shooting for the web

[zenman]

Hi guys,

I did a a search on this forum for "web" and I was surprised there were no results - I thought this would have been a faq, or at least a beginners question:

for simple P&S shots that will be used on web pages [blogs, etc] is it better to use a lower resolution or higher? On one hand, shooting with the lower resolution results in smaller file sizes, so in theory the camera should respond quicker [see my other post about time between shots] and you may even be able to skip a step of resizing the shots to fit on the page later anyway.

OTOH, is there some details that render better if the original was at a higher resolution and then scaled down later?

[nemesis256]

In my opinion using a lower quality setting is asking for trouble. What if for some reason you wanted a bigger size? What if the shot needs to be cropped? If it's bigger you can crop it and still have a large image. Storage is so cheap, so that shouldn't be an issue.

As far as the time between shots, I get a feeling that P&S cameras automatically set images to a lower quality setting if using burst mode. If you're not talking about using burst mode, that's just something you'll need to find out by trying out different cameras.

[CapnJack]

Zenmen- I'm new here too, but welcome.

I prefer to shoot in as high resolution as I can. However, you will probably want to "derez" the image for posting on the web. I like to match the resolution to that needed by the final product (like a power-point presentation) after I have taken the shot.

I agree with the reasons given by Nemisis256. I also prefer RAW but I'm biased because I used to work with microscope imaging- the lossy compression from JPEG could cause artifacts, especially when doing math on the images.

[OsmosisStudios]

Always shoot as big as you can. Especially with P&S cameras.

[zenman]

thanks for the thoughts, guys.

I did a little experimenting last night and I found that there was no discernable difference in time taken after the shot for the camera to be usable again between the smallest and largest sizes.

I did run into some other problems though, but that's for another thread...