OK, how many pixels are too many??

The digital war is a lot like the PC processor war of a year or two ago. Faster and faster processors. So where does it stop and when do you stop buying the next best generation?

With the digital camera wars, where does it reasonably end? 10mp, 15mp, 20mp... I know professionals that may want life size blow-ups may want as many pixels as they can get. But try emailing one of those beasts.

So for a prosumer camera to rival the D70, 20D and so on, what's the limit, and truly, what's the limit in terms of what we really need?

By the way, you'll have to pry my D70 out of my cold dead hands before I would give it up.

hollycowbatman said:

The digital war is a lot like the PC processor war of a year or two
ago. Faster and faster processors. So where does it stop and when
do you stop buying the next best generation?

With the digital camera wars, where does it reasonably end? 10mp,
15mp, 20mp... I know professionals that may want life size
blow-ups may want as many pixels as they can get. But try emailing
one of those beasts.

So for a prosumer camera to rival the D70, 20D and so on, what's
the limit, and truly, what's the limit in terms of what we really
need?

By the way, you'll have to pry my D70 out of my cold dead hands
before I would give it up.

Click to expand...

--

It's not just for enlargements. The other advantage of more pixels is cropping. If something is still a little toooooo far away, you can crop it down and still retain a lot of resolution to give you a good 8x10 print. There will never be too much resolution IMHO.

hollycowbatman said:

The digital war is a lot like the PC processor war of a year or two
ago. Faster and faster processors. So where does it stop and when
do you stop buying the next best generation?

With the digital camera wars, where does it reasonably end? 10mp,
15mp, 20mp... I know professionals that may want life size
blow-ups may want as many pixels as they can get. But try emailing
one of those beasts.

So for a prosumer camera to rival the D70, 20D and so on, what's
the limit, and truly, what's the limit in terms of what we really
need?

By the way, you'll have to pry my D70 out of my cold dead hands
before I would give it up.

Click to expand...

hollycowbatman said:

The digital war is a lot like the PC processor war of a year or two
ago. Faster and faster processors. So where does it stop and when
do you stop buying the next best generation?

Click to expand...

The more pixels to work with, the more you can crop or enlarge.

However, I think that for the time being, issues related to image storage requirements will be the limiting factor. Without much higher capacity in-camera storage devices and higher bandwidth transfer protocols, very large images are difficult to deal with.

More not Morie is always better. : )

But if you do have good film and the money for a DRUM SCANNER, you can have resolution that will blow away digital.

Hmm, how much do drum scanners cost?

M-A-R-K said:

hollycowbatman said:

The digital war is a lot like the PC processor war of a year or two
ago. Faster and faster processors. So where does it stop and when
do you stop buying the next best generation?

With the digital camera wars, where does it reasonably end? 10mp,
15mp, 20mp... I know professionals that may want life size
blow-ups may want as many pixels as they can get. But try emailing
one of those beasts.

So for a prosumer camera to rival the D70, 20D and so on, what's
the limit, and truly, what's the limit in terms of what we really
need?

By the way, you'll have to pry my D70 out of my cold dead hands
before I would give it up.

Click to expand...

--

Click to expand...

35mm film is NOT 60 MP.

Resolution should be matched to output needs. If you never print larger than a certain size you don't need much more resoltuion. Kind of like if all you run on a PC is Word you don't need a huge graphics card.

As mentioned, until you can handle moving and storing 100MB files, 20 MP is not practical. Even when you can move & store that much info - for many of us it will be excessive.

I haven't run out of resolution yet w/ 6MP...

Mike

hollycowbatman said:

So for a prosumer camera to rival the D70, 20D and so on, what's
the limit, and truly, what's the limit in terms of what we really
need?

Click to expand...

The traditional rules of thumb are:
1) your eye can resolve about an arcminute (1/60 of a degree);
2) you view an image from about a distance about the diagonal length

The first rule works out to about (3400/viewing distance) pixels per inch. Or from 12 inches away, around 300 ppi.

Using the second rule, an 10 by 15, would be view at 18 inches and need less than 200 ppi.

Now 10 * 200 = 2000 and 15 * 2000 = 3000 for 6 MP.

If you go to 20 by 30, you only need 100 ppi if you look from 36 inches so 6MP is still enough.

There may be some loss of resolution due to the mosaicing but I don't know how to quantify that.

Of course, the closer you look the more pixels you need. Uprezing may or may not work depending upon the subject matter.

Cropping could always consume more pixels. However, where do you draw the line--a 100MP and just crop out what you want? That would probably require some pretty sophisticated lens that I couldn't afford.

Do you feel the need for more resolution ?? Do you regularly print your photos in extra large sizes ??

It's really personal thing. I don't, I usually print at 10x15 and eventually one or another a bit bigger, but that's it. And the quality I get is amazing. So to me the 6 MP is enough and I won't change my camera body until something truly revolutionary comes along. And the camera companies better start improving a lot the sensors otherwise we will get noisier images as resolutions gets higher.

It's good to remind that 6 MP in the D70 DOES NOT equals 6 MP in a P&S... it's very different because of the sensor size. In a P&S and at today's technology, 6MP is already pushing the noise limits of those tiny sensors, while on the D70 (or any other DSLR sized sensor) it's just fine.

I've always wanted more mps for ability to crop if I don't like the framing, but as far as enlargements without cropping, the 20X30s I just got back look absolutely stunning. It appears, at least for my enlargements, 6 mp is more than adequate.

hollycowbatman said:

The digital war is a lot like the PC processor war of a year or two
ago. Faster and faster processors. So where does it stop and when
do you stop buying the next best generation?

With the digital camera wars, where does it reasonably end? 10mp,
15mp, 20mp... I know professionals that may want life size
blow-ups may want as many pixels as they can get. But try emailing
one of those beasts.

So for a prosumer camera to rival the D70, 20D and so on, what's
the limit, and truly, what's the limit in terms of what we really
need?

By the way, you'll have to pry my D70 out of my cold dead hands
before I would give it up.

Click to expand...

--
http://www.pbase.com/chad_gladstone/root