Luminous Landscape Forum
Site & Board Matters => About This Site => Topic started by: fike on November 17, 2008, 09:54:18 pm
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When I read Michael's update today about the DXOMark site, I was pretty excited, but after just a few minutes at the site messing around with all the sliders and nifty flash gadgetry, I was left kind of bored.
Is this it? Is this what photography has been reduced to?
That word "reduced" seems to be what everyone is shooting for. We want to reduce cameras down to one number, one rating, a top ten of a sort.
Top to bottom, image quality is becoming a business of analyzing a gnats @ss of variance. Michael comments about what one is to make of a 0.1 difference between two cameras. NOTHING.
We needed tools like this 4 years ago, but today they become more noise. Everyone is always trying to fight the last war...fight the last battle. In my opinion, DXOMarkis a tool that would have been great to fight the first round of the DSLR wars.
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I don't completely agree. Yes, there is still way too much pixel peeping going on these days, but if nothing else, DxOmark should provide some facts to turn down the heated debate of late about increasing pixel density. We've had a number of people arguing for a long time that increased pixel density is nothing but marketing hype, and others who have said that they aren't seeing the noise problems they've been told to expect. It's great to see some effort to finally analyze that question rigorously. I find that useful, and current.
Sure, some people might obsess over that single sensor number on DxOmark, but they could have just as easily obsessed over pixel count before, or frame rate, or any other silly thing. Ever heard of the great debate over the relative merits of Xenotars and Planars in Rolleiflex TLRs from the 50's? And it's not like we don't have any reviewers to tell us about the other important characteristics of new equipment. I rely a lot on Michael's valuable insights on camera handling, for example. Plenty of other sites are available to talk about purely artistic considerations.
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Perhaps (hopefully) the greatest contribution of DXOmark is to draw attention to something else than megapixels. If camera manufacturers start using DXOMark in their marketing hype, that's so much better than pushing out yet another high-mp camera.
Not to say that DXOMark is the end-all of objective sensor quality metrics, but it certainly is more rigorous than a mere megapixel count.
Buyers are always welcome to ignore such measures, and go for ergonomics, FPS or weather sealing.
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We want to reduce cameras down to one number, one rating, a top ten of a sort.
We don't need to to that since digital cameras already _are_ numbers, and there is no possible discussion about that. A different story is Photography, which is an art and as such can never be expressed as numbers.
So IMO the new site is the closest one to the real camera we can find now on the Net.
BR
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I think criticising a quantified test generally as inappropriate reduction of photography or pixel peeping misses the most important point. There are essentially two useful ways to approach the matter of equipment testing:
- Evaluation based on competence and trust. Someone who you consider competent and skilled gives you a subjective opinion. What you can gain from such a test much depends on how well the tester's and your priorities and view of things comply.
- Evaluation based on scientific method. Key element here is what is commonly called intersubjective verifyability - a testing can only be called scientific if it can be reproduced independently by others. This requires the used procedure to be documented in minute detail. Therefore the scope of such testing is usually limited to very few properties of the equipment (like sensor properties in case of digital cameras).
The problem about DXOMark to me seems that for falling into the first category their competence is not too widely accepted (most would consider an experienced photographer they know much more qualified). For the second category their method is not described well enough to actually assess its reliability. Don't get me wrong, it seems lightyears better than what you can find on dpreview but still not something i would put trust in.
And i think this is a bit of what Michael tries to address with his closing remarks - if there is a minute difference between the rating of different cameras you would need to know precisely how these numbers were determined to be able to interpret their significance.
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I think my issue is with the fact that the seem to reduce the camera to a few properties of the sensor, not the whole camera system. For example, I don't see any measure of a camera's ability to resolve detail. My guess is that they would consider resolving power as a property of the camera sensor AND LENS, but to me that is the camera system. Without looking at all the parts from lens and capture through post-processing (if any) to printing.
It is like judging the success of a person's life by their SAT scores (college admission exams) instead of by the composite of their life's work and achievements.
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Top to bottom, image quality is becoming a business of analyzing a gnats @ss of variance. Michael comments about what one is to make of a 0.1 difference between two cameras. NOTHING.
It's amusing that there is a 0.1 difference between the D700 and D3 which use the same sensor.
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It's amusing that there is a 0.1 difference between the D700 and D3 which use the same sensor.
