Fine vs normal?

[UUilliam]

What is the difference?
Is fine got more Anti-aliasing?
(judging by the icon being a rounded quarter circle) and normal being sharper (the icon being a sharp triangle almost?)
I tested and didn't see much difference...

 

[ANDS!]

Really depends. There is a difference in "quality", but for most applications (especially after resolution reductions), that difference is approaches zero.

However, with the cheap cost of media these days, theres really no reason to not shoot in "FINE" mode - especially if you are shooting JPEGS.

 

[musicaleCA]

The "normal" (i.e. craptacular) compression has more aliasing, and is more prone to JPEG artifacting (those nasty squares...*shudder*). There's no good reason to use it with how little media costs now.

 

[Dwig]

What is the difference?
Is fine got more Anti-aliasing?
(judging by the icon being a rounded quarter circle) and normal being sharper (the icon being a sharp triangle almost?)
I tested and didn't see much difference...

Depends on what camera you are talking about. On Nikons, the Fine/Normal option only affects the JPEG compression (and the resulting artifiacts) and has absolutely no effect on the pixel resolution. They have a separate control for resolution. Fine is equivalent of Photoshop's "quality = 10", a 1:4 compression, or about the highest quality JPEG export from most editing apps. A few Nikons have had an "Extra Fine" option equivalent of Photoshop's guality=12 setting.

With digital photography, there are two types of aliasing. One is caused by the sensor as a result of the size of the photosites relative to the size of some detail in the image. There is ususally some sort of bluring done in the cover filter (the anti-aliasing filter) over the sensor to reduce this problem. No camera setting will affect this issue.

The second type of aliasing occurs when you enlarge an image enough to cause the individual pixels to become visible. The lower the resolution of the image, in terms of number of pixels, the more likely this is to occur as normal display sizes. This is never directly affected to any significant degree by the JPEG compression. It is controled by the pixel resolution.