
Why we've reached the end of the camera megapixel race - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/#!/gadgets/news/2011/05/why-weve-reached-the-end-of-the-camera-megapixel-race.ars
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ericb
I'd like to see a shutter-speed race. My last 2 (inexpensive) cameras were
slow on the draw and I frequently missed good shots of my kids. If I tried to
take an action shot, it was nothing but blur.

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fr0sty
that is a 'sensitivity' race, actually...

Shutter speed, ISO, and Aperture in photography are related in much the same
way as Voltage, Current, and Resistance.

To change any of those three (in your case shutter speed) you have to
compensate in one or both of the others. Lens aperture is limited mainly by
form-factor (can't have a large aperture in a tiny zoom lens) and is therefore
rather constant across Point-and-Shoot cameras. but Sensitivity can be
improved by having higher-quality sensors and supporting circuitry.

My first P&S camera had a maximum ISO of 400 and was very noisy at that level.
my first DSLR did 1600 (4x as sensitive) and the current bleeding edge is
128000 (8x more sensitive again). Even in inexpensive point and shoot maximum
ISO seems to be around 1600 (or more).

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CountSessine
I'll point out another reason why you might not want more megapixels - size
and data management. If you're shooting your photos RAW and you take a lot of
them, you'll easily have a photo library whose size is in the hundreds of GBs,
if not in the TBs range. Hard drives are cheap, but in all likelihood your
photos are precious to you - meaning you have to back the library up on a
regular basis.

A glut of meaningless megapixels makes it harder to preserve the meaningful
data buried within.

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juiceandjuice
Speaking of 12MP and low light performance, no mirror and a quiet shutter,
I've got a Fuji X100 in the mail, finally after two months.

<http://www.finepix-x100.com>

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ams6110
Thanks for posting that. I've fantasized about a Leica M9 but the body and the
glass would run about $8,500. Looks like a (much) lower priced alternative.

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juiceandjuice
Well if you got the glass cheap enough, but really you'd probably be spending
closer to $10k.

These are in and out of stock quickly right now. I preordered two months ago
and I'm just now getting it shipped from B&H.

This camera is really the answer to Leica's X1, and most people think it's
better than the X1 for various reasons. The general consensus is that it's an
awesome camera with some firmware glitches that need to be ironed out. I've
been shooting with a Canon S95, and although it's an amazing little camera, I
realized just how much you really need a viewfinder. But the Fuji is going to
be everything I've really been wanting: a smaller camera with a fast semi-wide
lens lens (35mm) with great low light performance.

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runjake
Megapixels haven't meant anything to me in a decade. I'm more concerned about
shutter speeds, lens, and image compression.

Disclaimer: I am a point & clicker. I've never even touched a DSLR camera.

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antiterra
The marketing idea that consumers could judge a camera based on 'how many
megas it has' died a while back. It was definitely dead in 2009 when Sony
released cameras with Exmor backlit sensors and competed with a similar Fuji
offering.

In the professional market, however, it's possible to get an 80 megapixel
medium format sensor and there are post-production advantages that make this
worthwhile for professional use. I wouldn't be surprised if sensor resolution
continued to creep up in prosumer cameras as well.

There are still benefits for consumers from higher sensor density and
resolution, as long as it can be done without introducing noise. For example,
slightly less awful digital zoom and the ability to liberally crop.

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wccrawford
You'd think people would avoid saying that 'X should be enough for anybody'
after the whole Gates thing. (Yeah, I've heard it's a misquote, etc... Doesn't
matter, it's famous and should serve as a warning anyhow.)

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hugh3
Not really. I'm prepared to go out on several limbs here.

"Four wheels ought to be enough for anybody"

"Twelve beers ought to be enough for anybody"

"Two intestines ought to be enough for anybody"

The point being that beyond a certain point more pixels (unlike more memory)
just makes life worse. There's only so many photons to go around.

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z92
> "Four wheels ought to be enough for anybody"

Most truckers now agree that 18 wheels is the best. That's after number-of-
wheels race from 70s where we tried upto 22 wheels.

~~~
jws
Or perhaps 10 is 2.5% more efficient and saves money up front as well. Go
evolution!

[http://www.epa.gov/smartwaytransport/transport/documents/tec...](http://www.epa.gov/smartwaytransport/transport/documents/tech/018_gtp_fs_tires.pdf)

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bradleyland
I'd take a 6 MP hit (down from 12 MP to 6 MP) for an extra two stops in speed.
I have a D90 with an 18-200mm VR lens. It's tremendously versitile, and the VR
helps shooth handheld at long focal lenghts in less than favorable light, but
indoors, I either have to crank up the ISO or mount a prime.

Newer DSLRs have even better low light performance than my camera, but at ISO
800, the noise and artifacts begin to bother me. I'd happily trade a few MP to
get ISO 200 image quality at ISO 800.

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DTanner
I recently printed some 15 mega-pixel images in 36"x24" and they quality was
quite good. The number of people in the world who need > 24 mega-pixel images
is very very small.

Only [5%](<http://www.canonrumors.com/forum/index.php/topic,818.0.html>) of
photographers want a mega-pixel bump in the new 5D MK III.

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Ygor
Last summer, when I got one of the then best Android smart phones on the
market, from all the cool features and interesting capabilities, the question
I got asked the most was: "How many megapixels does it have?".

It took me some time to get used to it, and not get annoyed every time. People
like to focus on a single number for quality measurement.

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kylec
I hope not - while megapixels alone aren't sufficient to produce a great
photo, they are a necessary component. I don't mind if the industry pauses for
a while to increase the image quality through other means, but eventually the
pixel count will become the bottleneck again if it's not increased.

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dialtone
First you need to resolve the other bottlenecks or more megapixels will only
make the inadequacy of the lenses more obvious.

The lesson to learn here is that the camera needs to grow more organically,
it's useless to grow megapixels so much without improving lenses or the size
of the sensor, instead, as the article states, it makes it _worse_. Like
megahertz, megapixel is a nice single number that many customers associated
with performance but it's pretty far from truth. A more detailed sensor will
only see what the lenses let go through and a smaller sensor will become that
much less sensitive. It is cheaper however.

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jconnop
There is no such thing as 'too many pixels'.

Case in point: <http://skysurvey.org/>

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juiceandjuice
Actually there is, fundamentally. When you start having more pixels than your
system can resolve (because of motion blur, lens defects, etc...), then you
have too many pixels.

I think you have too many pixels if you can't get low noise performance at ISO
800 equivalent.

