Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Dead Sea Scrolls

Dead Sea Scrolls
A rare professional photograph of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is one of the best preserved scrolls. Compare to all other images on Commons. Top EV, borderline size--but basically impossible to do better.
 * Reason

Dead Sea scrolls
 * Article this image appears in:


 * Creator:Unknown


 * Support as nominator -- Durova Charge! 23:57, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I really don't think this has a chance. If the text was at a size large enough to be readable (by those who can read it), it would probably breeze through. &mdash; BRIAN 0918 &bull; 2008-08-14 01:01Z
 * Oppose. Very high EV, but 983 × 463 for an item of this size is just to small. As Brian notes, the text is illegible. As Durova says, unlikely we'll get a better reproduction any time soon, which is terrible, but how things are unfortunately Mostlyharmless (talk) 03:29, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Oppose per Mostlyharmless. I was under the impression that high resolution photographs were made of the scrolls. --Uncle Bungle (talk) 11:05, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Oppose Again, the key factor is text legibility.--HereToHelp (talk to me) 14:34, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
 * The text is practically illegible when you see the scrolls in real life. These are heavily faded and extremely brittle, and the letters themselves have changed substantially after two millenia.  We're lucky these documents still exist at all.  If you're going to oppose on size that's totally understandable, but (having actually seen these things) the legibility problem is beyond the photographer's control.  Durova Charge! 16:57, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I think it's clear there's substantially more detail than this resolution allows. The letters here are generally illegible not from degredation (although that might play a substantial part in a larger version), but from lack of detail. Thegreenj 23:39, 15 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Reluctant oppose for being too small. I wish it wasn't! Intothewoods29 (talk) 17:02, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Note: I hope you don't mind, Durova, that I fixed the nom a bit. (But changed no wording).  Spencer T♦C 01:22, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

MER-C 10:33, 19 August 2008 (UTC)