Kind of hard to take anything seriously after reading that. He buys a seriously expensive camera and shoots it in point and shoot size. That's just insane.
What's so hard with a simple home NAS. I replace the drive in my laptop every year for whatever is then biggest (sweet spot) and ue a NAS for backups. RAID5
"Which is Better: a 10MP camera dialed down to 3MP, or a 3MP camera?
Easy: when set to the same resolution, a higher-resolution camera set to a lower resolution always looks better than a camera with that native resolution.
This is because digital cameras cheat and use Bayer Interpolation. They don't really have that many color pixels on their CCDs. CCDs are actually black-and-white and use colored stripes to see color. Bayer Interpolation spreads the data around to fill in each pixel as if it could could see color. Because of this the images of all digital cameras at their native resolutions are more blurred than they could be.
If you halve the size of the image, the pixel-to-pixel sharpness will increase because there is now enough data for each and every pixel. See my Bayer Interpolation page for examples.
Therefore it's always better to use a higher resolution camera set down to a lower resolution than a camera with only that much resolution."
You might want to read this, it will help you understand how sensors work.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/camera-sensors.ht...
I recently compared a Nikon D3200, D5200, D7100 and a D700, all using the same (or close to same) lower megapixels count of around 10. The higher end cameras made a huge difference in quality. The lower end also could not support higher end flashes.
I own a proofing company with thousands of users, and ran a print lab for years. You don't need more than 200PPI for larger prints and thus can save a lot.
In fact, considering most people order prints 11x14 and smaller, having the larger megapixels actually hurt quality because the printers (Fuji, Durst, etc.) downsample the files and you lose sharpness if you send them the large file (which most photographers do).
For my wedding shooting, I never need a larger file than 12 megapixels as that's large enough for a 30x40 at 300 dpi. I prefer to save the hard drive space.
My point was that shooting that wonderful camera in 5mp mode is stupid.
"The higher end cameras made a huge difference in quality" - even when you down-sampled them to 5mp? And I think you're being ridiculous when you say "huge". There will be more intra-shot difference in quality than between any two modern DSLRs. The light will make far more difference to whatever it is you think is quality.
For weddings of course you don't need much. That was my point really.
You do realize right that you can put those same better lenses on the entry level canon right?
You, and everyone else, it seems, misunderstood. My point was that down-sampling to 5mp a canon 5dMkIII's images is a waste of that camera, and any entry level DSLR will produce indistinguishable images at that down-sampled level.
Also the standard for lab work is 300PPI, not 200, so I am not sure if I lend very much credibility to your comment.
Which is Better: a 10MP camera dialed down to 3MP, or a 3MP camera?
Depends on the lens. 10MP vs 3MP is one thing, 10MP vs 1000MP another... at some point you're just blowing up a fixed amount of signal, and with most lenses that point comes much earlier than one would think.
But even then, doing things like straightening or color adjustments before scaling it down looks better than doing it afterwards. That's what the camera does when you shoot in JPEG, but once that's done, it's done, no going back.
Would you buy CD, transcode it to MP3, and then throw the CD away? Maybe not all photos are that important, but sometimes you only find out where a particular one falls after some time passed.
It's all about the importance you place on the data, and your level of technical skill.
I want everything local.
Regardless, that seems a nice setup. I'm not opposed to the cloud (as long as I treat it as a dumb storage system), but it's certainly more expensive than buying your own disks.
Personally, I prefer to use both local and cloud storage (encrypted, bien sûr).
Drives/tape/flash/dvd is pretty damn cheap and easy. These S3 type solutions would have to be much cheaper to be interesting.
Besides, how do you verify that those backups can be restored when you need them, if they're offline in some remote location? That seems rather untrustworthy to me. I run checks against parity files regularly to verify their integrity.
And can you download 47GB faster than your mom can mail you a DVD?
And can you download 47GB faster than your mom can mail you a DVD?
Probably, though I'm not quite sure about the speed of S3. I use a cheap VPS instead (much more expensive than Glacier, but also much, much more useful), from which I can easily get 3MB/s, so that would definitively be yes.