What's the best output ?

[fisherman]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to digital photography, so I was wondering, in order of preferance, what is the most important aspect of digital photography, that delivers the best "hard copy output".

Is it :-
1 The camera (Video capture or digital stills) ?

2 The software application used to produce the output ?

3 The printer

4 The file format (I think *.BMP is better than *.JPG) Am I right ?

I know I've left out quite a few other points (paper, ink, etc)

I am using a Canon XM1, along with a Samsung Digimax 800K ( a gift, but really handy in the pocket). A Hewlett Packard 550C printer (soon to upgrade to an Epson 870 ??).

Any views greatfully appreciated.

[Bill S]

Its a bit like asking which is most important in a sports car, the engine, the brakes, the tyres or the suspension.

The most important is to balance all four to suit the type of photography you wish to do and the output you want.

If you are happy with 6x4 prints and mainly taking holiday snapshots then the printer and the paper are probably the most important. The Epson is good but the HP with decent paper will be better than the Epson with cheap paper. You may even find that you prefer to do away with printing altogether and just display on a TV screen! This can be an extremely effective way of displaying a "slideshow"

If you are trying to take wildlife then a decent lens with a high optical magnification makes the camera most important. That is really the basis for everything else.

.jpg (if not over-compressed) is excellent. It is very rare to actually find artifacts, but beware of some cameras that do use high levels of compression to enable a reasonable number of frames to be stored on small storage devices.

The software application really depends upon how much you wish to play around with the results - Photoshop is fantastic but rather overkill just to do your holiday shots.

You may find it useful to have a look at some of the many message boards that include samples of general photographs taken by non- professionals as well as the pros!
eg.http://www.mavican.nu/cgi-bin/boards/mavpic.pl
or others (links are given in earlier threads) http://www.dpreview.com/ gives excellent technical writeups with full spec downloads (so they can be slow to download some!)

It is useful to try some of these with your existing printing kit! They results can be excellent even on 10x8 prints.

One thing that I can be fairly sure of - very few people are disappointed when they get a decent digicam! Check out the message boards!

[Alan Roberts at work]

Bill's right. In general the lens is probably the most limiting factor, followed by the printer/paper. Once you get those sorted, the only real limitation is the photographer.

Beware of cameras with very small format sensors (like 1/4" or smaller) because the lens will be diffraction limited, andnthat means the picture will get softer as you stop down, not sharper, particularly at f11-16 or so.

File format is only a problem if you're short of storage. BMP is uncompressed so makes huge files, LZW compressed TIF is next best because it is a lossless compressor (you get out what you put in), JPG is very variable (you almost never get out what you put in, but at least you may have some control over the compression ratio). If you have no access to the source image, you may never know how JPG distorts the it, but you can become accustomed to what it does and start to make intelligent guesses as to what's been thrown away, then you'll want lower compression.

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alan@mugswellvillage.freeserve.co.uk. Delete village for a spam-free diet.