The Fallacy of Judging Image Quality Online

Just a quick post to link to a great rant from Michael Reichmann on his Luminous Landscape site entitled The Fallacy of Judging Image Quality Online.

Whether your photography is ultimately destined for web display, or as prints, isn't the point. Both can be appropriate venues. But please, please, stop judging the technical quality of photographic equipment by looking at small web images. ...this usually bears little real-world relationship to how a photograph will appear in a print...

Photography is a pursuit that involves esthetics as well as technology. The later [sic] serves the former, and it is only when seen in the context of an image's final form of presentation that it is possible to evaluate the technology that helped produce it.

What Michael says in his article is so true! What you see on-screen is a poor approximation of what your image will look like in print - making it unfit for either evaluating gear and serious image critiques. And, whether or not you intend to display your images as prints you may find (as I have) that printing can reveal weaknesses in your image that aren't easily caught on-screen.