As good as it needs to be?

We ponder whether cameras can be further improved.

Our photographer follows a number of websites and blogs dealing with his subject, not all of which are restricted to film.  An idea under discussion recently is whether digital cameras have gotten as good as they really need to be, and that further improvements would make no actual difference in the pictures.

It’s not a question of a lack of imagination, in the spirit of the song “Kansas City” in the musical Oklahoma, where “They’ve gone about as far as they can go.”  It’s not difficult to imagine digital sensors with more pixels, lower noise and more speed.  Lens design is a multifaceted problem in optimization, where there may yet lurk unsuspected sweet spots for modern computer programs to find.  The question is whether it would make any real difference.  Even in a large print, the difference between a 12 megapixel sensor and a 50 MP one is all but invisible, and any respectable lens will give excellent resolution across either.  Low-light characteristics already outdo the human eye.  From a technical point of view, just about any picture you can see, you can capture.  For some purposes, mostly scientific and technical, improvement would indeed be useful.  But the fraction of photographers affected is tiny.

Or is this just a matter of looking only backward, and seeing only how far we’ve come?  Silver-halide photography itself seemed a marvel when it appeared.  A painter or draftsman had no hope of locating each straw in a hay bale, and suddenly it was done automatically.  The slow emulsions used at first were improved to the point of allowing “instantaneous” photography.  The bulky view-cameras were replaced, for most purposes, by “miniatures” that could be carried anywhere.  Color film was invented and developed to a high degree.  Automatic light meters took much of the guesswork out of exposure, and the single-lens reflex design still reigns among digital cameras.

But wonderful pictures were produced at every step of the way, even by simple and cheap instruments.  None of the improvements had been necessary for the great photographers of the previous stage.  In that sense, technical excellence in the camera is a side issue when discussing photography.  What a more advanced camera does is widen the scope of possible images.  It is up to the photographer to explore it.

Although none of us is a serious digital photographer, from the results we’ve seen we think it’s likely that little is to be gained by adding megapixels, reducing noise or redesigning lenses.  Improvements seem likely, however, in the software controlling the process, both in the camera and on the computer.  And we have a feeling that too much effort has been made to reproduce the look of familiar processes (including their limitations) and not enough spent on exploring new possibilities.

But all of this is irrelevant to the vast majority of people, who only take pictures with their smartphones.