Not amusing at all. Could be explained in various ways. One is sample deviation. Not sure how DxO deal with this. Other reason might be differences in the off the chip circuits.
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So far nobody has inserted a Ken Rockwell phrase
lol ;-)
Being dead honest, I take these numbers with a pinch (bucket) of salt. Esp the dynamic range ones..10.1 stops on a G9, right..ok..cough cough..
And these 12 stops DSLR's have printable IQ do they? I suspect not. Most of the tests I have seen involve pulling around the image both ends, so much so that even a 6"x4" would be pushing it.
I can appreciate that with cameras, there will always be an element of testing, and the like. However, really we are going a bit too far with this.
I therefore declare that site to be.."of little importance in the real world"
There was a time you would go to the shop and grab a few cameras, play around and the feel of one would just fit you, and you bought it. Aaaah back when life was simple..
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I think perhaps some folks have missed the whole point of pixel peeping. It's not so that we can get excited about small differences and make purchasing decisions based on such small differences. It's so we can ignore such differences, remove them from the equation and concentrate on more relevant factors such as availability of good wide-angle lenses, autofocus accuracy, bracketing options etc etc.
In order to determine whether or not differences in performance are significant, someone has to do the testing, and hopefully as precisely and rigorously as possible. Subjective appraisal is just too variable.
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I think perhaps some folks have missed the whole point of pixel peeping. It's not so that we can get excited about small differences and make purchasing decisions based on such small differences. It's so we can ignore such differences, remove them from the equation and concentrate on more relevant factors such as availability of good wide-angle lenses, autofocus accuracy, bracketing options etc etc.
In order to determine whether or not differences in performance are significant, someone has to do the testing, and hopefully as precisely and rigorously as possible. Subjective appraisal is just too variable.
If that is what you are up to, then great. I think that is fine. I think what I object to is when people use it to justify hyperbolic statements of superiority or inferiority of a particular camera of preference.
It's the system baby. From the brain, down the arms, through the lens and camera to the paper. Everything matters. And everything matters differently for different people and applications.
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It's the system baby. From the brain, down the arms, through the lens and camera to the paper. Everything matters. And everything matters differently for different people and applications.
True! But it's difficult to change one's arms and brain. Changing the camera is easy. With brain and arms the same, differences attributed to the camera can be spectacular, provided one skips a few upgrades.
On the other hand, one could go along with Ken Rockwell's hypothesis that the camera doesn't matter. One could spend a few years studying art, composition and lighting techniques, and then also take spectacularly improved images with the same old-fashioned camera. Such improvements could then be attributed to the brain and arms rather than the camera .
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The Nikon 40Dx beats the Canon 40d in color depth by 0,3.
Does that mean the colors of the Nikon D40 are better? Or even equal? Is color depth all that is to color? Isn't there also how colors are interpreted and recorded?
I see those guys measure a Rembrandt and a Picasso and then judge the artistic quality by the color depth of the paints those masters used.
If this low-end numbers ranking persists, manufacturers may choose to build cameras that fare well in tests that can be understood by Joe Blow, but don't deliver a truly aesthetic image quality.
Image quality is a matter of definitions.
DXO sensor reduces it to a couple of technical data.
Compare: what satisfactory work Ansel Adams could do with the older films with the thicker emulsion. He mentioned it in his book "The Negative", that modern films, with their thin emulsions, did not offer the same kind of aesthetic quality that his older, less advanced films had.
This is a comparison, and I guess you know how it's meant.
You could build a camera that records in maximum color depth, but gives unpleasant colors.
And the data would still show it's the top camera. That's the danger of the numbers game.
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I'd rather read a review of a knowledgeable and aesthetically educated photographer on how a camera performs in that photographer's work.
For this you need education and knowledge and a lot of experience.
Pixel peeping can be understood by Joe Blow, it can also be done by Joe Blow.
Let's hope we won't get any Joe Blow cameras out of this.
PS: Safari crashed three times visiting that site.
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Is this what photography has been reduced to?
That word "reduced" seems to be what everyone is shooting for. We want to reduce cameras down to one number, one rating, a top ten of a sort.
(...)
DXOMarkis a tool that would have been great to fight the first round of the DSLR wars.
I agree.
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0.1 is a negligable difference!
DXO is reporting results of stringent testing based on "raw" data, in my book that is a good thing. Most test results reported are for JPEG, which I never use.
I'd suggest that the tests are informative.
