On image quality, digital, and consumer concern

[Ed Eubanks]

Lance Ulanoff, writer for PC Magazine, has posted an interesting op-ed piece on the PC Magazine website (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1822953,00.asp). Basically, he suggests that the average consumer doesn't care about image quality.
I have to agree with him; why else would the talk around here-- and the actual demonstration of higher quality that so often occurs by LF enthusiasts, among others-- be met with so little genuine concern?
What do you think-- is Ulanoff right?

[Mark_3632]

I think the guy is mighty full of it.

I don't understand this statement you made:

"I have to agree with him; why else would the talk around here-- and the actual demonstration of higher quality that so often occurs by LF enthusiasts, among others-- be met with so little genuine concern?"

[David A. Goldfarb]

Sounds about right to me. With instamatic cameras, 110, disc cameras, disposables, consumer negative film, drugstore processing, etc., convenience has long been more of an issue in the mass market than image quality.

But that doesn't really have any effect on what I do.

[Sal Santamaura]

Why make that observation image-specific? It would be better stated in the general case:

"The average consumer doesn't care about quality."

[Brian Vuillemenot]

Let's face it, we live in an instant gratification society. The vast majority of people are concerned with getting things quick and cheap, at the expence of quality. Large format photography is about inconvenience- it takes years to master the equipment and techniques, large sums of money for equipment, dragging around 40 lbs. of gear, getting up two hours before sunrise, etc. Although mastery of the medium is in reach of almost anyone, very few indeed have the persistence and dedication to pursue it, especially when it comes at a cost of missing the latest reality show or football game on TV. Another factor is that most people don't notice the difference in quality becaouse they look at photographs and other artistic works with the same passive disregard as they watch TV or movies. In other words, just a casual glance without really thinking about what they're seeing. Of course, a major cause of this is that relatively few people have ever probably seen a large format photograph, and really don't have any idea of the difference.

[Ted Harris]

Let’s not forget that the consumer photo world is a very different world. Of course he is right, perhaps even more right than he knows. In his article he states “This is not to say that if they were shown images (moving or still, in side-by-side tests) or played audio in stereo and then in 6.1 surround sound, they couldn't tell the difference.” When it comes to Walmart/Ritz Camera/Drug Store photos I am not sure they could tell the difference. For starters they are looking at very small prints, 3.5x5 or 4x6 usually. At that size it is even difficult (not impossible but difficult) to tell the difference between some properly exposed and printed LF images v. similarly handled 35mm or high quality digital images.

In fact, the issue may not even be “telling the difference” but more does the image adequately capture the moment? I, like many of us, carry around a shirt pocket 3.2 megapixel digital camera (it replaced the Olympus XA which I carried for years and which in turn replaced a Minox). They are for snapshots, to record a moment, to take a picture of the box that DHL destroyed or a precious family moment, etc. They have little to do with my professional work. Granted, when I was still carrying the XA used better film than the average consumer and most of the time processed it myself. I say most of the time because my wife and family used to bitch about looking at contact sheets and I didn’t want to bother to print each and every frame ..... so, yes, I admit it, sometimes I would drop those rolls off at the local drugstore or super market for the cheapo processing and prints, just like any consumer. I saw the difference sure but that wasn’t what was important as the writer points out.

Final note, there are times when you can tell the difference, even in small prints, and when consumers will notice. This past winter I was selling my notecards at a Christmas Fair, which I often do. Only difference here was that there was another photographer selling notecards on the other side of the hall. I could see everything that was going on at her table and watched closely for a couple of hours. Best I could tell she sold one 8x10 print and no cards at all. I sold 20 + boxes of cards, 5 8x10’s and took several more orders of additional larger prints. I have known this photographer for years; she has an eye,she has ‘soul’ but she shoots in 35mm and digital exclusively and doesn’t go to the trouble to make sure her images are as sharp as possible. My cards are almost all from 4x5 and 5x7 with a few from 6x9 so I am printing reduced images and I make very sure each one is a little gem. Since it wasn’t the difference in subject matter and the pricing was about the same (although again I marked smarter, presenting cards in boxes with envelopes and she did not) I have to assume the quality difference was bringing the consumers my way, or at least some of them.

