Diminishing returns in photography

In many fields of endeavor and enjoyment as you spend more and more money, you get a smaller and smaller perceptual improvement per dollar.

You can buy a decent bottle of wine for 20 bucks. Picked carefully, you can serve it to knowledgeable friends and get few complaints. You could could spring for a 40-dollar bottle, and, again, chosen carefully, you’d get better wine. Up the ante to 60 clams, and the wine gets better, but the difference is not as great as the delta between 20 and 40 dollars. Keep going. When you get to $2000 a bottle, the improvement over a $1000 wine comes down to a matter of taste, even among wine experts.

You can get a decent television for $500. If you spend $1000 for one with the same size screen, it’ll be better, if you choose wisely. Spend $2000, and the difference will be smaller. Double that, and it’s smaller yet. Spring for an 8000-dollar set, and you’ll have to look closely to see the difference between it and the $4K one.

You can get an OK hifi for $1000. Double that, and it’ll be better. But the difference between a $60,000 setup and a $120,000 one will be smaller.

This is true in buying art, for sure.

And yet…

The aficionados in these fields will sometimes go on and on about the differences between purchases at the very highest end of their field. They will debate endlessly about them, and if you happen across a conversation — especially an Internet conversation — among those folk you will think there’s an immense difference. But if you’re ever lucky enough to drink a glass of ’61 Cheval Blanc, 2012  Romanée-Conti, or ’82 Petrus, you’ll be hard pressed to say much beside, “I’d like a refill of any of them.”

It’s the same with cameras, and it’s getting to be more and more the same as the CMOS sensor technology improves and the processor power continues to increase.

Compared to many serious cameras of yesteryear, the iPhone 15 takes pretty great pictures. M43 is better, APS-C is better than that, FF is better than that. For pure image quality, medium format is even better, but MF cameras can’t do some things that the newest FF cameras do with ease. As time goes by, cameras of all formats get better. Yet we don’t have more wall space, and, cataract surgery excepted, our eyes aren’t improving with time. So the perceptual differences grow smaller and smaller.

But that’s not a sentiment that gets a lot of digital ink these days, especially on the camera forums.