Digital BW, The Print

Thought I\u2019d add my two cents.

For the last six years or so I have been using a Sony a900 and a Zeiss 24-70, the expensive, high end zoom.

I make up to 16x20 B&W landscapes that are heavily manipulated with regard to tone. I have found this setup barely adequate (briefly had an Olympus, while transitioning from film to digital, which was a complete joke of a toy) and have often had to make compromises after manipulation had caused the image to start to crumble. At the time I bought it, the Sony was the only affordable full frame sensor available.

Since Sony has decided they will no longer make optical viewfinder full frame cameras, I have had to abandon Sony (equipment is for sale on ebay) and switch to Nikon. It did not take me long to realize that the Nikon is far more useful for my purposes and though the Nikon image can crumble too, manipulation potential is far greater than I could ever achieve with the Sony.

My conclusions are that one needs at least a 24megapixel full frame sensor (full frame is an absolute must), 36MP being preferable. The camera must not have a low-pass, anti-aliasing filter which should have been called a \u201cseverely blur all of your photographs\u201d filter. (What a difference!) Having to sharpen every image because of this \u201cfeature\u201d causes considerable information loss before you do anything else to your images. Fixed focal length lenses help a lot, even considering the most mediocre of them, as compared to the very best zoom lenses. They are also cheaper. I now have six single focal length Nikon lenses purchased used for about $400 less than one Zeiss zoom initially cost me. And a major contribution to image quality is also accounted for by the advantage of Nikon\u2019s 14 bit color depth as opposed to SonyR17;s 12 bit depth. Don\u2019t dismiss is. The difference is critical. Images are much less manipulatable when only 12 bit.

If you are NOT going to fold, spindle and mutilate your B&W images the way I do, then I would say the minimum requirements would still be 24 MP, no anti-alias filter (they are a stupid idea under all circumstances) and 12 bit depth will do you just fine. High quality zooms would be OK, too.

With film, no matter how much you manipulated your image when printing, you still had 100% of the information contained in the negative and could continue to manipulate, ad infinitum.

With digital, every time you do anything at all to your image, part of it evaporates. The more you work on it, the more it crumbles.

So, your sensor size, megapixel count and bit depth must provide enough information overkill that you can afford to throw a lot of it away, and still have a good image, OR, you must settle for very little manipulation.

Bear in mind that there are thousands of people out there who will insist they take all their photographs with their iPhones and get results just as good. Brain surgery with a spoon is also possible.