[paulr]

"there are times when you can tell the difference, even in small prints, and when consumers will notice"

There's a big leap between noticing the difference and caring so much that you're willing to make great sacrifices for it.

Anyone who isn't deaf can hear that a great stereo sounds better than a cheap one. But most people would still rather have their ipods. And of the ones who do actually covet the fancy system, only a small number will consider it important enough to actually shell out the $$$, even if they're able.

I fully sympathize. It's obvious to me that a giant plasma t.v. looks better than my cheap tv that I bought over 10 years ago. Do I want one? Maybe if one fell off a truck outside my house i'd take it. But I wouldn't pay much money at all for the difference. It just doesn't matter to me.

The sacrifices in money, time, and frustration I've made for image quality makes sense only because i'm a photographer. Photography is one of the few things that i've chosen to focus on. Why would i expect everyone else to share the same concerns?

[Ted Harris]

paulr -- as usual we agree completely! In fact I am smiling at yoru analogy cause I feel the same way about th emonster plasma tv's. In fact, while far from a luddite, I don't even own an iPod.

The critical point IMo is that "only a small number will consider it important enough to actually shell out the $$$, even if they're able." When we are talking the small consumer prints v. what we sell (oro print or purchase froma commercial lab) we are talking not jsut incremental differences in price but differences in (usually) several orders of magnitude in price.

[David Luttmann]

Sal,

You're right on the mark. For the average consumer, a 3MP or 4MP point and shoot is all they need for their 4x6 or 5x7 prints. Remember, these are people who think 8x10 is huge. The average consumer does not need the higher 11, 12, 17, or 22MP sensors as of late, nor do they need MF or LF scanned on an Imacon or drum scanner.

I remember printing a 16x24 from my first DSLR, a Canon D30. It ended up being a 72 DPI file and people who saw it were "amazed at how sharp & detailed" it was. I remember thinking that they need their eyes checked. Now prints at 16x24 from my 1DS look reasonable....and my customers are thrilled. Being that the customers are basically paying for my lights and the mortgage payment, I now shoot digitally for all my portrait, wedding and location/commercial work. My personal "landscape/fine art" work is done on MF & LF because I care about the quality. For everyone else, the 11MP sensor has proven "good enough."

It's the same when people compare their drug stores prints to silver or high end inkjet. They don't realize what they are missing until they are shown.

Regards,

[Eric Brody]

The camera is but a tool. It can be used by a some to make beautiful images that clearly qualify as fine art; it can be used as a tool of journalism, and of politics as well. Many of my friends are not at all interested in any of the above. They want to have memorable images of their travels, their family, their children. That defines their quest for "quality."

One's choice of tool, eg large format vs point and shoot digital (I have and enjoy using both), depends on the results desired. Woodworking tools can be used to build a home, a brick and board bookcase or to fashion a carving that also qualifies as fine art.

All that matters is that the tool does the desired job. While some of us enjoy photographic tools for their own sake, (and I'm one of these), I do not feel the same way about woodworking tools. To me a hammer is just something with which I often hit my finger, while my 4x5 camera...

Eric

[Steve Hamley]

Paulr,

I completely disagree! I'd love to have the biggest, best, monster plasma screen TV I could get - if it fell off the truck; I'd sell it and get a 7x17...

Steve

[David Luttmann]

"To me a hammer is just something with which I often hit my finger, while my 4x5 camera...

Eric"

Eric,

I can identify with the hammer.....but have you ever dropped a Mamiya RB67 and tried catching it with your big toe? ;- ()

Cheers,

[paulr]

"we are talking not jsut incremental differences in price but differences in (usually) several orders of magnitude in price."

And we're also talking about a fundamentally different use of photography--at least I think most people here would agree.

Mark Twain described the U.S. and England as two countries irreperably divided by a common language. The same might be said of fine artists, commercial photographers, and my aunt Pat, who all happen to use cameras. This sharing a common medium actually contributes confusion, because it leads to the silly assumption that everyone's up to the same thing. My aunt is looking for memories; the commercial guy is selling something; the artist is expressing whatever she's expressing. They all likely have different expectations of the medium.

