Aroid Close-ups With Kodak DC-120

My major consideration in choosing the DS-120 was its great resolution: 1280 by 960 pixels. I figured out that not only this was plenty enough to make a startup screen for a 21-inch monitor, but also if I get something not quite in focus, scaling the photo (which would have to be done for WWW publishing anyway) will bring back the sharpness. As it turns out, the image sharpness provided by the camera is not that great if I use the medium quality of the snapshots, so I ended up scaling most everything.

I set up a couple of pages in response to some questions about the recommended techniques of using a digital camera for close-ups that I saw floating around on the aroid-l mailing list.

All sample photos in these pages are of Amorphophallus muelleri. In retrospect, I should have picked something with tiny, small details. Perhaps when the next aroid bloom pops up, I'll replace all photos with something more convincing. In any case, note that the featured portion of the A. muelleri petiole is about 3/8 inch thick (actually, more like 7/16"), so most of these photos are enlargements.

Note that if you want to see any differences among the photos on these pages, it is entirely useless to view them in the 8-bit color setting. You really need a monitor capable of displaying thousands of colors, and a 24-bit color setting is is highly recommended.

Contents

Since there are a number of photos showing comparisons among various settings and situations, and the files are rather large, all topics are separated into their own pages, with the exception of the first one.

• There are four possible levels of quality of the image stored in the camera...
• ...but how do they translate to the quality of the final image?
• How can we ensure the snapshots are really in focus?
• What are the best lighting conditions?
• The camera is neat, but there are some flies in the ointment...
• What JPEG compression to chose for the WWW page?

Quality of the image stored in the camera

The quality of the image stored in the DC-120 can be set to one of four levels; this setting can be done individually for each consecutive snapshot. Here is a table illustrating all of them; no compression has been used, so they may take a while to load. The photos below are small snippets of much larger ones (each is about 1/25 of the area of the full-sized photo). They all have been taken under mid-morning sun at 8.6 inches distance from the subject.

My conclusion: for enlargements from extreme close-up, either of the two best quality settings should be used.

Low quality. This fits 20 photos in memory. Note the rather bad aliasing at the left edge of the stem and fuzziness in the middle. Image size: 22.8kB.	Medium quality. This fits 12 photos in the memory. The aliasing is still there, but not as severe. I take most of my photos at this quality level. Image size: 26.7kB.
High quality, fits 7 photos in memory. Somewhat better, but not that much. Image size: 26.7kB.	Lossless - clearly best of all of them, but fits only 2 photos in memory. I would use it only for photos to be shown in full size. Image size: 28.4kB.

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Copyright © 1997 Krzysztof Kozminski