Originally posted by photoptimist Although you are right that many internet discussions of resolution are just amateur anecdotes, there's a ton of very technical work out there on the resolution of film, lenses, digital sensors, etc. and how they interact.
Yet for all that technical information, I've never seen an evaluation of what that information means to personal enjoyment of photographs. IN fact, Pentax lens designers have intimated on many occasions, that it's not just about the test charts, its about "lenses for the way people take pictures". Without an understanding of how all that information can help you increase your enjoyment of those images it's pretty much useless.
Off the Pentax engineers are right, and there is a conflict between test charts evaluation, and the way people take pictures, then a lot more work needs to be done, and at least part of that needs to be done on neurological responses to stimuli, without which we have no way of evaluating what level of test performance best relates to our synapses being stimulated by the image in front of us.
For example, I've seen some work that suggests that from a normal viewing distance, most people can't tell the difference between 100 DPI printing and 300 dpi printing. The work it takes to make such evaluations impedes the enjoyment of the image. I refuse to get caught up in the technological evaluations, until there is evidence that it makes any difference to my enjoyment of the images.
You make pictures with film, you make pictures with digital. Does the research tell you which you would enjoy more. Most of this research ignores the most important thing. The way most are able to enjoy images depends on how accurate the image is set up to portray how the brain actually processes images. Without designing systems for the way the brain functions the technical aspects are meaningless.
One example would be corrected lenses. The brain will compensate for distortion because it's used to looking at the world through a distorting lens. Images taken with lenses that have been corrected to have no distortion can just look odd and unreal. Too much distortion isn't any better. There is a level of distortion that is acceptable, and for that type of image, not enough distortion looks odd, and too much distortion looks odd. Those kinds fo quirks of human perspective have never been addressed in any technical paper I've seen, yet they are possibly the most important things you should be looking at selecting a particular lens for a particular scene. Sometimes you look at a scene and think, I want the fisheye, sometimes you want a "poorly" corrected lens and sometimes you want a heavily corredtend lens. I've never seen a paper that defines what every photographer does every day. He goes to his camera bag and selects the type of lens he wants for the job at hand.
Until these technical papers are tailored to insight into human perception, they're reporting on less half the story, and from a photographer's point of view the least important part. If I have the the 35-80, the DFA 28-105, the SuperTak 35 3.5 and and the DA 35 in my bag. I'm going to look at a scene and know which one I'm going to use for a 35mm image. and sometimes it will be the 35-80. Untill there are technical papers that tell me why that is, they are pretty much useless.
Quote: Shoot a sunrise with Ektar and then one with a digital camera. The color transitions are smoother and although taken at the same time, the results are massively different.
I'd love to see the prints to be able to make that evaluation. So, I have to ask, what digital camera was used for this evaluation? Why do I not know of any craft show participants currently using film if it's so "massively" better? None of us seems to have any issues selling digital sunsets. You'd think if all you have to do is go back to film, some of us would have done it. Or maybe it's just a difference that's not apparent to the consumer. You'd think if it's "massively" different, some one would have caught on. I guess we are all just stupid.
I guess the people who buy our images are as well.