Best regards
Erik
Not amusing at all. Could be explained in various ways. One is sample deviation. Not sure how DxO deal with this. Other reason might be differences in the off the chip circuits.
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Image quality is a matter of definitions.
DXO sensor reduces it to a couple of technical data.
Compare: what satisfactory work Ansel Adams could do with the older films with the thicker emulsion. He mentioned it in his book "The Negative", that modern films, with their thin emulsions, did not offer the same kind of aesthetic quality that his older, less advanced films had.
This is a comparison, and I guess you know how it's meant.
You could build a camera that records in maximum color depth, but gives unpleasant colors.
And the data would still show it's the top camera. That's the danger of the numbers game.
There are plenty of definitions at the DXOMark website. What's your problem? You don't like an over all assessment expressed as a number? If you think there is some important quality of the sensor that DXO is not measuring, tell us what it is. Pleasantness of color is not a property of the sensor. The undeveloped RAW image does not have any colors. It's all data. Colors exist in the mind. What may be a pleasant color to you might not be to someone else. Getting pleasant colors is presumably what you try to do when you convert your RAW file and do postprocessing in Photoshop. If you want very accurate colors, then it's usually necessary to calibrate your camera.
The point should be stressed that DXO is not making an over all assessment of camera systems, but of camera sensors. The sensor is analagous to the old-fashioned film. I've still got a folder containing information on the properties of various types of film, which I downloaded years ago from the manufacturers websites. It includes not only the spacial frequency properties of the films, but curves for spectral dye density, and spectral sensitivity. For example, Provia 100F has greatest sensitivity in the blue layer.
In the early days of Kodak DSLRs, which were ridiculously expensive, it was suggested by at least one manufacturer that it might be possible to build a camera with a replaceable sensor. Instead of buying a new camera every couple of years as sensor technology improved along the lines of Moore's Law, one would just buy a new sensor. Nothing came of the idea for very good reasons. New cameras contain all sorts of improvements in addition to improved sensor performance, which are useful in their own right.
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Well, it seems that Apple needs to do some homework on "Safari", doesn't it? And yes, Firefox has also issues.
Erik
PS: Safari crashed three times visiting that site.
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Well, it seems that Apple needs to do some homework on "Safari", doesn't it? And yes, Firefox has also issues.
Erik
Erik,
I think you'll agree, these are side-line issues and people should recognise them as such. The question is, are the DXO results accurate? If anyone thinks they are not, then let them provide the evidence. In the absense of contrary eveidence, this is all idle speculation.
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Pleasantness of color is not a property of the sensor. The undeveloped RAW image does not have any colors. It's all data. Colors exist in the mind. What may be a pleasant color to you might not be to someone else. Getting pleasant colors is presumably what you try to do when you convert your RAW file and do postprocessing in Photoshop. If you want very accurate colors, then it's usually necessary to calibrate your camera.
Colors exist in the mind?
So what? Anything that exists in the real world exists also in the mind, expressed in the mind's way to comprehend, understand, and categorize things, putting them into relations to other phenomena.
So what you say is without any sense.
Or did you intend to say "color exists (only) in the mind"?
That would be less than having said something bearing no sense. It would be wrong.
Of course, color is what we call a certain sensation, when reflected light of a certain wave length hits our retina. Depending on that wave length we can see it in different colors, or, like infra red, we can't see it at all.
The same goes for a sensor. Instead of a retina being connected to a brain, it is connected to a computer chip and records the light data in zeros and ones.
If there would not be a strong correlation between light of a certain wave length hitting the sensor and its being categorized/interpreted as a certain color, color photography, and especially color management would be impossible.
Of course, sensors can be built with different sensibilities, just as lenses can be built sharp or cheap.
I do not have the impression that DxoSensor does any in depth analysis how color is seen by a sensor.
PS: it is also wrong to say a RAW file doesn't contain any color, just data.
It's data about color, even though easy to edit. Any RAW file will tell you what color a person's face is or what a color a car has. You just have to process it, knowing from which camera it came, so you can interpret the data about color, and you know what color it is. That's a part of color management.
Data, that cannot be linked to something tangible or concrete, is worthless.
In the same vein you could say that there's no music on a CD, just data.
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Sorry Ray,
You are absolutely correct. Regarding the main issue my view is that:
- DXO results are created with significant care.
- Their methods seem to be based on proper math.
- To reduce all data to a simple DXO mark is a bit to simplicistic in my view.
