Too many megapixels?

Are very high megapixel full frame cameras - 36mp or 42mp - too much for vintage lenses? I'm wondering if they expose/amplify any weaknesses or imperfections in the optics to such a degree that bad what seemed like "character" at 16mp turns appears more like bad technique.

Just one data point : here's a site that compares old Nikon lenses (select the MF lenses in the menu on the left) on 12MP and 36 MP cameras, with the author's description and conclusions, as well as sample images : http://www.sassmannshausen.eu/lenses-html/

While vintage lenses don't automatically qualify as "bad", modern optical designs, production methods and materials make this blog worth reading. https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/10/the-8k-conundrum-when-bad-lenses-mount-good-sensors/

Marie Meyer said:

Are very high megapixel full frame cameras - 36mp or 42mp - too much for vintage lenses? I'm wondering if they expose/amplify any weaknesses or imperfections in the optics to such a degree that bad what seemed like "character" at 16mp turns appears more like bad technique.

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With good vintage lenses, no problem!

Though wides and ultra-wides might need to be stopped down a bit for very sharp corners.

My experience is with a 42mp sensor and many lenses of varying ages, including current Canon L (which provide a comparison allowing me to say that the better vintage lenses are very good indeed).

Attention needs to be paid to the adapters. They need to be geometrically aligned, of the correct length (if using lenses having floating elements) and not introduce inner reflections or light leaks. Testing an adapter for those problems can take about half an hour. IMO, many complaints about adapting lenses are due to "bad" adapters.

In general, a higher pixel count will make almost any lens do better, unless it's a real dog.

Marie Meyer said:

Are very high megapixel full frame cameras - 36mp or 42mp - too much for vintage lenses? I'm wondering if they expose/amplify any weaknesses or imperfections in the optics to such a degree that bad what seemed like "character" at 16mp turns appears more like bad technique.

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When the real mega got into the FF sensors dpreviewers were commenting that the extra pixels in such large sensors had a down side. They tended to highlight errors in operator technique - especially when the ability to crop was used - not always to to the image’s advantage. I expect that lesser lenses could also have their imperfections more readily seen.

NikonHaoleboy said:

While vintage lenses don't automatically qualify as "bad", modern optical designs, production methods and materials make this blog worth reading. https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/10/the-8k-conundrum-when-bad-lenses-mount-good-sensors/

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Thanks for the link - if I understand things properly you cannot make a cheap poor performing lens appreciably better by throwing more pixels at it. But a really good lens appreciates them.

Moral of the story - we can have fun with cheap legacy lenses of various levels of quality with cheaper cameras and might be wasting our time on a bang for buck basis on camera bodies with high performance sensors. On the other hand if you do have something special in camera body land then a truly high performance lens will be quite amazing (as long as your personal ability incldes good technique).

I am that mch the wiser and better educated.

Marie Meyer said:

Are very high megapixel full frame cameras - 36mp or 42mp - too much for vintage lenses? I'm wondering if they expose/amplify any weaknesses or imperfections in the optics to such a degree that bad what seemed like "character" at 16mp turns appears more like bad technique.

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I wrote the blog post linked below. While I think people tend to draw the "correct" conclusion, I want to clear up any potential confusion and provide additional perspective.

Increasing the number of pixels will never reduce the image quality from a sharpness perspective. It will allow you to zoom farther into the image in post without seeing jagged edges from the pixels themselves, but the "pictoral" resolution will never go down. If there was an 8x10's worth of detail at 12MP, there will be an 8x10's worth of detail (or more) at 36MP. A great lens might take you to a 16x20 at 36mp, or whatever the numbers work out to. If your worse lens doesn't take you there, it just means the pixels were in some sense "wasted."

The attributes of lenses that get wrapped up into "character" do not usually look like technique errors, except perhaps focus. I would not say that what seemed like "character" at 16mp will turn into what appears like bad technique at higher resolutions.

Marie Meyer said:

Are very high megapixel full frame cameras - 36mp or 42mp - too much for vintage lenses? I'm wondering if they expose/amplify any weaknesses or imperfections in the optics to such a degree that bad what seemed like "character" at 16mp turns appears more like bad technique.

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Good lenses will continue to look good, and bad lenses will continue to look bad...

I look at it this way, even if the sensor out resolves the lens, adding more pixels will just show in greater detail what the lens is capable of, and if your method and size of display doesn't change, you'll not see much if any difference.

My better lenses show no sign of resolution limits at 36MP.

One of the first adapters I bought, a cheapie, was off sized, and made my adapted lens unable to focus to infinity.

It's funny but I never expected such a simple thing as an all manual adapter to be made so poorly that was a problem. I had to ask around and learn about it, thought the lens was bad before I did.

The average crop camera has a pixel pitch pretty much like the FF 36-42mpix sensor, so you get a good idea of what to expect from your lenses. The corners are usually softer, of course.

