ranjeetrain
New Member
Short answer: Perceived difference between a photo posted on internet from a small-fine and a large-fine/basic is negligible/zero. Because the detail is not lost. It's like camera doing the resizing work for you prior to saving on the card.
Long answer: You have a valid point. But there are many good reasons to shoot small-fine.
- Small files - In this digital era, a typical user clicks 200 photos a day when out for shooting. In early digital camera days, files were 300kb to 3MB. Now most DLSRs generate 10MB plus files. Shooting small helps all the way from shooting to posting.
- Faster writes - You can use even a class 4 card and still get fast frame rates.
- Faster preview - Less or negligible lag with small files when you preview them on camera. With large photos you do experience lag while previewing, even with fastest cards.
- Faster transfer - Its irritating to connect your camera and sit through it as it transfers files over USB. (Its different in case of direct card access, but in that case you lose many functionalities the Camera software provides).
- Faster editing - If you like to edit photos (even simple task such as watermarking, adding vigenette, frames), editing is much faster with small files. With large files you need a graphics optimized computer to edit photos without experiencing lag.
- Faster uploads - This part is most irritating for me personally. 5-8 times upload time with large unedited pictures, compared to small-edited pictures.
- Less storage needs - You only fill a hundred MBs instead of a few GBs per day.
- Faster retrieval - Any user who has been using digital for longer than a year or two, ends up with 100s of GB of files. Needless to say, you don't keep them in your primary storage such as the main HDD of your machine (Desktop/Laptop). You would generally park them elsewhere (NAS/Optical disks/Portable USB disks etc). When retrieving photos from storage, small files will load much faster. Please remember: the speed of retrieval doesn't depend on the read speed of storage media/device here. It depends on the slowest device in the chain (Network/reading speed of the display device, such as wireless photo frames, DLNA capable TVs, DLNA capable media clients, streamer, uPnP capable handheld devices, iPhone, iPad, Android clients, Tablets).
- Cleaner images - Small files saved by camera are less noisy in most conditions other than very good light. Very good for users who won't edit their files.
Output/Percieved difference? Negligible! In fact, I find small edited files to have better sharpening, sizing, aspect-ratio to have than non-edited files because you are paying attention to the individual photos with human intelligence, not using software intelligence to upload photos to Flickr/Picassa using a software.
BUT, for the users who will take the files to editing table, they should always shoot Large (to make use of maximum resolution, as you pointed out). Even better is to shoot RAW. But, if you do shoot raw, you must be good with editing as RAW files benefit a lot from good editing skills.
Hope that helps!
I may have touched more areas than you asked for. But that was to add clarity to the discussion.