In general I'd suggest that DXO's data are by and large consistent with other tests. There is actually very little measurement data published which are based on raw images, except those by gentlemen Panopeeper, Glujik and others who publish on this forum. The fact that DXO publishes data produced under consistent conditions is a very good thing.
The data from DXO seems to indicate that there is less development in technology than what we may have believed. Their finding is essentially that noise on the pixel level did not improve at all the past five years. The improvement in technology went into increasing picture density. DXO also point out that significant improvements have been achieved in raw image processing, they state that the DXO engine of today has 4 dB less noise than the early versions.
DXO has done a great effort to present data in an easily understandable format.
Erik
Erik,
I think you'll agree, these are side-line issues and people should recognise them as such. The question is, are the DXO results accurate? If anyone thinks they are not, then let them provide the evidence. In the absense of contrary eveidence, this is all idle speculation.
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I would want to look at real world results myself. Numbers and charts on a website don't tell me anything about the image quality anyway.
I don't see a lot of value in the results, not unless they are backed up with samples you can see.
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Colors exist in the mind?
So what? Anything that exists in the real world exists also in the mind, expressed in the mind's way to comprehend, understand, and categorize things, putting them into relations to other phenomena.
So what you say is without any sense.
Or did you intend to say "color exists (only) in the mind"?
That would be less than having said something bearing no sense. It would be wrong.
Sorry I wasn't clear. The sensation or experience of color exists only in the mind and such experience varies amongst individual humans, sometimes greatly in the case of people who are described as being color blind, and sometimes more subtly. Some people involuntarily experience a particular color when they hear certain sounds, letter or numbers. It's called synesthesia. Would you say that someone who experiences the sensation of red when he/she sees the letter 'A' could objectively claim that the color red is a property of the letter A?
It's data about color, even though easy to edit. Any RAW file will tell you what color a person's face is or what a color a car has. You just have to process it, knowing from which camera it came, so you can interpret the data about color, and you know what color it is. That's a part of color management.
Data, that cannot be linked to something tangible or concrete, is worthless.
In the same vein you could say that there's no music on a CD, just data
I think you are failing to distinguish between colloquial langauge and scientific language. The music CD is a good example. It contains data which can be transformed and interpreted through a complex chain of processes to produce music. Whether you will like the quality of the sound cannot be determined from an examination of the data on the disc or from an examination of the recording properties of the disc, because the fidelity of the resulting music is dependent upon the quality of the CD player, the quality of the amplifier, the quality of the loudspeakers, the positioning of the loudspeakers in the room, the positioning of you, the listener, in the room, and the acoustic properties of the room.
Data, that cannot be linked to something tangible or concrete, is worthless.
We have no knowledge of data that cannot be linked to something tangible or concrete. They only becomes data when they are linked to something tangible.
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Sorry I wasn't clear. The sensation or experience of color exists only in the mind and such experience varies amongst individual humans, sometimes greatly in the case of people who are described as being color blind, and sometimes more subtly. Some people involuntarily experience a particular color when they hear certain sounds, letter or numbers. It's called synesthesia. Would you say that someone who experiences the sensation of red when he/she sees the letter 'A' could objectively claim that the color red is a property of the letter A?
I think you are failing to distinguish between colloquial langauge and scientific language. The music CD is a good example. It contains data which can be transformed and interpreted through a complex chain of processes to produce music. Whether you will like the quality of the sound cannot be determined from an examination of the data on the disc or from an examination of the recording properties of the disc, because the fidelity of the resulting music is dependent upon the quality of the CD player, the quality of the amplifier, the quality of the loudspeakers, the positioning of the loudspeakers in the room, the positioning of you, the listener, in the room, and the acoustic properties of the room.
We have no knowledge of data that cannot be linked to something tangible or concrete. They only becomes data when they are linked to something tangible.
Where are you going with this? This all makes little sense.
Why don't you first plan what you want to say, and then say it?
If you have nothing to say, like in this post, why say something and just keeping up an attitude, just to appear to be right?
I think you are failing to distinguish between colloquial langauge and scientific language.
What does that mean? Whenever you say something that doesn't make any sense, I have to understand it that you were using the language "colloquially"?
Poor, little trick. If you say something, that doesn't make sense, you can tell the other party:
"Oh, it was only meant colloquially."
