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More is Better

I agree with Sven-S. Porst in his rebuttal of Dave Weinberger (who thought his 2.1 megapixel images were 830MB) on the issue of whether to capture larger images or smaller images from a digital camera.

I've always taken my images on the highest quality setting available. I think of it as insurance. CD-Rs are cheap enough that if I run out of disk space, I'll offload some images. But the insurance? You never know what you'll need an image for in the future - it could be a 24" x 36" poster - get and save as much information as possible now.

Once you lose data, it's gone. You can compress, but you can't go the other way.

2 Responses to "More is Better"

  1. The MB rather than KB was a momentary lapse in an otherwise unblemished record of total rightness and accuracy. ... Um, sure. But I actually do know the difference between the two.

    That aside, I agree with you. The one drawback is that shooting large does cut down the # of photos I can put on my datastick before having to upload 'em.

  2. Speaking as a photographer...buy a 2nd (or larger) card. I shoot w/ a Canon 1Ds with RAW + simultaneous small JPEG for editing. I get ~70 images to 1 GB. I generally cary 3.25GB on me when I'm shooting, and I'll often have my Powerbook in the car so that I can download images and free up a card. Granted I'm probably shooting more than most people, but w/ the price of storage dropping so low, there's no reason that Canon Powershot camera can't have a 512 or 1GB CF card.