Do you have any existing film equipment that could possibly be reused? I know alot of photographers have a significant amount of money wrapped up in their brand of choice, and to be able to re-use the lenses on the digital body is nice. My only experience is using our Fuji FinePix S2 Pro which accepts all our old Nikon F-mount lenses and filters, for instance. Very nice camera, though I think there is a newer model soon to be announced (if not already).
No, I don’t have any equipment at all. This would be an entirely new experience for me.
Clay,
No! Sorry, it’s all Bronica stuff but probably quite useless. We toyed with the idea of digital backs but at the time (3 years ago) the backs were $30,000+ so digital SLRs come at the right time.
The new camera you may be refering to is the Canon EOS1D Mark11 Also featured on dpreview.com but the ultimate Canon is the EOS 1DS with 12 MP but about $5,000.
Fuji are bringing out the S3 Pro and may have a 50MP file but I think it’s interpolated. still, they’re fine cameras. I think again it’s all down to personal preferences. it’s a case of whatever works best.
Regards
Mark
Apologies Clay, I thought you were asking me. I should have realised you would have started with me (Mark)
regards
Mark
Jonathan,
I’ve been using the Canon 10D for about 9 months. It is heavy enough to feel substantial, takes impressive photos (once I learned how to color correct them properly in Photoshop), and is easy to use. The review Mark recommended is very helpful and it was exactly what convinced me to buy it. I love this camera!
Jeanne
Jonathan,
If it’s any benefit to you, we are able to get a 20" x 30" print from a Pro Lab and the quality is spot on. That would take 4 front covers to fill so there would be absolutely no degradation in quality for glossy mag covers.
You can also download images from dpreview.com to gat an idea of quality. You can even see hairs where you didn’t know existed! 🙂
Regards
Mark
Thanks for the recommendations. Like I said, I’m still new to all of this so I’m not familiar with all of the terms. However, if I understand correctly, the megapixels are what determines the size and quality, correct? If so, what is the smallest number of megapixels I could get by with and still have good photos cover size?
Well if you’re looking the quality, 6MP should be fine but top quality mags are producing 50MP prints. Is it possible to go to a good camera retailer you know of and hire out a camera?
We use Calumet in Belfast. They charge £75/ $125 a week and if we buy the camera they deduct this off the final price.
Do a bit of research and within the week take a few prints on CD to your local Lab and test the quality.
There is a bit of a learning curve and some people get tripped up by it but if you can overcome this you’ll be well rewarded.
Regards
Mark
Hello Mark, and everyone else,
Thanks again for the suggestions. I’m after a bit more information, so I’ll give you a bit more background to my question, and perhaps you can help.
The primary motivation for my original question is that I’m trying to educate myself about the basics of digital photography. Not because I want to actaully take photos myself (though that’s not out of the question–hence my interest in hearing about specific camera recommendations), but because as a graphic designer, I sometimes have to discuss issues with photographers, and I find that my knowledge in this area is woefully lacking.
I do graphic design/layout for a small circulation (20,000) magazine that is distributed to a niche market here in the U.S. With just a couple of exceptions, our cover images have always been custom photography. Our first photographer (I don’t know what kind of camera he had) sent us 8.5×11" TIFF files at 600ppi. At that quality, I could have easily enlarged them to 17×22".
We recently switched to a different photographer. He has a Nikon D1x (5.5 megapixel) camera. For the first cover he shot, he sent us 6.5×10" TIFF files at 300ppi. That means I had to enlarge the photo 33% just to get it the right size for the cover.
Can someone give me an overview on exactly what impact on quality the number of megapixels has? And what other factors are important in the image quality? Please start at a very basic level, and assume I don’t know anything about the subject (because I don’t!).
Thanks (and sorry for the long post)!
Jonathan
Jonathan Lewis
After you did the enlarging by 33%, was the quality satisfactory? I could be wrong, but I believe that any quality camera in the 5 megapixel range should be capable of the size you need for a magazine cover, providing that it is equipped with a good lens.
If I were doing the photo for you, I would wish to know the exact size and resolution required, and that is the file I would send to you.