Would be a great means for politics: " I promised to not raise taxes? Read my lips: I was talking colloquially, and not meaning it"
We have no knowledge of data that cannot be linked to something tangible or concrete. They only becomes data when they are linked to something tangible.
So you took something I said about data having to be linked to something tangible or concrete in order to be of value, and reformulated it, but in such a convoluted and cloudy way, that you destroyed any sense. What kind of debating style is this? It doesn't add anything, only destroys meaning.
Well, to set things straight for a last time.
Data is information written down by obeying certain rules. If you haven't gotten those rules, you can't read the data, but it's still data.
E.g. For many centuries it was impossible for European scientists to read Egyptian Hieroglyphs. All those texts in the several ancient, Egyptian writing styles can be called data. They were data even before they could be read/deciphered.
In 1799, during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, the Rosetta Stone was discovered. On it, the same text was written in ancient Greek and in two kinds of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, hieroglyphs could be deciphered because of the known part, the ancient Greek text.
Now the data could be read, deciphered.
So, data is data, no matter if you can read them, or not. It just makes sense only when you know the rules for the deciphering.
Data is just a general term, the most general. The data on a music CD is generally data, but it is also music (in the same way as music is music when it is written down on paper in the form of musical notes. So your whole blabla about the transformation process doesn't add any information here, but it avoids the question you were pretending to treat.
You see, that's with all your posts. A lot of faking knowledge and faking arguments, without giving anything worthwhile.
You're just wasting my time.
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You're just wasting my time.
And you're wasting mine. Sorry I responded.
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You have chosen to ignore all posts from: Ray.
I'm sure I missed out on some very touching derailment.
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What? Afraid Ray might have had the last word?
Yet another thread that should be closed..
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I'm very amused at such antics . Why would anyone deliberately announce to someone that he/she is, henceforth, going to ignore them? I ignore whole threads if they don't interest me. I do not feel compelled to announce to the world that I am hereby going to ignore a particular person, thought, idea, philosophy, discipline, race, religion, whatever.
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Has anybody read and has opinions about that article:
http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/nikon_test/test.htm (http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/nikon_test/test.htm)
It claims that the Nikon bodies are applying some kind of raw noise reduction before saving the raw file, and thus reduce also the kind of details that can be captured.
Thus, comparison of noise levels becomes irrelevant.
Cited also on this site:
http://www.photo-lovers.org/fpsensor.html.en (http://www.photo-lovers.org/fpsensor.html.en)
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What? Afraid Ray might have had the last word?
Yet another thread that should be closed..
It's because of ignorant blabla guys like you and Ray that message boards are overcrowded with useless texts, in short: misinformation.
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It's because of ignorant blabla guys like you and Ray that message boards are overcrowded with useless texts, in short: misinformation.
Yours are no better.
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Not nearly as good, in fact.
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Hi,
While I consider the DxO mark as a single figure of merit somewhat dubious I find that there is a lot of good analysis of the sensors. They have not yet published data on the D3X but the 5DII test seems to show a one EV advantage for the 5DII over the A-900 and that's consistent with Michael Reichmann's observations although Michael doesn't have a lab.
Another point is that DxO shares this information, much appreciated, at least by me!
Erik
When I read Michael's update today about the DXOMark site, I was pretty excited, but after just a few minutes at the site messing around with all the sliders and nifty flash gadgetry, I was left kind of bored.
Is this it? Is this what photography has been reduced to?
That word "reduced" seems to be what everyone is shooting for. We want to reduce cameras down to one number, one rating, a top ten of a sort.
Top to bottom, image quality is becoming a business of analyzing a gnats @ss of variance. Michael comments about what one is to make of a 0.1 difference between two cameras. NOTHING.
We needed tools like this 4 years ago, but today they become more noise. Everyone is always trying to fight the last war...fight the last battle. In my opinion, DXOMarkis a tool that would have been great to fight the first round of the DSLR wars.
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I'll leave this thread open as long as people immediately stop the personal attacks.
Otherwise, goodnight Irene.
Michael
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When I read Michael's update today about the DXOMark site, I was pretty excited, but after just a few minutes at the site messing around with all the sliders and nifty flash gadgetry, I was left kind of bored.
Is this it? Is this what photography has been reduced to?
That word "reduced" seems to be what everyone is shooting for. We want to reduce cameras down to one number, one rating, a top ten of a sort.
Top to bottom, image quality is becoming a business of analyzing a gnats @ss of variance. Michael comments about what one is to make of a 0.1 difference between two cameras. NOTHING.
