For many years, digital camera resolution (the number of pixels it had) has been something close to an obsession with many photographers - and there's a good reason for this. The first digital cameras had sub-megapixel sensors - the Apple Quicktake, launched in 1994, featured a 640x480 pixel resolution. That's 0.3 Mb. A couple of years later I got my hands on an Agfa ePhoto 1280 - with a staggering 0.7Mb of resolution - I even used one to shoot product pictures for the magazine I was editing at the time - and even though the images produced could not be enlarged beyond the size of a postage stamp, it was a start.
Digital camera technology, and more specifically camera resolution, has taken nearly a quarter of a century to catch up with the resolution capabilities of film.
Generally film resolution is said to be the equivalent of around 25Mb - that's the amount of scanned data needed (from film) to produce a photo-realistic image at A4 proportions (with no visible pixellation). Once 10Mp+ cameras and photo quality inkjet printers hit the market most photographers breathed a collective sigh of relief as their printed results began to look as good as film. Nevertheless it was a struggle to keep up in the newly minted digital world. Just shooting pictures, as we did so easily with film, was never the end of the story for the digital photographer. Using the new technology required you to take on the job of file management, to learn about photo editing software, become a photo archivist, a retoucher, a computer expert, and colour grader. With film, most of these tasks were managed by your friendly high street photo lab. With digital you were on your own. Remember all those 'high street' processing labs and one-hour photo services in pharmacies and big stores like K-Mart? Whatever happened to Agfa, Konica, Fuji and even the big yellow giant, Kodak? Some film companies embraced digital technology, investing in (very) expensive printers - they mostly survived. But many couldn't adapt and simply faded into obscurity like a cheap inkjet print.
Remember spending $15 for 36, 4x6-inch prints - all produced during your lunch break at the high street printing lab? That service quickly became a faded memory and while the public struggled with the new digital technology, many of us missed doing what we always did with film: get every frame on the roll of film printed. Suddenly pictures were 'on the computer...', and because we were all such novices with computers, there were plenty of accidents: lost files, crashed hard drives, unreadable SmartMedia cards, scratched CDs - we were faced with so many things that could go wrong, it was a scary time. With film, if we lost a print, the chances were good that a film negative could be found and a reprint ordered. With digital, images often just disappeared, fuelled by our inexperience with the complexity of the emerging technology. Even today, with the ubiquitous Cloud and other archiving services, we still suffer computer failures, hard drive freezes, or simply lose everything in one hit because we accidentally dropped the iPhone into the harbour on a Christmas cruise. If it wasn't properly backed up, it was gone forever..
Today's affordable digital cameras come with huge resolutions from 20Mp and 24Mp, up to 50Mp - and even 60Mp (if you have the cash). Even my 20Mp resolution Olympus OM1 can produce an 80Mp RGB file using its clever HiRes Mode (only if the subject is static). It's an amazing technology but do I really need an 80Mb file? We are all now shooting pictures that are significantly higher resolution than film. Most camera files can be effectively printed to poster size, but are we better off with so many more pixels? And at the higher end of the market, does it make sense to spend $5,500 on a 61Mp Sony A7 R5 (body) or $6,800 on a 47.3Mp Panasonic mirrorless camera body?
It's somewhat ironic that, having bought these high resolution devices most amateur photographers only ever display their work in a very low resolution environment. Instagram, the photographer's favourite, is a case in point. Standard resolution for anything posted online is 1080x1080 pixels, a lower resolution than you'd get from a 25-year old Agfa ePhoto 1280. And consider this, in the commercial photography world, more than 90% of a photographer's work ends up no larger than an A4 page, often it's an even smaller picture. All those pixels going to waste.
There are a many quality photo printing companies to choose from, plus there's a great range of affordable photo quality inkjet printers available - if you prefer to print at home - but I think the damage has already been done - social media has already inflicted irreversible damage on the print industry and I don't think it's going to improve with upcoming generations Compared to film's heyday, few people actually print their pictures, produce photo albums or make digital books. Where do the millions of images shot every second end up? Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat. In other words online, in an environment that requires no more than a megabyte of data per photo, mostly less. I find that a very sad state of affairs - admittedly many online portfolios do look good - but that's all they will ever be and when the companies that host these images move on, go bust, change their licensing requirements or get bought by other online providers, what happens to your work? Unless you have a regimented image archival system in place, either in the Cloud or locally, you might lose the lot. How much longer will the imaging industry continue to release ever-higher resolution cameras when, for the majority of users, when it brings little or no benefit. Certainly, as technology matures, the handling, performance, metering, AF response, file sharpness and colour rendition produced by new cameras continues to improve - features that would benefit any photographer, regardless of where their work ends up. But all those pixels? In a way the imaging industry shoots itself in the foot every time a new, higher resolution sensor is released. Though the industry is increasingly producing cameras featuring full frame sensors, there's only so much space on the chip to accommodate those pixels. And, as the pixel count goes up, so the pixel size has to reduce - and we all know that smaller pixels are not as good as larger pixels increases - one reason perhaps why Sony markets a full frame camera with only 12-megapixels (the Sony A7 III). Having a camera with a huge number of very small pixels creates a raft of negative issues like additional noise - so the design engineers have to be increasingly clever to make those sensors perform as well as some of the larger pixel cameras. They do an excellent job of it but, what about all those pixels?
When I taught photography one of my pet hobbies was to try and encourage students to print pictures because this was, and still is, the best way to see how good your camera gear is. Most declined as they were clearly already lost to the seduction of Instagram and its groupies, but those that did were impressed with the results. Looking at your images enlarged to A3 or larger, can be a great sublime experience - especially is you use some of the very exotic paper surfaces currently available like satin, matte, watercolour. Making a digital photo book is perhaps the best use of your photography because, for a really high quality printed result. it not only gobbles up large files producing outstandingly sharp and colourful results, a book also gives you a permanent record of a trip, wedding, or family occasion that the entire family can enjoy for many years.
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