It is becoming a popular passtime among some photographers these days to bemoan the increasing dominance of web-based advertising and the slow death of print, especially magazines. Some are even suggesting to throw out the very high resolution cameras and replace them with 2 or 4 MP models, with the justification that you won’t need more than that for a web-dominated future.

Although I agree with the trend away from high-resolution, that is not the whole story and not a reason to sell your 30MP camera for a 2MP model anytime soon. This seems like another case of an author trying to appear prophetic (although he is about 20 years too late in this case to be prophetic and too early for the article to apply in the real world).

Even if print used to comprise 90% of your work and by 2010 it will only comprise 20% (for example) you will still need the extra resolution for that 20%. You would not want to abandon high-resolution unless the cost of having more resolution exceeds how much you are making from it.

Personally I don’t think print will die in our lifetime any more than TV killed off radio, although like radio I expect it will become a niche rather than the dominant medium. And although the current figures for magazines are not looking good, my mailbox is still filling up regularly with printed catalogues and other junk mail, printed in high resolution.

Even if an image is targeted at the web, many clients would prefer that the image be produced at high-res to give them flexibility in future should they decide to go to print.

Even if e-paper does take off, and there’s a good chance it will, I expect that it will have to be higher resolution than 72dpi, to make text really crisp. Same goes for computer monitors – how long will it be before we have smaller pixel pitches for sharper text and images? I can easily imagine extreme resolution screens taking off before too long. So the screens won’t necessarily become much larger but the pixels will be a lot smaller. Instead of HD’s 2 MP resolution, with half the pixel width and height they could be 8 MP screens, or with 300dpi rather than 72dpi (but same screen size), that would result in 34 MP.

Whatever resolution the medium will be, you will always be happy to have extra resolution to support multimedia zooming, or plain old cropping.

And with bayer filter arrays on our sensors, images always look more detailed when downsampled properly, so an 8 MP camera will give you a better 2 MP image than a native 2 MP camera, all else being equal.

So it seems there are good reasons for shooting in high res for some years to come, and if high-resolution screens take off soon enough, high-res will have a healthy future. Or perhaps, like cars which can do 250kph in countries with speed limits of 100kph, people will always get extra resolution for nothing more than the fun of it!