I see nothing silly about the reference to a V-6 with two plug wires off. If you have 8MP available and you force the camera to only shoot at 6 or 4MP, it's taking away 25 to 50% of the camera's potential performance just like pulling engine plug wires. You get a shot with 75 to 50% of the capability of the camera then compensate with Genuine Fractals to falsely bring the resulting file back up to what it could have been originally. Pull two plug wires and you get 75 to 50% of your engine's capability, you still likely get to your destination, but you had to push the gas pedal down farther to keep the same speed.

Children, children … behave. This is a public forum. You two wanna go at it it, pick guns or knives and go outside. Arguing opinions is, well, senseless. Opinions are like butt-holes … everyone has one and most of them stink.

When we're talking about a file size that might be 1MB larger to capture your camera's full resolution and hard drives are 1 Terabyte today, I still don't see the point.

You clearly verify my statement of stubborn minimalist with the following phrases: I do not fall for myths, what some "know-it-all" preaches, my approach... is purely practical, I know... what stupid is, do not tell me... that you fell for the myth, some "experts", maybe nobody told you that, prove your point, prove to me, subscribe to your myths, I will stay down to Earth, etc.

So here's how it really is with resolution, minus any conversation about sensor size and pixel size.

An 18MP shot can be post-edited 50% to provide a 9MP final product. It has been said in every single photographic magazine since the beginning of digital still cameras (these were film-oriented mags for decades before digital) that no digital camera would ever reach the level of quality of 35mm film until the digital cameras would output files of a minimum of 11MP. I like to shoot with about 1/4 to a maximum of 1/3 of the photo being an area surrounding the real subject so I have room for reshaping with cropping. That means a 16MP file from my camera is going to give me a cropped post-edited finished product that is about 10.5 to 11MP - maybe 12. That is ideal - according to not just some single wacko "expert" spreading myths but the whole photographic knowledge-base community at large - to print the ideal 8X10 without interpolation.

Apparently you haven't heard that interpolation is a process that is used in video and it has been applied to still photography. Video signal sent to a TV screen is one line of light moving from left to right vertically very quickly, followed by a blacked out return line from right to left, followed by a left to right line of light - over and over. There were originally about 175 lit lines and 175 black lines which created a poor picture. Interpolation is filling those blacked out lines with a copy of the previous lit line. This makes the video look richer, gives it simulated fake higher (doubled) resolution, and pleases the viewer's eye better than the un-interpolated version.

When digital flat screen LCD TV's came along, 720i (interpolated) and 720p were the first of the HD screens, followed later by 1080i (interpolated) and 1080p. I don't know about you, but I can easily see the difference between 1080i coming out of my cable TV box and 1080p that comes out of my Blu-Ray player. Interpolating is clearly not as good as the higher resolution pure signal.

Interpolating is essentially just simulating higher resolution by creating fake pixels to put between the real ones. Thus while Genuine Fractals is doing something totally amazing (and I certainly won't disrespect them) by interpolating and filling spaces between the original virgin pixels with copies so the file can be printed much larger - it's fake - not as good as having twice or three times as many real pixels of data. Even Genuine Fractals has to admit there is some deterioration but they say it is minimal.

I don't take photos that are blown up to 5X5 foot or bigger then mounted on movie theater walls or train stations. But if your blowups were done with a 6MP JPG file and enlarged with Genuine Fractals' interpolation method, but were also enlarged from an identical 18MP RAW file usingh Genuine Fractals' same method, the one created from the 18MP RAW file would have 1/3 of the interpolation done to it that the 6MP version had, and therefore would result in a definite difference in clarity to the point of awesome. That's not even discussing JPG compression loss.

If I'm going to act as a commercial artistic photographer, I'm going to provide my clients with the very best I can milk out of the tools that are available to me. That means if I'm shooting for wall size murals, I'm going to shoot at 25MP or 50MP RAW or whatever is the highest resolution I can afford and interpolate those files minimally. If I am going to shoot 16X20 or 11X14, I'm going to shoot at 16 to 24MP to have the flexibility to crop and not use interpolation at all. If I'm going to shoot for 8X10, I'm going to shoot at 14 to 16MP and not use interpolation. If I'm shooting for smaller prints, it doesn't matter too much since 10MP is about as low as you can buy today, but I will always shoot with the possibility that a few of those will come out so good that I want to print at 8X10 without interpolation.

I'm not saying your work is not good because I haven't seen any of it in print, but I'm saying it would most certainly enlarge better with higher resolution files. If you are satisfied with interpolating with fake pixels when it's not necessary, then that's your personal choice, but that's not where I'm at nor will I ever be.

I guess we can agree to disagree.