Which would you rather have

Given the cost of printing and framing large images to hang in your living room...
would you rather have numerous prints or one of those new OLED televisions to display your stuff?

I guess it depends on your idea of large and expensive. I like 16×12 as a print size, big enough to see, looks nice in a simple 20×16 frame with a mat, and I can hang them on my wall at under £10 each. Yes they are cheap and nasty frames, but you really can't tell looking at it on the wall. The prints run me at £1.15 each, so I can even change them round a fair bit if I want to. If I wait for a sale I can even go up to 30×20 on Fuji Pearl (metallic look) paper for £10 a pop, but then I do have to pay around £50 for a frame with glazing and all the bits. So I don't do too many of those, and anyway they end up needing a big wall to look good. With my room sizes I prefer a number of the smaller prints. I've not looked at the cost of an OLED TV, but I guess they are not cheap, even "standard" 4K TVs are going to hit you up for £1000 for something in the 40" range. We only moved to having a 40" 1080p TV two years ago, when they had some Blaupunkt branded units on a Black Friday sale at our local Sainsbury's supermarket for only £150. So my daughter and I camped out in the car all night so that we were at the front of the queue to get one. It's OK for watching TV, and I'm sure a bigger better one would be nice, but it would still be predominantly for watching TV on, and situated in the room to best forfill that purpouse. That would still leave a lot of wall in our home looking for some "decoration" and I think photographic prints would fill that space nicely, just as they do now.

Alan

Well, hey, it can be a toss-up! Yes, I've adorned my walls with framed prints, although they've been limited to 12" x 16" and 12" x 18" prints, along with some smaller ones that have been framed with mattes. This has been rewarding, both for friends/visitors who have enjoyed just standing and looking, as well as for my personal enjoyment, having my home "decorated" with nice stuff of my own work!

But, at the same time, I have at times entertained folks using my "old" plasma 52" widescreen HD TV, sure, why not?! Also, it has been handy when I'm not at home and I can "share" images from my PBase Web Host using an available computer/monitor, although if there was a TV with a proper input port, well, why not?!

Rather, either, or... Why? Small room? Not enough walls?
Given what everything is proportional - room size, tv size and prints size, here is no problem to have both.
As long as photos or tv are not part of decore, of course....

Prints.

Prints. Before selling my house my walls were covered in my work.

Traci_Ann wrote in post #18245558
Prints. Before selling my house my walls were covered in my work.

That's certainly a good point -- a few years ago I "lost" my home, including ultra-comfortable upholstered furniture and my big screen TV, and believe me, the furniture was wonderful for lounging and viewing whatever was on that TV. But it's all gone! I don't have much wall space for prints, but my daughter has them all stored away, and one day...but in the meantime I still can see and share my images online, whether via a monitor or a TV, so I'm still good with both!

chauncey wrote in post #18244949
would you rather have numerous prints or one of those new OLED televisions to display your stuff?

I would much rather have the television - IF someone could come and set it up for me and get my photos on it. I can never figure out how to get anything electronic to work, and trying to get my photos from my computer to the TV by using some kind of cloud or USB cable or something would fry my brain! The only reason I don't have such a beast is because I don't now how I would ever get my photos to show up on it without me having to read an instruction manual or something (and that is just never going to happen).

The reason I would greatly prefer the TV is twofold:

1: Why be stuck looking at the same 5 or 6 photos all the time, day in, day out, when I could have 1,000 or 2,000 images rotating? Even the world's best photography ever is stuff that I get tired of seeing after a few minutes or a few days. With the TV playing hundreds or thousands of images in slideshow fashion, I would never get tired of what I was seeing! My extreme ADD would be satisfied!

2: I really like the way that images look on a 5k computer monitor, or even a TV screen if the resolution is high enough. Why? Because I am actually looking at the light! The light is coming from within - it is as if the image IS light. With a print, I am looking at something that has light from another source shining onto it.

I like to keep my house very dark inside - windows all shut up tight with blinds and shutters blocking out all of the light. And I don't turn lights on (except in the kitchen so I can see to cook) because I like it all dark inside. Prints on my walls would never look good because there wouldn't ever be any decent light shining on them. With the TV, or a computer monitor, the light is coming from within the image itself, so photos look GREAT when viewed in a blacked-out house.

But I'd only have an interest in the TV if I could get one that was at least 48" across (not just 48" on the diagonal), and if it had a resolution of at least 5,000 pixels in the long dimension. I only like to look at stuff that's pretty big, and have no use at all and little appreciation for prints that are smaller than 30" across. I am quite demanding when it comes to what I like to look at, and I lack the financial resources to ever be satisfied, as I simply cannot afford the things that I most prefer.........and if I can't have the very very best, then why even have anything at all? So my big walls sit bare and unadorned. Poverty and snobbery do not make a good combination

.

Let's get down to the nitty-gritty, why do we even want to display those images?
Are we boasting to friends and family about our skills, or perhaps just ego gratification.

My fireplace mantel is home to more than twenty years of junk...remnants of school projects from nine kids.
Those projects get put there, never to be looked at again...I don't even dust around them anymore.

Visitors...when you're a 73 y/o, bull headed old fart, visitors don't stop in any more...satisfies me to no end.

Prints. When a 12" X 18" is $3 it's cheaper than coffee. And no virus will ever affect it.

I would rather have a bunch of 4k OLED screens built into the walls around the house ann being driven off of some PC so that images can change. But then I look at the cost of even a large print compared to $15k~$20k worth of hardware and my dream evaporates.

chauncey wrote in post #18246256
Let's get down to the nitty-gritty, why do we even want to display those images?
Are we boasting to friends and family about our skills, or perhaps just ego gratification.

My fireplace mantel is home to more than twenty years of junk...remnants of school projects from nine kids.
Those projects get put there, never to be looked at again...I don't even dust around them anymore.

Visitors...when you're a 73 y/o, bull headed old fart, visitors don't stop in any more...satisfies me to no end.

Um.. maybe it's as simple as liking to look at the images. Both my wife's and my PC cycle random images as a screen saver. It's nice to see some random image pop up when walking by. I get to remember the day/event/whatever and enjoy an image as well. I have also scanned much of my old film images as well as my dad's and even grandfathers. I have family images going back to the 1920s.

I think the limitations of print and the fact that you can't just have a constantly varying slideshow of countless images actually amount to a good reason why it's well worth trying to select, print, mount, frame and hang a set of favourite images.

1) Choosing a relatively small number of pictures that best represent your 'work' is a challenge in itself and forces you to think about the particular merits of individual photographs.

2) Making the best presentation of each photograph presents an additional challenge. Getting the printing, mounting and framing right so that a photograph is shown to best advantage requires careful thought.

3) The way that pictures are hung ... how they are grouped and/or sequenced ... offers the chance to present themes or tell stories that is not easy to achieve using electronic media when you are looking at just one image at a time.

And it's not all about showing your photographs, too. Hanging pictures on your walls enhances the space you live in. It's satisfying if some those pictures are ones that you have made and not bought from a shop or gallery.

I think printing and hanging photographs makes a stronger statement than rotating them on a screen. I am personally very shy of showing my own photographs (I think with very good reason when I see the quality of some of the images that are posted here). But friends who see my pictures constantly urge me to print and display them ... not keep them locked away on a computer or fleetingly visible at low resolution on social media. So I am currently going through years worth of shots to find twenty or thirty that I will put up on the wall. It's quite tough ... even though I don't shoot anything like the number of photos that many on here seem to.

I think human beings excel when we work within constraints; when we have to make choices.

So that's my case for print.