I am seriously considering selling my Nikon gear as the Sony, in particular, fulfills 95% of my needs. The iPhone also does an amazing job in so many other ways. While my creative passion is still there, I now realize how misplaced my desire for the highest possible IQ was compared to my needs. I’m not making colossal prints, so have little need for 36mp. I’ve come to realize just how much of that desire was spawned by pixel peeping on screen compared to the reality of where prints are hung and how much more significant emotional attachment becomes when selling prints. In reading equipment reviews today, one might just wonder how any good photo could have ever been produced back in the film days with such diminished DR, lens quality, accutance and resolution!
Thanks to all the tech wizards of today, the RX-10iii just about does it all as well as any 35mm film or even 24mp APS and FF today - at least in the context of what I do - photo books and prints up to 17” - and the iPhone isn’t far behind!
Yet I seem to be going the other way, I too thought that 'pixel power' was an overhyped concept and it is the art of the shot that is more important than anything else and that all the famous and well known work from the past, is really low-res by comparison to even the cheapest cameras theses days and even some phones. Yet here I am using a 42mp chipped Sony with uncompressed raws and stitching together ridiculously large panos, that at native 300dpi resolution will comfortably print out at over six feet in length and often quite a lot more.
I suppose how it now works for me is, that if I get an image that I feel has something artistically satisfying within it (and hopefully for others too), then I also want it to be of a far higher resolution and size than anyone could ever want including myself. So what I usually tend to do these days, is after arriving at a scene I want to photograph, is take the
'artsy' single shots or series of shots, then take the
'OMG look at the size of that and the amazing detail within it' type of stitched pano shot.
But hey, everyone to their own as they say, it is just that there is something about super hi-res shots and being able to go into the detail, that is just so addictively satisfying, that it has me well and truly hooked I am afraid.
Yet I cannot see the point MFD, as it now looks to me to be so unnecessarily expensive and unnecessarily heavy in comparison to the hi-res Sony chipped sensored cameras available today. And don't get me wrong, I am no Sony fanboy, as you will know if you have read any of my rants against the camera over the last couple of years, but the sensor they built into it is just so amazing, that I have learnt to forgive just how annoying the rest of the camera and the menu system can be.
Dave