It’s over. My infatuation with pocket digital cameras is done. I was in love with my Canon Powershot SD700 for the first two days, but once I got to know it better, the only thing that grew was my contempt. I returned it to Glazers this afternoon.
Robin commented, "It’s over, huh? That was fast. You were so in love with it at the beginning. I’ve had relationships like that."
At first, I was captivated with a different interactive relationship of a camera with the world—watching the pictue compose on the back of a tiny TV screen, and gleefully capturing scores of them. But it was in the "what do I do now" phase that disillusionment set in.
All digital captures need work once you’ve imported them. A digital photo never looks as bad as when you first see it during the ingest phase. With RAW, every interpretation is up for grabs, and you’re not committed to any of it. You can change your mind at any time with no cost to the integrity of the file. With jpg capture on a small camera, you’re looking at a tiny fraction of the data to begin with, and any edit thereafter is a destructive one.
I’m so enamoured with a RAW workflow at this point that jpg seems like a huge bother. You mean I have to open up Photoshop to do anything to make this image look decent? And I have to save the file under some other name if I want to change my mind later?
Then there’s the quality. I set my camera for the highest quality settings possible. Even so, when I zoomed to 100% on the screen, I saw lots of funky compression artifacts that I wasn’t used to. What is this camera good for, I thought? Blog photos maybe. But what else?
I’m used to carrying around my 5D all the time anyway. I have a little red Swiss Army backpack that makes it easy to shuttle it about during my daily routine, and a padded chamber on my bike rack so it can come along for the ride. The fling is over, and I’m back with my committed partner.
"You can change your mind at any time with no cost to the integrity of the file."
This isn't a property special to RAW files, but just to your workflow. Adobe needs to get its act together, and give us lossless editing in Photoshop.
In the meantime, Adobe Lightroom lets you use the same workflow for jpgs as for raw images.
(There are other alternatives, but none with as good a workflow. For a jpg-only workflow, Picasa is a simple lossless editing program, but certainly not as functional as Photoshop.)
Posted by: Anonymous | July 24, 2006 at 09:33 PM
Ha, I have to admit I go through similar 'stages' where I leave my 5D at home and slip my P&S in my backpocket, only to wonder why it's not as fast, wide, sharp, and awesome as it's SLR counterpart. Curious, do you use a battery grip as well? How's the fit in the Swiss Army bag?
Posted by: Jimmie | July 24, 2006 at 11:09 PM
For me, the real world is prints, not an image on a computer screen at 100% magnification. A 6x7 negative at comparable magnification doesn't looks so impressive either. I can get absolutely beautiful prints up to 11x14 from a 3 year old, 4MP Canon G3. I think you would have been surprised at the quality of prints you could have gotten from your little camera.
Posted by: John Roberts | July 25, 2006 at 06:57 PM
You might try the panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1. It shoots raw.
Posted by: | July 25, 2006 at 07:04 PM
John,
I did make prints from the jpg files, and they took some radical layering to achieve anything reasonable. The histogram looked like a comb with a lot of missing teeth, and you could detect a difference in the look of the print. Nothing can compensate for the artifacts from a compressed format. If I had no contrast to prints from my 12mp RAW captures, I might have thought they were OK. But they were inferior.
Posted by: Doug Plummer | July 25, 2006 at 09:08 PM