The Joy of Pixel Density

Well, here is a preliminary example of what I have been promising for a little while; a direct comparison of pixel density with the same subject, same distance, same f-stop, same exposure time, same focal length. The cameras are the Canon 400D with 5.7 micron pixels, and the Panasonic FZ50 with 1.97 micron pixels. The larger crops are at the scale of 100% pixel view of the FZ50, and the smaller ones, at the scale of 100% pixel view of the 400D.

I say preliminary because this was taken from a distance, over a busy Manhattan highway, so there is a bit of atmospheric haze with pollution, limiting the sharpness of the FZ50 image, and they were hand-held, too. The G9 would also be good to include in a more thorough comparison, as it has better RAW data and less pattern noise than the FZ50, despite having slightly higher read noise as a whole.

These are RAW (simply interpolated to full RGB), with no WB, and no noise reduction, and no explicit sharpening. This is just to compare RAW noise per unit of area. As you can see, the unbalanced colors are almost exactly the same, making the comparison simpler than if the color channel responses were greatly different.

These are pushed to a true exposure index of ISO 13,500 from ISO 100 on both cameras.