not see my point that what our cameras can actually produce, and
what people generally use them for, are two totally distinct curves?

It's my opinion that, photographically speaking, we will continue to live in
a world of dramatic excess over the actual requirements, and digicams have
joined that world of ridiculous surplus quality.



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