We needed tools like this 4 years ago, but today they become more noise. Everyone is always trying to fight the last war...fight the last battle. In my opinion, DXOMarkis a tool that would have been great to fight the first round of the DSLR wars.
Sounds like you had expectations that were way too high. I found the site to be mildly interesting in that it seems to confirm what I and others have subjectively seen. Ultimately, I think it's a tech site for technical folks who are always searching for the definitive (Lol), artists couldn't give a isht. Tech sites, including DxO, can't determine quality, creative or otherwise, only you can. Again, I find this useful info but not definitive. I'd much rather hear from artists using these tools and read about their experiences with them.
You can give an artist any tool and they can use it to make a great artwork. (The rest will admire their great tools)
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Please don't forget that scientists gave us the tools that artist use.
Erik
Sounds like you had expectations that were way too high. I found the site to be mildly interesting in that it seems to confirm what I and others have subjectively seen. Ultimately, I think it's a tech site for technical folks who are always searching for the definitive (Lol), artists couldn't give a isht. Tech sites, including DxO, can't determine quality, creative or otherwise, only you can. Again, I find this useful info but not definitive. I'd much rather hear from artists using these tools and read about their experiences with them.
You can give an artist any tool and they can use it to make a great artwork. (The rest will admire their great tools)
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Please don't forget that scientists gave us the tools that artist use.
Erik
Exactly! If one wants to take the attitude that the camera doesn't really matter and that even a Holga can produce interesting results in the right hands, one should not forget that the Holga is still a product of centuries of photographic development, careful observations in physics, chemistry and optics, and the application of a sophisticated manufacturing processes.
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Exactly! If one wants to take the attitude that the camera doesn't really matter and that even a Holga can produce interesting results in the right hands, one should not forget that the Holga is still a product of centuries of photographic development, careful observations in physics, chemistry and optics, and the application of a sophisticated manufacturing processes.
No one said cameras don't matter (or scientists for that matter), heck, the artist and scientist can be the same person as history has shown. The point is, pick a tool and spend your time being creative.
I'm a fan of progress and technology but I think too many people on these forums obsess over the technical details. I find it humorous that many photographers seem to think that if they just get the new camera X, they will finally produce something interesting. (being able to print it bigger won't make it better either)
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being able to print it bigger won't make it better either
Conversely, being able to print larger does not detract from the artistic merits of an image, either. Sometimes, improving technical quality improves artistic qualities.
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(being able to print it bigger won't make it better either)
Actually, I disagree on that point. Bigger can be better. If it wasn't, there'd be no reason for me to use a wide-format Epson 7600; there'd be no reason for artists to paint on large canvasses; there'd be no reason for people to use large, widescreen computer monitors or buy large, widescreen TV sets.
When a print or presentation is large, whatever qualities it has, artistic or otherwise, can be more readily appreciated.
My stitched view of the Himalayan mountain range at dawn, at a print size of 2ftx6ft, is just magnificent. I think it would be even more magnificent if I'd been able to use a 5D MkII instead of the old 5D .
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Actually, I disagree on that point. Bigger can be better. If it wasn't, there'd be no reason for me to use a wide-format Epson 7600; there'd be no reason for artists to paint on large canvasses; there'd be no reason for people to use large, widescreen computer monitors or buy large, widescreen TV sets.
When a print or presentation is large, whatever qualities it has, artistic or otherwise, can be more readily appreciated.
My stitched view of the Himalayan mountain range at dawn, at a print size of 2ftx6ft, is just magnificent. I think it would be even more magnificent if I'd been able to use a 5D MkII instead of the old 5D .
As the thread drifts off topic.
Print size is a very interesting thing.
I was at the Barbican Capa/This is war exhibition last week.
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/even...ail.asp?ID=8029 (http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=8029)
There were some very large digital prints from the Iraq war there which were quite spectacular but would have been pointless if small. The "subject" in these images was actually quite small as a proportion of the overall frame, not terribly different in physical dimensions on the final print of the subject of many of the smaller prints, but the subject was surrounded by large areas of sand, sea and sky. Quite effective in a large print.
And technologically very interesting too. I was it really struck by the difference in the 1930s prints from Leica and Rollei 6x6 as compared to these huge 24x36?? modern inkjet prints. Blowing up those old negatives would not have worked to give the same effect at all.