What comes first, the Camera or the Printer

oakfieldphotography.com

Hi all
In the race for an ever expanding demand on specs for new cameras can printers keep up with them?

Regards
Patrick:D

Overfocused

(I assume) 300DPI prints will always be a standard. If you're more than a few inches away from the print at 300DPI the human eye can't differentiate much more than that, if that. 600DPI makes a difference with tons of fine detail, however I am a macro freak that notices every little smidge, and most others will never even notice the difference of prints above 300DPI anyway, lol.

So, the answer is yes. You should be wondering if cameras will keep up with printers instead

With 24x36 large format prints being much more accessible with the easy to use large format printers available, as an art photographer my dream target native resolution for a camera would be 7200x10800 pixels for a 300DPI print on a 24x36. Eventually consumer cameras might go up to that resolution natively, but that's a stretch. The market may never go that far for consumers, unless marketing does a really good job brainwashing and somehow gets people to believe they need that much resolution for snapshots. I doubt your average mom wants to take 50 megapixel images for 4x6's or 8x10's of her kid or a photo for facebook uploading. Medium format digital has just approached that mark too, so it'll probably take at least 5+ years till prosumer DSLRs have that much resolution unless a new awesome sensor tech is available very shortly.



* And I forgot about color gamut reproduction... we may never reach what the camera can see print-wise, but, the gap closes a lot with the 7 and 8 ink cartridge printers. They make some gorgeous stuff that are plenty of eye candy for anybody, lol

ziggy53

In a number of measures neither computer monitors nor any print mechanism or system has been able to properly depict all that modern cameras have to offer on a 1:1 basis.

What happens instead is that through a system of oversampling and long-precision calculations the rendering to monitors and printers is (potentially) more accurate and (potentially) higher quality than ever before. In particular, the highest end print processes can produce excellent quality because of starting with (potentially) excellent source material.

In other words, there has never been a greater opportunity for photographers to maintain control of the entire process with such digital precision and consistency in quality. Sadly, that doesn't mean that high quality is pervasive or dominant, only more possible than before.

My recommendation is for each photographer to learn their craft and to develop their style to a point where they can control the process to their liking, and hopefully to their market's liking. That's all you need to worry about and it can easily take more than an entire lifetime to try to achieve anything close to excellence. Indeed it's something I am in a constant struggle to ascertain for myself.