Image Quality, Size and Sharpening Overview

Image Quality, Size and Sharpening Overview

The 2500 provides three options for controlling how an image will be captured and how it will be processed. The first option is about image quality. The term "image quality" is a little misleading here, because we all belive that the quality of the lens and the quality of the film (for film camera) dictate the quality of the resulting image. In digital shooting, there are more factors. Each captured image will be stored on a Compact Flash (CF) card. To save space, images are compressed. This compression is a lossy one. More precisely, once an image is compressed, some details captured by the camera sensor will disappear permanently. The loss-of-detail rate is proportional to the memory saved. This is the main reason that the 2500 gives you a choice between high image quality (less loss-of-details) and low memory consumption (high loss-of-detail). See Image Quality for the details.

The second option is image size. This option permits a user to select the "size" of the image just like you can order 3×5, 5×7 and 8×10 prints from your negatives. Of course, a smaller size image requires less memory; however, a smaller size image records less details. See Image Size to learn more.

If the transition between a light area and a dark area (i.e., the edge between two areas) is made clearer, we will have an impression that the image is sharper. Therefore, emphasizing the border line between a light area and a dark area becomes a popular in-camera software tool, and is usually referred to as sharpening. Technically, image sharpening includes more image processing tricks; however, "emphasizing borders," or edge sharpening, is the most basic one. The 2500 in-camera software provides several image sharpening levels. See Image Sharpening for the details.