Hi Jonathan,
I’ve no experience with printing professionally so I can’t exactly say what works best and I can only talk "ppi" (pixels per inch) lingo, not lpi (lines per inch) or otherwise. But, the general rule of thumb is that an image resolution of 300ppi will provide a photorealistic print quality. Using 300ppi as a guideline then, you can take the image size desired and calculate from that what the minimum desired megapixel rating is for a camera sensor. An 8×10-inch print (2400×3000 pixels) defines a 7.2 Mpx sensor. If you must be more conserative, you’ll see those who cite getting excellent printed results even as low as 220-240 ppi. At 240 ppi the demands are obviously less…about 4.6 Mpx and hence how it is that, as Q Photo said, a digital camera rated around 5 Mpx with a good, sharp lens can produce images that should meet your needs.
Taking this a bit further, very good results can be obtained through the use of Photoshop or other tools to resize (resample) an image up to a 7.2 Mpx size. I don’t know just how large you can go before obvious image deterioration is incurred, but a quality resampling of a 240ppi image up to 300ppi is quite reasonable to expect.
Other factors play in here as well, such as the camera itself. Digital SLRs have larger sensors than the all-in-one, high-end "digicams". So, using current typical cameras for comparison, the Olympus C8080 8 Mpx camera with its smaller sensor than the Nikon D70 DSLR with a larger sensor, may produce an inferior image although it has more megapixels in the image. The reason is due to the different size and density of the actual sensor cells and the increased susceptibility to digital noise with the smaller cells. Again, other factors may also weigh in here. In any case, a nice, clean (noise-wise) image from the Nikon D70 may actually resample to a larger size more readily than the image of the Olympus C8080. I won’t claim that is an absolute fact though, and perhaps even less true with these specific cameras (the Olympus reportedly controls noise very well), but a DSLR does in general provide a higher quality image than the high-end digicam.
The bottom line here is that I think it is quite likely that even a 5 Mpx camera and particularly a DSLR can provide you with the image size and quality to support your needs. Anything more than that is just icing on the cake and gives you the freedom of working with more "actual" as opposed to "interpolated" data.
Regards,
Daryl
Thanks for the replies, Q Photo and Daryl.
In answer to your question, Q, the quality was more or less acceptable after I enlarged it by the 33%. It wasn’t as sharp, however, as I would prefer. Notwithstanding, I think it was good enough.
It seems that the more I read, the more I realize there is to know! (Though I guess it’s that way with any technical subject.) Thanks for the info, Daryl, that may get me started in the right direction. Just as a follow up question, I think I missed something in your explanation of how to figure how many megapixels are needed based on the desired print size. You said: "An 8×10-inch print (2400×3000 pixels) defines a 7.2 Mpx sensor." I must be missing some part of the formula. How do you figure that 7.2 is needed for an 8×10? What is the mathematical equation to figure that?
Again, thanks for the information!
Jonathan
Jonathan,
Sorry for being somewhat cryptic…that calculation was based upon a 300ppi resolution. So, 8*300 = 2400 and 10*300 = 3000 pixels. Oddly, I’ve never given it much thought, but the result then of mutiplying 2400 px * 3000 px is 7,200,000 pixels "squared". I guess the common convention is just to drop the "squared", since were really just talking of the pixel density; that is, how many pixels are packed into that 8×10-inch area. In this case, 7.2 million, thus a 7.2 Mpx sensor if you want the data to be non-interpolated.
Maybe that is clearer now,
Daryl
Hi Daryl,
Okay, it was the part about multiplying the 2400 pixels by the 3000 pixels that I didn’t catch before. Thanks for clearing it up for me!
Jonathan
My first thought was, why a 50MP file? We just produced a 6X9 book cover (front and back) with a Canon Digital Rebel (6.3 MP) which provided us with 300 dpi resolution for a 9X24" image. I then realized that this 6.3 MP camera actually produces a 20 Meg TIFF file – not a 6.3 meg file as one might think. I’ve seen 8X10 prints from this camera that look stunning — I would think good enough for a mag cover, but maybe not.
In any event, with such a camera you’d need to avoid enlarging the photo, since you’d have little or no resolution to spare. I was told that you need an 11 MP camera to match the resolution of a 35 MM film camera.
As a little extra, the Canon comes with a photo stitch program, which allows you to glue a number of images together. You can get some really massive resolution this way 🙂
Doug
wrote in message
Well if you’re looking the quality, 6MP should be fine but top quality
mags are producing 50MP prints. Is it possible to go to a good camera retailer you know of and hire out a camera?
We use Calumet in Belfast. They charge