My beloved OM Zuiko 55/1.2, bought second hand in the mid 70s, is very sharp on my 20mpix Samsung NX20. I think this was at f:2.8

The more pixels the better, whatever the lens. Ideally, there would be no pixels but a continuous recording surface.

If a lens has aberrations that give a style to the image, you still want to record that image as completely as possible. And most people would want to use their camera with the best lenses as well as with the worst.

The only disadvantage to having more pixels is that there is more data to handle.

When I buy a lens, I usually buy about 5-6 and then compare them all. I can tell you that most reviews online proclaiming vintage lenses are somehow inferior are flat out wrong. In fact, I've found I prefer the vintage in almost all cases. When trying lenses, don't listen to the reviews. Check for yourself and prepare to be surprised.

As far as too many megapixels... Ya, it's a tradeoff between lots of resolution and better light gathering ability. Figure out where your needs lie. I suppose.

Spot on!

Marie Meyer said:

Are very high megapixel full frame cameras - 36mp or 42mp - too much for vintage lenses? I'm wondering if they expose/amplify any weaknesses or imperfections in the optics to such a degree that bad what seemed like "character" at 16mp turns appears more like bad technique.

Click to expand...

The resolution of a camera + lens system is not what you think it is.

Basically, the pixels are sampling a continuous image projected by the lens. According to Nyquist, the highest-spatial-frequency structure that can be reliably recovered is 1/2 the sampling frequency. That means a 6000x4000 pixel sensor cannot recover more than 3000x2000 pixels worth of lens image. Most cameras use color filter arrays so that colors are not recorded at each pixel site, but are interpolated from a 2x2 color sampling pattern (RG,GB for Bayer filters), which violates the signal sampling constraints needed for accurate recovery of image data, but essentially brings that 6000x4000 sensor down to 1500x1000 -- in other words, a 24MP sensor is only guaranteed to accurately recover about 1.5MP! Incidentally, if the lens produces higher-frequency detail than that, the result is artifacting, such as moire (especially if an anti-aliasing filter doesn't deliberately remove the higher-frequency components of the image projected by the lens).

The point is, higher pixel counts are your friend.

Sampling a lens image at less than the Nyquist rate is bad; sampling at the Nyquist rate or higher is necessary to capture what the lens offers. Sampling faster than the Nyquist rate simply provides a higher-quality reconstruction of the lens image (not higher resolution as much as more tonally accurate). In sum, "pixel peepers" will see what the lens projects more accurately, but you can always computationally rescale (interpolate) the image to a lower resolution if you don't like the details you see.

ProfHankD said:

Marie Meyer said:

Are very high megapixel full frame cameras - 36mp or 42mp - too much for vintage lenses? I'm wondering if they expose/amplify any weaknesses or imperfections in the optics to such a degree that bad what seemed like "character" at 16mp turns appears more like bad technique.

Click to expand...

The resolution of a camera + lens system is not what you think it is.

Basically, the pixels are sampling a continuous image projected by the lens. According to Nyquist, the highest-spatial-frequency structure that can be reliably recovered is 1/2 the sampling frequency. That means a 6000x4000 pixel sensor cannot recover more than 3000x2000 pixels worth of lens image.

Click to expand...

That is a twisted way of saying that which ends up wrong. It is correct to say the 6000x4000 sensor can record 3000x2000 elements worth of image, but not pixels. Pixels are already sampled, and this is not black friday - there is no need to double-discount.

ProfHankD said:

Most cameras use color filter arrays so that colors are not recorded at each pixel site, but are interpolated from a 2x2 color sampling pattern (RG,GB for Bayer filters), which violates the signal sampling constraints needed for accurate recovery of image data, but essentially brings that 6000x4000 sensor down to 1500x1000

Click to expand...

Only in a single color plane. For G, for example, the loss is smaller. For a spectrally uniform white object, there is no loss at all. For an average scene, the loss is somewhere between monochromatic red or blue and the spectrally uniform case.

ProfHankD said:

-- in other words, a 24MP sensor is only guaranteed to accurately recover about 1.5MP!

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It is not.

ProfHankD said:

Sampling a lens image at less than the Nyquist rate is bad;

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There is not a clear notion of nyquist for the image from a lens, which does not have inherent periodicity.

AiryDiscus said:

ProfHankD said:

Marie Meyer said:

Are very high megapixel full frame cameras - 36mp or 42mp - too much for vintage lenses?

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...

Member said:

Member said:

Sampling a lens image at less than the Nyquist rate is bad;

Click to expand...

There is not a clear notion of nyquist for the image from a lens, which does not have inherent periodicity.

Click to expand...

Yes, I took a few liberties in describing it -- and so must we all because the in-depth explanation even gets into researchy issues like compressive sampling, not to mention optics issues as basic as the diffraction limit differences inherent to different wavelengths. However, my answer to the OP stands:

higher pixel counts give you better samplings of what the optical system can deliver

It's never too much provided you realize that the goal is getting everything the lens can deliver, not getting high-frequency image content at the sensor pixel level.

