Sony alpha A55

[alphaomega]

mike2008 wrote

I've come to the conclusion that pixel-peeping is pretty much dead. All the cameras are good for IQ. The fundamental limit is the user, just like it was for film. If you make the camera fun and easy to use as well as light and small with great IQ then it's a successful camera. The fact is upsets a few people who totally fail to produce any real eveidence about IQ issues matters not a jot.

For the general users probably yes. It's a long time ago any new digital camera DSLR or P&S could satisfy any 7x5 print user. My main interest in retirement is to photograph for Alamy. I have just been out with the venerable LX2 10Mp and this camera can produce acceptable images as long at I use ISO100. When I use my A550 I can probably go to ISO 800 or 1600 without a problem. I have made the point before that if my telephoto zoom in use cannot produce a sufficiently large target image I will need to upsize and the more the better to have a larger sensor. When I do architecture I often need to use the lens distortion filter extensively leaving to a lot of cropping. For these purposes I would favour the A580 16Mp sensor. In fact, if the 18Mp rumours are true, I would probably wait for an A700 update as long as my lenses could do justice. Maybe the ultimate APS-C size is 16Mp and beyond that the lenses cannot cope. Time will show. The point is that some of us have special requirements and I for one will not invest in FF although that would be an option for the W/A issues.

[agorabasta]

Pixel peeping will never die. It will simply shift to peep at things more important than noise. After all, you can always appreciate the quality of some 16bit per channel 40+ Mp MF image even after it gets reduced to screen resolutions. So we'll resort to arguing about things like tonal fidelity, plots of spectral DR against spatial frequency, transitional edge response fidelity and so on... Just ask yourself, why the skies/clouds look so much better in a900 captures as compared to those from a700 and why it's all quite opposite in the shadows?

Current digital imaging quality is still very far from true perfection, lens quality notwithstanding.

[Dusty]

Agorbasta, I've been looking a lot lately at a bunch of photos for a website I'm designing, and I can tell you that, working with HUGE (10800 x 7200) 24bit TIFFs, I have no need to pixel-peep! I can, however, complain about the over-all quality of photos taken!

Harsh shadows on group portraits when you could have used bounce flash (I can see the white ceiling). Taking a shot of a gray item on an overcast day with lots of sky behind it, and not using fill flash to light the people.

I think I should have done the photo shoot. The company could have rented me a 900 and lenses and saved a bit of money.

Yes we'll always have some quality issues, but digital has come light years in the last 5 years, and in 5 more there won't bee too much to complain about!

Dusty

[catalytic]

I think we'll be complaining about video. There's lots of pain points there that have yet to be resolved...

[agorabasta]

Yes we'll always have some quality issues, but digital has come light years in the last 5 years, and in 5 more there won't bee too much to complain about!

As once a state-of-art tech reaches maturity, it also becomes cheap thus finding its way into lowly commodity stuff. It universally happened so to all kinds of once-upon-a-time high-tech products in history. (E.g. manuscripts->printed books->pulp fiction )
If the current type of digital imaging tech is really approaching the maturity point, you may expect a total degradation of cameras offered to general public consumption.

If then the lens design and production also gets automated by cheap enough means, only the Leicas of this world may survive in this business... Or they may not.