Pixel Peeping Part I

By Bob Atkins

Since digital cameras (and especially DSLRs) first became popular there has been an epidemic of what might be termed "Pixel Peeping". Pixel Peeping is a secretive activity practiced by some photographers in their basement and involves repeated photographing of resolution charts and grey cards, followed by manipulation far beyond the bounds of normal in an attempt to find defects in the image.  It's sort of like giving a hypochondriac their own magnetic resonance imaging machine and finding them spending all their time laying in it trying to prove that there's something wrong with them!

Now of course equipment testing is an old and well established tradition, and indeed it's something we all do at times. If some thing is wrong, it's good to know about it. The problem is that if you look hard enough and you don't really know what you're looking for, you'll probably find something.

So here's a Pixel Peeping Problem. Take a look at these two images. I've been testing quite a few cameras and lenses recently, both for photo.net, my own website and my own information. These are crops from a couple of images I shot of the same resolution test chart during the course of these tests. I'm not going to tell you anything else. I'm not going to tell you which cameras, what type of cameras, what lenses or anything else. All I'll say is that the images are unmanipulated and that they were shot and cropped to have exactly the same image scale so as to appear as identical as possible. I will tell you that I'm not "cheating" and showing the same image with different post exposure processing. They are crops from two different "out of the camera" images.

What would you conclude from peeping at these pixels? What would you say about the cameras and/or the lenses and/or the camera firmware?

In "Pixel Peeping Part II" I'll give you the full technical details on these images so we can see how accurate your peeping was!