But I promise that our ideas of "quality" -- really, how a picture looks--will be a lower priority for someone like my aunt, for whom the camera is one of many accessories to her life, than it will be for the other two, for whom photography is central.

[Neal Shields]

Juran, who basically invented modern statistical quality methods said that: "Quality is what the customer perceives"

I don’t think that it is that the consumer doesn’t care about quality but that many consumers are using different criteria to measure quality than we are.

Grandma thinks that a 5 meg shot of little Johnny is higher quality than an Ansel Adams print hanging in the museum.

Her criteria for judging the quality of a print is does it or does it not have her favorite grandson in it.

A 5 meg digital camera does a LOT of things better than my 8x10 Deardorff loaded with 100 asa Tmax.

I just took an old friend out to watch me shoot an 8x10 of a bridge. He just made two major purchases. A 6 meg digital SLR and a $400 8X10 B&W contact print from a local artist.

He is tickled to death with his digital camera but knows that it doesn’t capture anywhere near the information that my 8x10 does. He says that it is cheaper, faster, quicker lighter, and if he takes a picture he doesn’t want, he just erases it and takes another. He has already seen the pictures he took and I am going to wait till I take a few more to mix up chemicals.

It was also 90 degrees in the Texas sun and we used a cart to drag my gear about a quarter of a mile down the river. It then took me about 30 minutes to shoot two shots and then drag the gear back to the car. All the while he was merrily snapping away with his new digital camera. (I didn’t make a convert to large format.)

Beyond the convenience of capture from a practical standpoint, for most people final image quality is going to be governed by their computer screen, the Frontier printer at their local photo store or a scanner and or ink jet printer.

In all of these cases, no mater what camera that they shoot with, the final print will be lucky to exhibit detail beyond 6 lp/mm.

In the case of the Fuji Frontier, even if someone uses the best cameras lenses, film and techniques, the most stable tripod, the most flexible cable release and waits for a lull in the wind, they are going to have a digital photograph taken of their film and the final print will be printed to 300dpi.

What I believe that the average consumer doesn’t either care about or doesn’t understand or both; is information capture.

There are a lot of people out there that think that they can capture as much information with a 6 meg SLR as they can with 35mm film. (Hand held they might be right with the obvious exception of dynamic range.) I attribute this to deceptive marketing.

The reason that I care about how much information a camera system can capture is that I only take pictures for the sake of taking pictures. The only thing that I can not synthesize is information. Everything else only requires (as engineers are fond of saying) “time and materials”.

If I want the acutance of a digital photo from film I can scan it into Photoshop and sharpen it till I can’t stand to look at the screen.

However, if I don’t capture the information there is nothing I can do in the computer or darkroom to get it back.

[Ken Lee]

"Basically, he suggests that the average consumer doesn't care about image quality."



Not long ago, the average person couldn't read or write - but that never stopped inspired poets from writing.

[Al Seyle]

I see the same very old (older than I am) adage is still alive and well---"The Masses are Asses".

But of course don't count me as among the masses. After all, I want the best quality cameras, lenses, car, TV, clothes, house, furniture, . . . . ad infinitum.

:^)

[Bruce E. Rathbun]

If quality is indeed on the decline why is platinum palladium so much in demand these days?

-Bruce

[fred arnold]

"... why is pt/pd so much in demand these days?"

Probably because it has a certain look, caused by the different tonal scale, color of the image, and quite frequently the brushstrokes and minor coating marks at the edges, which means that it bridges several worlds at once. Photograph, yet hand made; recent image, yet timeless feel to the process. I'm willing to bet that if you took a good image with a digigizmo, made a careful internegative, and made a good pt/pd print, then people would be less concerned with the first stage of the image-making chain, and suitably impressed by the final product. I love cyanotypes from the 4x5, but I have a couple of images from a 3mp digi that except for a bad printer (they were test shots, so I used the office machine) look just fine on small-format cyanotype on paper with a touch of tooth to it. It's all a matter of matching the subject to the format to the final print.

