Thread: Image quality or ease of use?

Originally Posted by soundimageplus

Sorry I'm really bad with acronyms - GAS??

BB is referring to chaps like myself inflicted with GAS (gear acquisition syndrome), AKA (also known as) CBA (camera buying addiction) and LBA (lens buying addiction). I have a problem. Admission of the problem is the first step to recovery. I'm stuck on the first step!!

All kidding aside, well written David. I hope it will help me recover!

Thank you. Yes I'm actually very guilty of that.

To all - the points you make are excellent & I see I'm not alone in this.

Christilous point - "The only cure is to stay off the forums I think" is a good one and shows how things have changed. In the days of film when new models appeared after years rather than months, I kept the same MF camera for 16 years and kept my 35mm cameras for about 5 years each. I'm lucky if some of them last 16 weeks now!!

Plus just one comment from Dons piece, that I can very much identify with.
"For me it's as simple as... If a camera creates an intrusion on my vision, I move on without it.
If it doesn't create much intrusion, it moves on with me.
The used market is flooded with cameras from me.
It always was and always will be.."

Originally Posted by pictor

Gear Acquisition Syndrome

Pixelheads Anonymous?
My name is David and I'm a cameraholic.

Originally Posted by Armanius

BB is referring to chaps like myself inflicted with GAS (gear acquisition syndrome), AKA (also known as) CBA (camera buying addiction) and LBA (lens buying addiction). I have a problem. Admission of the problem is the first step to recovery. I'm stuck on the first step!!

All kidding aside, well written David. I hope it will help me recover!

More than just ease of use, I find it is the way that a camera feels and operates that decides whether I choose to keep a camera or move on to something else. I have bought and sold more than a few cameras with great IQ that I just didn't click with. Absolute image quality is just one factor, albeit a very important one.

Originally Posted by Amin Sabet

Very interesting perspective, David. For me, all of today's cameras (including small sensor cameras) have crossed my "threshold" for image quality when light is good, and all current 4/3 and larger sensor cameras have crossed my "threshold" for image quality in variable light.

This expresses my sentiment pretty much exactly. And I have the advantage of never having owned the ultra high end DSLRs, so I never had to choose. I shot and processed a fair amount of film back in the day and had decent SLRs to work with. And TLRs and such as well. But digital all happened during my 25-30 year hiatus as a mere shooter of snaps while I was busy raising kids and having a career and other stuff. When I decided to "get a decent camera again" a little over a year ago (for a trip my wife and I were planning for last summer) I jumped in like I always do and looked at the available options. And it became quickly apparent to me that the images people were turning out with m43 cameras were eons better technically than the best of my film work. As was most of what I was seeing from high end point and shoots like the LX3 and S90. I knew I wanted more versatility than a tiny camera with a zoom lens but there was no way I wanted to carry a big DSLR unless there was a very compelling reason to do so, so I went the m43 route and have been quite happy with that. Only since then have I started to notice differences in IQ between different levels of gear, but for the kind of shooting I do and the way I view my images, it just doesn't matter.

I've become a fairly ambitious collector of gear in my one year + back in photography, but none of it has had the ultimate in IQ as its goal - its always been about the camera and lens that best gets out of the way and lets me get the kinds of shots I want to get. And the IQ has invariably been good enough. I have to say I'm getting a bit spoiled by the IQ of the X100 and the Nex, now that I have them and I CAN see a difference. But that has roughly nothing to do with why I bought those cameras and the difference, even though I can see it, doesn't matter to me or affect whether I produce a terrible photograph, a good one, or one of my rare shots thats a little better than good.

To illustrate, I was recently involved in some discussion or another over on dpreview - I think in either the Fuji or Nex forums. And I had my Flickr stream linked in my sig, as I do most places. I don't have exif data available in my Flickr stream at the moment. And some guy in the discussion happened to open my Flickr stream and started looking at my photographs and liking them. I was flattered. But then he started trying to use them to make points about gear, making some not unreasonable assumptions about what I'd used for various shots. The problem was that he was dead wrong in most of his gear assumptions, as reasonable as his guesses were. He was head over heels about a particular landscape I'd shot and was quite sure it was taken with a Nex (because it was in the same set as another shot I'd noted I HAD taken with the Nex). And he was using it to make a point about how good the APS sensor IQ was relative to m43. The only problem being I'd shot that particular photograph with a Canon S90! Which really screwed up the point he was trying to make.

