Effective Use of 40Mpx sensor

Truman Prevatt wrote:

deednets wrote:

Truman Prevatt wrote:

deednets wrote:

KariP wrote:

Tom Schum wrote:

Truman Prevatt wrote:

Tom Schum wrote:

Truman Prevatt wrote:

KariP wrote:

In theory it is possible to build a APS C camera with a 250mpx sensor - some photographers might believe , that cropping could do the job of several lenses. IMO it is not possible to use cropping instead of buying more than one lens.

For grins and giggles, I found the diffraction limit for a 250 MP APSC sensor. It is at f2.4.

If you downsize the image to 1/4 original pixels, would the diffraction limit equal that of a 62.5mp sensor?

I think this is why it is a good idea to have a lot of pixels in a color filter array sensor, so you can extract an image from it that has virtually no interpolation errors.

Yes errors of spatial position would still corrupt the color and detail rendering, but these would be so small that they would not contribute visible distortions, in my opinion.

Tom,

Diffraction occurs in a digital sensor when more the Airy Disk covers four or more pixels. Or that is at least the standard used for digital displays by most of the computational sites. The current rule of thumb for the CoC is d/1500 where d is the diagonal dimension of the sensor.

There is a lot of benefits of over sampling. Today in most high quality software defined RF receivers systems, the baseband is highly oversampled. From that the band of interest is filtered out and processed. That gives more flexibility but more importantly it gives better noise performance through integration and constant pause offset (no phase distortion over the band) of the band of interest.

So I would have no issues at all with a 100 MP sensor down sampled 4 to 1 to eliminate the artifacts from the interpolation process. In reality with a CFA sensor you really have three subsampled sensors so the resolution is not determined by the pixel count. The resolution is also image dependent. I remember papers by Foveon that showed the resolution of a CFA (Bayer in this case) varied from 1/4 the pixel count to 1/2 the pixel count back to 1/4 as the color in the image varied from extreme Red through Green to the extreme Blue and they gave plenty of charts to validate that. Foveon estimated that the effective resolution for an "average" image for a CFA was between 1/4 to 1/2 the sensor size with the average being about 1/3.

So a 4 to 1 binning of a CFA would be about right and reduce the noise by about 6 dB. BTW that is a very common practice in imaging radar.

Thanks, Truman! Very interesting answer.

I read that some company is going to build a camera for phones that has a 200mpx sensor.

My iPhone is taking photos with f 2 or something and the HEIC file result are impressive. Better than jpegs, adjustable

Obviously phones use many forms of computational photography and sensors get bigger in mpx but the size stays rather small. Oversampling , pixel binning, whatever processes ... and serious cropping will be possible. Even bokeh will look terrific in portraits.

After some years we can leave our heavy cameras and pile of lenses at home - my iPhone will have a couple of huge 300mpx sensors , some lenses and enough of computing power. No backpack needed . It will outperform my brains... and skills.

A sad day as part of the fun is the execution.

Don't worry. No matter how good the tool, the results is only as good as the execution. In the not to distant future meta materials will replace glass in lenses. Meta materials are capable of a negative refractive index so lenses will be small and light weight and not suffer the aberrations of glass. Meta materials are currently being used for small high performance antenna and prototypes for visual frequencies are being developed.

Replacing glass lenses would be a game changer for photography.

And yet, vinyl is still around, people play old violins and some others use M2s with lenses from the 1950s.

Play an APPLE Stradivari like a pro, impress your 2000 closest friends on Facebook without even touching an instrument.

Beautiful bokeh too.

What's not to like? 🤪

Remember when you had to grab the end of the whip antenna in you sell phone and extend it to about 4 inches? Not that long ago. Today metamaterial antennas in cell phones means bet better reception, with two fully dual polarized antenna. Metamaterial antenna make such things as Tile and AirTags possible.

I don't see many people wanting to return to the extending whip antenna.

Yes, I remember my first SLR. It was Zenit E made in russia - a schoolboy could afford it. When I find some old BW prints (not so many left) I just wonder how good some of them are , still.

Today I like my R6 and a couple of Fujifilm cameras - fantastic gear !

Cameras are technical wonders and everything works great.

Why are my photographs not like wonders  and great ?