SWAUG REVIEW: Nikon Coolpix 4300 on AMiGA

[SWAUG]

SWAUG.org.uk has a look at the Nikon Coolpix 4300 Digital Camera in our latest review.

We review it's picture-quality and reveal how well it works with the Amiga.

Goto http://www.swaug.org.uk/support for the full review.

[minator]

Interesting review, the image quality is pretty good, vastly better than my camcorder in camera mode.
There is noise on the images but mostly in dark areas where they take on a specled look rather than being randomly coloured.

One point mentioned is that images from the previous 1 MPixel cam looked blocky when blown up for printing, this can be fixed however - increase the DPI of the image and this will smooth out any blockyness, even for low res images.  Will also work on high res images but cafeful with memory - you'll need anything from 40MB *upwards* for a single A4 image.

Note: I use 300-600 DPI for printing (Photoshop).

[Erwin-K]

Many (most?) Amigans who use Amiga image processors for working on digital camera images will not even know what DPI (dots per inch) means.

Resolution is resolution. Unless some piece of hardware is hardcoded to require the DPI data it is irrelevent.

Because of its legacy connection to the printing industry Photoshop keys everything around the DPI setting. (You change the DPI and your printed size changes.) I just load the image into TurboPrint & make it the size I want.

That camera sounds very Amiga friendly. I'll have to check if it is available in the U.S.

[minator]

Resolution is resolution. Unless some piece of hardware is hardcoded to require the DPI data it is irrelevent.

The resolution gives the resolution but the dpi determines the size it's displayed at.
It's simlar to sampling rate for audio, a sample is meaningless if you don't know the sampling frequency.

If it's not on Amiga software it's an important missing feature.

[Erwin-K]

I've seen this discussion run back & forth more than once on the ImageFX mailing list.

People with long held ties to the professional printing industry see it as essential. Many (most?) who came to Amiga graphics from any other direction tend to hold DPI as less important, or even a hinderence.

Personally I think DPI is about as important as an 8.3 file name restriction. Just one more parameter some programs with a perfectly good GUI want you to wrestle with. I'll take an image and print it how I want to, not at the size a DPI setting dictates.

Perish forbid, but I'm even going to mention the Evil Empire. AFAIK, no M$ Office application requires DPI data. And yes, I've seen lots of people at work stretch images until single pixels are the size of small postage stamps.

DPI may be important to desktop publishing programs that prepare files for printing service bureaus. To me anything else is unnecessary.

Sure a sample is a sample, but a player program that has to be told the sample rate before playing is just poor coding. Does your JPEG viewer demand to know what rate of compression you used to save the file?

[minator]

Personally I think DPI is about as important as an 8.3 file name restriction. Just one more parameter some programs with a perfectly good GUI want you to wrestle with. I'll take an image and print it how I want to, not at the size a DPI setting dictates.

You seem to think it's a useless feature but it's anything but - but I agree thet how it's implemented is far from perfect, especially in Photoshop, but then Photoshop hardly has a perfect GUI - I don't like the way it handles DPI settings.

If people don't know the benefits of it they'll not see any point, if you print a 1 Mpixel image is it blocky?  I wont because I'll up the DPI before printing and that'll smooth out the blockyness.

You can do the same without a DPI setting by upping the resolution to 3K X 4K and that'll have the same effect (assuming the scaler is a good one).

Sure a sample is a sample, but a player program that has to be told the sample rate before playing is just poor coding.

All sample programs have to know the sample rate before playing a sample - it's in the header of the sample fine.  An MP3 player has to know the bitrate to play an MP3 correctly.

If you mean you shouldn't have to type it in I agree, but it's there none the less.

I mentioned samples specifically because if you have a sample at say 8KHz (the old Amiga standard) it'll be horribly noisey due to quantisation noise.  If you resample it to 44KHz it'll smooth out the noise, there is no more information in the sample but it'll sound a lot better.  This is exactly the same as what I'm doing with images for printing, DPI in this case is the tool that allows me to do this.