I only shot with the S90 on one of the days of my trip last year and I came back from that day with several of my favorite photographs from the whole trip. And I've printed a few of them at sizes the S90 was never intended to support and, I can see the flaws on very close inspection, but visitors in my home never fail to mention a couple of those shots first. Because they're good photographs and the IQ deficiencies of the S90 were not enough to get in the way of the viewer. I've since sold the S90 because its particularly bad for some of the shooting I like to do and the LX5 is much better in that respect, but it had absolutely NOTHING to do with image quality!

So if I ever start feeling high and mighty about IQ making a difference, I remind myself of those prints and that story and it puts my ass back in its seat pretty quickly.

-Ray

I've owned and sold 21 digital cameras in the last decade and the one I still identify most with is the Oly C5050. It's the one I kept the longest.
I seem to be in a semi-constant state of flux and am a source of some anxiety to my wife. . I like Don's analogy of the camera becoming transparent in the image capture process (my paraphrasing). David your thoughts have inspired me to concentrate more on the output regardless of the input tool (camera).

I am always amazed when I print. Just last night I was going through some old prints from various digital cameras and they were all very, very good. All printed on good Epson printers after being carefully processed. Looking at pictures on the screen is one thing, and it tends to expose warts and all, but printing levels the playing field. Even though I don't print much right now, pictures are still meant to be printed imo. On the screen is more convenient, but not as pleasing.

I've also discovered that printing is a great way to edit pictures. I'll put away the prints for some time then come back and review. Some stand out, others fall by the wayside.

There is one picture that stands out to me, that proves to me that virtually any camera is a great camera for prints. It's a shot of a cement factory in an industrial section of Berkeley. Lots of interesting shapes and lines and textures. Slightly underexposed, but the black and white print is stunning nonetheless.

IQ and ease of use are separate things to me.

this is an interesting thread ... I feel underqualified to add anything, but also feel impelled to do so ... here's a snap of my first "serious" camera and my E-P2 ... I never took a good frame with the first, much as I loved to have it in my hands, because I never had the patience to "learn photography" ... 35 years on, I bought the E-P2 ... it has all the qualities of the first, and I make better photographs ... I have notoriously always wanted "more" in almost every area of life, but mysteriously find that having acquired an E-P2, even a year on, I just don't look at other cameras with any sense of longing ... not even (whisper it ) an M9 ... too big ... however, I have spent the equivalent of the national debt of Mexico on glass ... none of which can I bear to part with yet ... so I seem to be ina bit of a minority ...


werra + E-P2 by _loupe, on Flickr

Cameras like the Nikon D700 and the Canon 5D have spoiled us so much, that we completely miss the point when we criticize cameras like the Olympus E-PL1 or compacts like the Canon G series for their comparably minor image quality. When we shot film no one even dared to dream about shooting color photographs at ISO 3200 and getting an image quality like that of this photograph I did last November:



Of course, the image quality is not perfect, but there was not even one equivalent color film I know of which was only a little bit usable. Thus this is better than we could expect when we shot film. The µ4/3 gear offers even better image quality than compact cameras like my Canon G12 and are still very convenient. I understand that there are photographers who really need those heavy and fast cameras, but for many of us its image quality is much more than we will ever need...

...if there were not the perfectionist in us...

Apart from my interest in photography I work for a performing arts organisation and the same dilemma exists in sound fidelity. I work with one musician who has genuinely spent twice as much on his sound system as he has on his home. At 55 his hearing acuity will not be what it once was and I wonder whether the premium price he pays for the equipment translates to a discernable difference in what he can hear. Top of the range Hi Fi like lenses being exponentially more expensive that decent Hi Fi equipment.

I am a tragic cyclist and I won't bore you with the parallels in cycling except to observe that $280 for 12 grams shaved off the weight of a pair of pedals is about the measure of it.