"Less Megapixels = Better Color"...

57even wrote:

Truman Prevatt wrote:

Batdude wrote:

...Do you agree with that?

I went to one of my local camera stores and there is a gentleman that has been working there for many years and he seems to know his stuff. He is in his late 60's early 70's I would say.

The guy was talking to a customer and I was kind of paying attention to the type of conversation they were having. The customer asked "Should I get a camera with a lot of megapixels and what's the difference?"

To make it really short, then the sales person asked the customer "do you want a lot of resolution or better image quality? The higher the megapixels the more resolution you will get with lots of detail. The less resolution the better the Image quality will be with better richer color".

The key is size of the pixels. On the same area - take an APS-C sensor for example - the more MP the smaller the pixel. Bigger pixels collect more light. They produce more tonal gradation and hence richer colors.

Now if you put that higher number of MP on a FF sensor - the pixels will be bigger, e.g. 24 MP APS-C sensor has significantly smaller pixels than a 24 MP FF sensor. For example on an APSC 24 MP equates to a pixel with linear dimensions of approximately 3.9 micro meters while on a FF sensor the pixel size will be 6 micro meters. I put 24 MP on a 44x33 medium format camera such as the GFX the pixel size would be 7 1/3 micrometer. Bigger pixels, deeper wells, more light capturing ability, higher DR and greater tonal and color richness. So bigger pixels the greater the tonal gradation so richer tones and richer colors. Nothing has changed. People went to medium format film cameras over 35 mm cameras for better image quality and to 4x5 cameras over medium format as they wanted more image quality, richer tones and colors.

This old codger is right - nothing really new under the sun. The world nor photography didn't change with digital sensors.

No, this is completely wrong.

If you downsize the files to the same size (either in pixels or print size) the noise level will be more or less identical. It doesn't matter how big the pixels are, only how much light you collect over the whole sensor, or per sq m of the final image.

More small pixels collect the same amount of light as fewer large ones.

Bit-depth is only relevant to DR.

Just look at the SNR data on DXO.

Agreed.   The confusion is, in the old days (re the outdated clarkvision link), this was more true since smaller pixels had less collection area because it was behind the circuitry.  Plus read noise was higher then, so post-binning was noisier than pre-binning (at least for B&W CCDs that supported on-chip binning).

With the advent of microlenses and the continuous reduction in read noise, this effect has been more or less nullified.   And as you said, you can clearly see this in Bill Claff's data and on DXO.