Pixel wars are back!

[flamin lib]

Sony has had 60 mpxls so Canon just announced a 70 mpxl sensor and Samsung has a 108 mpxl sensor for the next gen phone.

I remember the early days of DSLRs when Canon/Nikon touted their 8-12 Meg sensors and poo-pooed Oly's 5 Megs as poor resolution. Oly countered with,"Yeah but our pixels are bigger and have better dynamic range". That may sound familiar to those who watched the full frame vs crop sensor debate.

So are more pixels really all that much better? As in all things, that depends. How are the images being displayed? What is the desired viewing distance?

Most of us have HD TV's and monitors. A 1080p screen has just short of .8 mpxl. Now there are 4k and soon 8k screens. That's still less than half the resolution of an average crop sensor camera. As more and more people move to web publishing and electronic storage a genuine need for ultra high resolution cameras seems limited. At the current state of the art monitor resolution anything over 10 Meg is overkill.

What about hard copies? Ya know, prints? Hard copies are much more demanding but even then viewing distance makes a difference. Vakay pics and snapshots are meant to be held in your hands for sharing, so 18-24 inches is the max distance and 4x6 is an ideal size. A couple of Megs is all anyone needs for that. What about bigger prints like 11x14? Viewing distance for 11x14 is about 4' plus. At that distance most people can't detect fine detail contained by Uber pixel images. I have perfectly acceptable 11x14s from a 5 Meg Nikon Coolpix and the largest print on display in my home is 36" on the long side from a 16 Meg image -- viewing distance for that print is 8+ feet. That said photography is the only art form judged by smell. Photographers are the only artists that put their noses against an image to judge quality.

Commercial work is more demanding yet with the average editor using a loop to check detail and counting pixels. Still, with all that scrutiny of your pictures they're still printed to 150 dpi (300 at best). But if you're gonna sell it they have to buy it and you've got to meet those expectations.

What about that dynamic range? Modern backlit led monitors display a huge range of brilliance and can be quite demanding. Prints on the other hand can only present what reflects off the surface. Remember that Ansel Adams reduced his B&W images to only 10 discernable shades of grey. Actually he had 15 but kept the extra 5 to himself . . .🤗


Does this mean I won't use the 80 Meg high res feature in my Em 1 II? Oh hell no! There are a lot of reasons to exploit every bit of technology available. I just don't think every last bit of it is necessary for truly great image making. We need to wipe the ink off our noses and get on with making pictures.

[metroins]

1. Thank you

for making pictures so I don't have to.

[MichaelSoE]

2. High pixel count is useful for making prints from cropped images.

I remember having to make a print from a cropped area of a 35mm negative. Any enlargement would have that classic graininess one would associate with large prints made with 35mm ... especially a crop. In the 60's when 35mm really took off, the large grainy print was very "arty".
It is so much nicer trekking through the woods with a digital rather than a 4x5 view camera to do landscapes. Big prints, cropping ability and portability.

[ManiacJoe]

3. Way too much marketing hype.

Unfortunately, when you pack that many pixels onto a very small sensor for a smartphone, the quality of the image often suffers quite badly. Phones are currently struggling to get 16 MP pictures to look good in low-light conditions.

That said, yes, technology is marching on and getting better all the time. We are just not there yet.