How good is the digital zoom for printing out A2 prints?

[appleman]

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I've been a Leica devotee for many years. I currently own the SLR1 with the 2 prime zoom lenses and I am in the process of selling my 3 M lenses having already sold my Leica M. Now, because of my aging eyesight I am considering buying the Q2. My question is how good is the digital zoom for printing out A2 prints?

[Jared]

10 hours ago, appleman said:

I've been a Leica devotee for many years. I currently own the SLR1 with the 2 prime zoom lenses and I am in the process of selling my 3 M lenses having already sold my Leica M. Now, because of my aging eyesight I am considering buying the Q2. My question is how good is the digital zoom for printing out A2 prints?

Not sure which camera the SLR1 is... Do you mean type 601 SL?  And you mentioned the two prime zoom lenses. The SL has three available zooms (16-35, 24-90, and 90-280) as well as five primes (35 ‘Cron, 50 ‘Cron, 50 ‘Lux, 75 ‘Cron, and 90 ‘Cron). Which two lenses do you have? And please describe your photography a bit. That will help us give you the best possible answer.

As to the Q2... Assuming you want to print on A2 paper without any interpolation, I would try to avoid the digital zoom or use it sparingly. Obviously, the nature of the photograph and the viewing distance will have a lot of influence as to what is acceptably sharp, so it isn’t an absolute. If doing street photography I would probably be comfortable using the 35mm crop, for example, but probably would avoid the 50mm. If printing a landscape for a gallery, I would try to stick with the 28mm field of view with only very slight cropping in software.

Edited October 11, 2020 by Jared

[appleman]

Good questions Jared, I should have been more specific. Yes, a 601 with 24-90 and 90-280 used for landscapes mainly, brilliant lenses and brilliant camera but cumbersome hence my interest in the Q2.  And thank you for your advice on the digital zoom.

[KenBennett]

The 28mm lens gives the entire ~47 megapixels. Even the 50mm "crop" gives 16 megapixels. I have many large prints from 16mp cameras that look great. I finally gave up worrying about printing sizes several years ago when our designers printed one of my stitched pano images, shot with a 16 megapixel Fuji body, 10 feet by 40 feet, as a backlit transparency. It looked great from a distance, and it looked impressive from a few feet away. Given the quality of the Q2 images, I would have no qualms making large prints. 

Your best bet might be to download some raw files from the Q2 and make some prints. You can crop the raw file yourself and see if the resulting prints meet your expectations. That'll save $5K if you don't like them

[Jared]

4 hours ago, appleman said:

Good questions Jared, I should have been more specific. Yes, a 601 with 24-90 and 90-280 used for landscapes mainly, brilliant lenses and brilliant camera but cumbersome hence my interest in the Q2.  And thank you for your advice on the digital zoom.

Mostly landscapes. Got it.

Much if the story telling in a typical landscape image is in the details. You’re going to want to hold as much resolution as possible—much more so than if you were printing portraits or street photos or even architecture shots. I think I’d still be comfortable printing A2 with the 35mm crop, but don’t think I would want to go to 50 or 75. Of course, if that’s the only way you can make the image you want, so be it, but I would try to find compositions that work well at 28mm as much as possible or 35mm.

Now, if you were talking street? Or environmental portraiture? I’d tell you to stop worrying and just choose the perspective that tells the story.

[Stuart Richardson]

You should be able to get away with A2 prints up to the 50mm, if you keep the ISO lower than 1600 or so. But it is unlikely they will look as good as the SL1. If you are used to the 90-280, you will definitely not be able to achieve that with digital zoom on the Q2...at least not to A2 with good quality.

[appleman]

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Thank you Stuart for your comments. No, I don't intend to print A2 using the Q2 comparison with the 90-280. I don't want to "get away with it" either and I won't be using the Q2 for landscapes. I was just curious about what the limits of the Q2 processor were. Thanks.

[appleman]

15 hours ago, Jared said:

Mostly landscapes. Got it.

Much if the story telling in a typical landscape image is in the details. You’re going to want to hold as much resolution as possible—much more so than if you were printing portraits or street photos or even architecture shots. I think I’d still be comfortable printing A2 with the 35mm crop, but don’t think I would want to go to 50 or 75. Of course, if that’s the only way you can make the image you want, so be it, but I would try to find compositions that work well at 28mm as much as possible or 35mm.

Now, if you were talking street? Or environmental portraiture? I’d tell you to stop worrying and just choose the perspective that tells the story.

Jared, thanks again for your input. Stuart has made similar comments. Maybe I will try some "edgy" street photography. Cheers.

[vedivv]

Back in the old days, I printed plenty A2 size landscape from 6MP cameras.  I had to use a program upsample before printing, but they were fine for reasonable viewing distance.   I have also seen plenty large landscape prints from 35mm films.  Cropped to 75mm in Q2, you still more pixels than 6MP.  There are also machine learning based program for enlargement.  

[4peterse]

Not much to add to what others have said before in this thread. Just some numbers for your reference (if I didn't completely miscalculated):

At 35mm crop you still have 30 Mpx and 280 dpi at A2

At 50mm crop you have 14.6 Mpx and 200 dpi at A2, which should still be ok

At 75mm crop you have just 6.5 Mpx and 133 dpi at A2, quality wouldn't be very good.

[jaapv]

15 hours ago, 4peterse said:

At 75mm crop you have just 6.5 Mpx and 133 dpi at A2, quality wouldn't be very good

Which could be amended to OK using proper resizing.

[nicci78]

Just use Gigapixel to resize 50 and 75mm crop photos 

[vedivv]

There plenty AI based enlargement algorithms that 4x or 8x enlargement are pretty usable.  Gigapixel is great.  I have also used this site (there is a free version to try): https://imglarger.com/

I have printed plenty 6MP photos (and scanned 35mm film) to A2 size, without AI resizing.  If you play around with printing medium, you can get good results.

[jaapv]

The point is, that even if the camera has not recorded some fine detail, due to lack of resolution, the enlargement software will preserve acuity when uprezzing. The viewer wil not notice the lack, unless in a direct comparison.

[colint544]

I was recently asked to made an A2 print of an image I'd shot in the city. It had been made on a Ricoh GR3, and was a crop of about three quarters of the frame. The print looked stunning, and the guy who bought it was over the moon with it.

The GR3 has a much smaller sensor, and only half the megapixels of the Leica Q2. I think you'd be absolutely fine to crop heavily into an image from the Q2, and still get superb A2 prints from it.