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Who only 16k for a camera sensor

Started Jan 21, 2020 | Discussions thread
aliasfox Senior Member • Posts: 1,375
Re: Who only 16k for a camera sensor
1

I wouldn't say 16MP is enough, but if you're shooting/framing reasonably, it likely isn't the limiting factor.

As others have mentioned, 16MP is more than enough for most viewing scenarios. It's only when you have to crop in where more pixels are useful. For example, if you crop in from 16MP to 8MP, you increase your effective focal length by 1.41x (I think that's the math). If you crop down to 4MP, you've doubled your focal length. Now, 8MP is actually still fine for most use cases, though 4MP gets a bit tight for printing above 8x10, or large TV viewing. Going to a 20MP sensor only increases that 4MP to 5MP, and a 24MP sensor only increases it to 6MP for the same crop. You'd have to double the original resolution to 32MP to get a 2x crop of 8MP.

Now, most photographers will tell you that if you have to crop that much, your image is likely very off in the first place - and you'd need a very high resolution sensor to make up for that.

And this all leads up to my last point - sensor resolution only matters if you have lenses that can properly resolve the detail. For the same pixel density, a 16MP 4/3" sensor is equivalent to (roughly):

- 24MP APS-C sensor

- 64MP FF sensor

And what you're seeing on all formats is that as APS-C goes beyond 24MP and FF goes beyond 40MP, lenses and technique can't keep up - at a pixel level, you're not going to be as sharp as you'd expect. I see this with my m4/3 gear - my copy of the 35-100/2.8 is quite soft at 100mm/2.8, and while it's a little better at 100/4, it's still noticeably softer than at the wide end. That softness is magnified if I crop in, and going to a 20MP or 24MP sensor really wouldn't help things that much because sensor resolution isn't the limiting factor.

I'd much rather have a 16MP sensor with significantly better DR (pixel-level exposure would be cool) than a 32MP sensor with the same DR/noise characteristics that we have today. I'm usually comfortable with my framing decisions, but I'll always take more PP latitude.

 aliasfox's gear list:aliasfox's gear list
Olympus XZ-1 Olympus PEN E-PM2 Olympus E-M1 Panasonic Lumix DMC-GM5 Olympus E-M5 II +17 more
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