21st century camera resolution requirements

in the past 10 years my use of stored images has gone from 100% prints to 100% digital.
gone 100% from printed images to 100% digital internet / email images.

I removed the strap from my canon 35mm (w/ it's huge 300mm telephoto lens that I got in a pawn shop in Amsterdam) to put on my new 12x camera last week. (12x = 360mm)
the new 12x camera is 1/3 the cost, size & weight of the old 35mm w/ telephoto lens.

I then proceeded to take several 1000 pictures of my new adopted mutt. The camera has a "continuous mode" that can take literally 100s of pix in a few minutes .. great for action / running / jumping puppy play action pix.
When I emptied the 2 gig card I had 2000 pictures on it!

after selecting the best pix I resized them to fit on a 19" screen.
& I then used .jpg compression to make for reasonable attachment transmission size.

did I lose all the advantages of high pixel count when I re-sized & compressed?
the resized & compressed pix look most excellent on a 19" screen.

what is the actual advantage of a 10m image for computer viewing?
Is such high rez only for printing out "wall murals"?

Screen resolution os very low (72dpi)
Low quality printing is 150 dpi
Glossy printing is 300 to 400 dpi
Some high-end stuff can be much higher still.

Yes, the RAW setting is for billboards or Glamour Mag stuff.
Perfectly useless for the internet cameraman.

I shot a Nikon D100 for years and loved it.

Most photographers fall into two categories.
1. Those that shoot thousands of frames and spend hours editing out the crap.
2. Those that shoot 100 frames and spend minutes editing down to the keepers.

I used to hate coming back from events with more than 50 images. For me, the number of useful images of the same action is 4-5.

so setting my camera on more than 1600x1200 ( 2 mega pixel) is not helpful for my usage?
I compress to under 200k for email attachments.

the 10 mega pixal images are beyond huge & make camera response sluggish.
the smaller the image the 'quicker' my camera is.

my camera also has settings for 'image quality' .. fine, normal, economy.
I have it set on fine .. the setting I use is based 'mystical belief' not rational fact!

the camera's instructions tell how to make the changes but no 'real world usage info'

thanks!

for action pix the 'continuous mode' is wonderful. Would require incredible luck to catch the 'point of memorable action' ..
no doubt for a static image this continuous feature is stupid.. I have many many 'continuous series of images' that are same same for all frames!!
but when the puppy was running & stumbling I got some great images using the continious

posed pix / professional layouts are different I'm sure.
seemed to take longer for my camera to upload 2k pix than it took to shoot them

Personally, I'd still shoot large pictures even for the web as you can do so much more in a photo editor such as Photoshop. The compression algorithms are better too. For web I compress in the 'Save for Web' setting at 60%. It's about as low as you can go and still have nice pictures.

Camera memory is cheap and you might as well set the resolution to the best that the CCD can grab. I agree edit the pictures down to whatever you need them for later. On my Canon EOS 400D I use the RAW setting mostly.

I've been shooting jpeg & RAW to see if going to raw after working out any gotchas is of any value. Many of the camera settings such as color characteristics and white balance & D-range optimization have no effect with Raw except when using with long exposures where the noise renders the pics almost useless. But I am leaning towards RAW

I shoot in the highest resolution possible when I do use JPEG only, you can always edit it down but can't really edit up.

With 10 meg pixels I do notice my edited pics saved for the net seem to loose some of their sharpness when compared to my 5MP camera. Might be me Might be the camera (doubtful) I rarely adjust pictures I take, except to rotate, crop and resize.

Depending on the camera & settings there will be a good deal of color and sharpness enhancements done by the camera before it ever gets to your image editor. I'm taking RAW & JPEG (at the same time - two pics for each shot) so that I can learn the various settings and how they affect the shots (this being my first DSLR) There is a big step from the SLR-like digitals and film SLRs. With just one tiny 2GB card I am able to take over 100 shots shooting JPEG & RAW combined. With the storage available there really is no reason to take shots of a lower resolution than your camera can handle (unless you're on a long trip and do not have a computer handy to move things to every day).

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Originally Posted by Texpat

Yes, the RAW setting is for billboards or Glamour Mag stuff. Perfectly useless for the internet cameraman.
I shot a Nikon D100 for years and loved it. Most photographers fall into two categories.
1. Those that shoot thousands of frames and spend hours editing out the crap.
2. Those that shoot 100 frames and spend minutes editing down to the keepers.
I used to hate coming back from events with more than 50 images. For me, the number of useful images of the same action is 4-5.

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I'd disagree with this, but each his own. I like to shoot as many shots as I think necessary. When I first started playing with cameras about 30 years ago the common wisdom was to shoot multiples. Without the cost of film or processing and the availability of 16GB compact flash cards, I can't think of a reason to reduce the size or number of shots you take. Well, except that editing part.

Biggest advantage of RAW is that it's easier to correct under or over exposed images and similar mistakes.

Having said that I do find that 99% of images I end up converting down to jpgs in the end anyway without doing any editing on them.

Also, for long term storage I store a jpg with the RAW for each image. Reason being is that as the RAW format is proprietory to the camera manufacturer/model, in 10 years time it may be tricky to find the right software to read it, but the jpg should be readable by anything that's around at the time.

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Originally Posted by friscofrankie

you can always edit it down but can't really edit up.

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Good point. I suppose you could shoot RAW and do your editing before resizing to post, publish or e-mail to grandma.

Editing low resolution photos yields inferior results. But in the end, what's an Internet photo poster going to do with a file full of 3M photos?

Probably reduce them down to a managable size. Maybe retain one or two that you think would make a nice poster. (But never does)

Depends on what you want right? After shooting a couple hundred raw photos I'm inclined to start thinking about a film camera for some things. But I am quite happy to browse through & edit the RAW digital photos on about 90% of what I shoot. I may be doing a lot of photo illustrated travel review and general articles in the coming months and higher quality pics will just make them just that much better.

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Originally Posted by Gerbil

Also, for long term storage I store a jpg with the RAW for each image. Reason being is that as the RAW format is proprietory to the camera manufacturer/model, in 10 years time it may be tricky to find the right software to read it, but the jpg should be readable by anything that's around at the time.

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dcraw is a very good and well maintained Open Source application with some plugins for different image editor allowing you to import yur raw files with out proprietary software. This site http://cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/ is by the developer and targeted to linux users but he does have links to Windows and Mac ports.

I can now import RAW files from my sony and my fuji cameras directly into the Gimp, although it does wipe the exif information There are ways to avoid this if it important to you but I haven't read up n it yet. Works pretty damn good, though

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Originally Posted by friscofrankie

dcraw is a very good

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Thanks. I'll take a look at that.

I lost the CD that came with my Canon. It was a bugger of a job getting a replacement as Canon did not have it available for download. Sorted now, but I could imagine similar problems in the future :(

i have 7mp panasonic camera with 12x zoom leica lens. i love the telephoto abilities but sometimes even 12x zoom is not enough. so the main reason i shoot at 7mp is that i can crop images afterwards and get even closer to the subject of the photo. i know i could just use digital zoom but its so much easier to do it at home and get the perfect framing for your pic with photoshop.