All formats offer some trade-off of image quality versus equipment convenience (and versus cost; I love large transparencies, but the thought of schlepping an 8x10 up a mountainside, and paying for the color transparency materials for it, is rather forbidding to me), but I think the point of the article, is that the average consumer has fallen off the end of the quality cart entirely. One can argue about the times that having a quick, small, camera allows you to have the image at all, and thereby makes up for the lack of total information, but people who put up with cellphone-quality images indifferently printed have abandoned even that level of reasoning. That's the depressing part. I am not bothered by the well-reasoned tradeoff ("i am unlikely to print larger than 11x14, and wish to be able to respond more quickly than LF will allow"), but I am by the attitude of "eh, it works and I don't have to think about what I'm doing, so who cares if it's fuzzy with blown highlights and a 45 degree horizon".

Maybe it's time to ensure Arts education in the schools, or otherwise work to popularize our art/craft, so that people learn to appreciate, look for, and expect quality.

[Ed Eubanks]

Mark-- what I meant was that, though we (the LF enthusiasts) are quick to profer a demonstration of the better quality of our work (or at least the potential of better quality), the average consumer seems not to be able to care less.

Ken-- interesting analogy with poets; but you presuppose that the taste or ability for detecting image quality is improving, while I would suggest (and I believe Ulanoff would agree) that it is actually on the decrease.

[Ken Lee]

Ed -- I agree with you. When the ancients wrote their inspired verses, Reading and Writing was reserved to a small group - there was no trend underway to educate the general public. I never suggested that the tastes of the general public are improving, but that if you're an artist, you make your art, regardless of whether people accept or understand it. It's an old story.

[Steven Barall]

People just want to see a picture of their kid and they want the camera that's easy to use. People are busy and don't have time to examine their prints under a microscope.

Kodak used to say that the average person used one roll of film a year. They would get a camera for Christmas and use that one roll for that Cristmas morning, family birthdays and then Thanksgiving and then buy another roll for the following Christmas and have that original roll finally processed

Do you think that there are professional race car mechanics out there right now hanging around the forums section of professionalracecarmechanics.info complaining about all of those stupid photographers who drive to and from jobs in cars that don't have 500 horsepower? I mean really, how can you possibly shoot a job in a car that doesn't get 500 horsepower?

[paulr]

Don't forget the stylist on the set, waiting til the photographer gets back into his Chevette ... "can you believe he buys his clothes at the Gap??!!"

[QT Luong]

If your goal is not "fine art", there is absolutely no need for image quality.

[Dan Fromm]

QT, not to quarrel or anything, but much of the time accurate representation is enough for me. That requires, often, better image quality than I can produce.

Cheers,

Dan

[tim atherton]

"but much of the time accurate representation is enough for me"

accurate representation of what?

I presume you only use colour film for starters...

[paulr]

accurate representation requires that 19th century process that shows people's auras.

[Dan Fromm]

Black/white too, Tim. Some at magnifications above 1:1, where the working ain't easy and depth of field is almost always less than needed. Current project is to make publishable photos of the distal ends of poeciliid fishes' gonopodia for descriptions I have to write. Magnifications in the range 5:1 - 10:1. Given the objects' sizes, 35 mm is fine, using a larger format gains nothing.

I view much of what I do as technical photography. When shooting color, the colors have to be right. In color and b/w, the fine details have to be discernable, ideally clearly visible. This is why I made the great leap upwards, from 35 mm to 6x9, for relatively static subjects.

paulr, about auras, I've never seen any and I doubt they exist. Aurora borealis, yes, personal auras, no.

QT, I don't aspire to be a fine artist. Competent technician would be enough. If I were to be a fine artist, I'd be closer to the F64s than to the pictorialists. Why do you think that image quality is of interest only to fine artists?

[paulr]

"paulr, about auras, I've never seen any and I doubt they exist. Aurora borealis, yes, personal auras, no."

come on man, you're harshing my buzz.

[David Luttmann]

"come on man, you're harshing my buzz."

Thanks for that Paul. I nearly choked to death on my morning coffee!