What is the dynamic range of your monitor or printer?

[tom b]

One of life's little ironies is that Sony may manufacture a sensor with a higher dynamic range than Canon. The problem is that neither of the today's current monitors or printers come slightly close to having the dynamic range of any of today's high end cameras.

The fact is that digital cameras have surpassed monitors and printers for quite some time! If you use traditional best practice, dynamic range is a very minor problem.

Cheers,

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

One of life's little ironies is that Sony may manufacture a sensor with a higher dynamic range than Canon. The problem is that neither of the today's current monitors or printers come slightly close to having the dynamic range of any of today's high end cameras.

Hi Tom,

Sensor DR is not the same as photographically relevant DR, and lots of scene contrast, once it passed the lens and mirror chamber's internal relections, is not all that high anymore. Just realise that the reflection of light from e.g. black ink on white paper is barely more than 7 stops of a difference. Add some light contrast and subtract internal reflections, and you may be lucky to have 9 stops of effective contrast.

Then there is tonemapping, because a full High Dynamic Range image will look dull and lifeless on our display without tonemapping. That will bring down the scene dynamic range to much much lower levels as well.

The contrast of our displays depends on the viewing conditions, but can be cranked up to levels that hurt our eyes. But hurting my eyes is not something I'd like to do for a pleasant viewing experience. Also, even a 1 bit image (Black or White) can be displayed at various contrast levels. More bits (often just 8-b/ch input) will only allow more subtle intermediate levels, not more contrast.

With printed output we are lucky to get much more than 7 stops DR (on glossy paper without ambient reflections).

Cheers,
Bart

[bjanes]

One of life's little ironies is that Sony may manufacture a sensor with a higher dynamic range than Canon. The problem is that neither of the today's current monitors or printers come slightly close to having the dynamic range of any of today's high end cameras.

The fact is that digital cameras have surpassed monitors and printers for quite some time! If you use traditional best practice, dynamic range is a very minor problem.

Tom,

You have not taken into account the difference between scene and output referred images. I don't know what you consider as "traditional best practice", but the art of printing requires (among other things) the mapping of scene luminances to what can be reproduced by the output device as Karl Lanag explaines in an excellent article. For most scenes, the DR of the Canon may be sufficient, but high contrast scenes require a high dynamic range sensor. The problem is then to map the scene referred image to what can be handled by the output device.

Regards,

Bill

[tom b]

Traditional best practice. You use a speedlight/flash, you use reflectors, you use strobes, you use tungsten lighting, you don't photograph in harsh light etc.

You can take great photographs without the need for great dynamic range.

Just ask anyone who has used slide film.

Cheers,

[hjulenissen]

Traditional best practice. You use a speedlight/flash, you use reflectors, you use strobes, you use tungsten lighting, you don't photograph in harsh light etc.

And often those things will improve your pictures as well. But what if you cannot use artificial light, and the scene is there to be captured only in a brief moment?

You can take great photographs without the need for great dynamic range.

Just ask anyone who has used slide film.

You can take great photographs with just about any camera. That is not to say that the choice of camera is irrelevant.

-h

[tom b]

Just saying, I've been looking at great photography for forty years.

The Sony fanboys seem to think that you need 14 stops of dynamic range when you can only see around 7 on your printer or monitor.

Seems more like salesmanship more than anything else. Once again photographers have been taking great images for as long as I can remember.

Cheers,

[digitaldog]

The Sony fanboys seem to think that you need 14 stops of dynamic range when you can only see around 7 on your printer or monitor.

I hate the unnecessary and dismissive term fanboy. I'm not one for Sony, don't own any of the hardware. But I'd far prefer the ability to capture 14 stops and render that to 7 IF necessary for a display or printer. Do you believe there are no scene's to capture that exceed 7 let alone 14 stops? IF you can't capture it, you can't render it to a print. Read Karl Lang's article ASAP.

[Schewe]

But I'd far prefer the ability to capture 14 stops and render that to 7 IF necessary for a display or printer.

Correct...capture wide DR and tone map to lower DR. If need be, use HDR to capture even wider DR and tone map to lower DR. BTW, this has been an issue with photography since the film days where a B&W or color neg captured far more DR than any print could ever reproduce. Not sure why digital is all of a sudden different. Likely because many digital photographers lack fundamental technical knowledge...

[tom b]

Reminded of occasional LuLa contributor's Murray Frederick's exhibition "Hector". A stunning exhibition of approximately 2x1.5m B&W images. Taken with a MF camera and inferior 12+ DR back.

What was I thinking to be blown away by his images!

Hector.

Cheers,