Minolta MC100/2.5 from 1969 on Sony 42 Mpix A7RII:


Full OOC image but scaled to 2048 pixels.




1:1 crop from original OOC image. Note that it is taken at 400 ISO so could be better noise wise at lower ISO and also sharpened with some post processing. (the card is placed behind the wind shield near the rear mirror on the first car).



--
Best regards
/Anders
----------------------------------------------------
My wide angle lens has so much field curvature that it bends the space time continuum.
You don't have to like my pictures, but it would help: http://www.lattermann.com/gallery

And they don't have to be that vintage.

A Canon 24-70 2.8 L resolves 15mp on a 5dsr.

A Canon 24-70 2.8 L II resolves 32 mp on the same camera.

Double the resolution with just 1 generation lens.

So as the megapixels goes up, the quality of the glass needs to go up if you want to get your money's worth of the pixels.

You'll get more detail on the vintage lenses but you won't get more megapixels.

If you're not interested in getting the max resolution out of the camera forget getting megapixels and just enjoy the vintage lenses for what they are and what you like about them.

--
,,,The Ring,,,

FLruckas said:

And they don't have to be that vintage.

A Canon 24-70 2.8 L resolves 15mp on a 5dsr.

A Canon 24-70 2.8 L II resolves 32 mp on the same camera.

Double the resolution with just 1 generation lens.

Click to expand...

The 24-70 was never a best in class lens, so it wasn't hard for them to improve it.

FLruckas said:

So as the megapixels goes up, the quality of the glass needs to go up if you want to get your money's worth of the pixels.

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All the lens makers hope you fall for that line, so they can sell you new lenses every few years.

People have been crying about hitting resolution limits with older lenses since 8MP sensors, I have no resolution problems with my better lenses from the 50's and 60's on a 36MP sensor.

FLruckas said:

You'll get more detail on the vintage lenses but you won't get more megapixels.

Click to expand...

Lol, lenses don't give you megapixels

FLruckas said:

If you're not interested in getting the max resolution out of the camera forget getting megapixels and just enjoy the vintage lenses for what they are and what you like about them.

Click to expand...

AiryDiscus said:

ProfHankD said:

Marie Meyer said:

Are very high megapixel full frame cameras - 36mp or 42mp - too much for vintage lenses? I'm wondering if they expose/amplify any weaknesses or imperfections in the optics to such a degree that bad what seemed like "character" at 16mp turns appears more like bad technique.

Click to expand...

The resolution of a camera + lens system is not what you think it is.

Basically, the pixels are sampling a continuous image projected by the lens. According to Nyquist, the highest-spatial-frequency structure that can be reliably recovered is 1/2 the sampling frequency. That means a 6000x4000 pixel sensor cannot recover more than 3000x2000 pixels worth of lens image.

Click to expand...

That is a twisted way of saying that which ends up wrong. It is correct to say the 6000x4000 sensor can record 3000x2000 elements worth of image, but not pixels. Pixels are already sampled, and this is not black friday - there is no need to double-discount.

Member said:

Most cameras use color filter arrays so that colors are not recorded at each pixel site, but are interpolated from a 2x2 color sampling pattern (RG,GB for Bayer filters), which violates the signal sampling constraints needed for accurate recovery of image data, but essentially brings that 6000x4000 sensor down to 1500x1000

Click to expand...

Only in a single color plane. For G, for example, the loss is smaller. For a spectrally uniform white object, there is no loss at all. For an average scene, the loss is somewhere between monochromatic red or blue and the spectrally uniform case.

Click to expand...

We are not that sensitive to chroma resolution, we are very sensitive to luminance resolution.



this image shows the difference between four subsampling schemes. Note how similar the color images appear. The lower row shows the resolution of the color information

Member said:

Member said:

-- in other words, a 24MP sensor is only guaranteed to accurately recover about 1.5MP!

Click to expand...

It is not.

Member said:

Sampling a lens image at less than the Nyquist rate is bad;

Click to expand...

There is not a clear notion of nyquist for the image from a lens, which does not have inherent periodicity.

Click to expand...

--
A Manual Focus Junky...
One photographers junk lens is an artists favorite tool.
####Where's my FF NEX-7 ?????
Firmware request:
-A button map for toggling the EVF & LCD
-Still waiting for the minimum shutter speed with auto ISO for my NEX-7 and A7r. I know it will never happen.
-Customize the display screen layout, I'd love to have both Histogram and level at the same time.
-More peaking options.
-An RGB overlay on the histogram -An option to return the focus assist zoom to one button press
-An option to return to how the NEX-7 handled playback, ie. center button to zoom, then you could use the control dial to zoom in and out, then center button to exit the zoom mode.