Well in seeing the other thread of the excitement building up on the P1000 a few concerns were mentioned but to me the most important item was much missed.
Yep you guessed it. IMAGE QUALITY......
Does anybody know if they are using an improved chip in this camera or the old 2015 1/2.3 chip?
I be pretty disappointed if it is. Not that the p900 image quality sucks it is we are adding a lot longer lens to this camera. Usually from what I have seen the longer lenses have a give and take in color representation, sharpness ect.
I hate to see basically the same camera just a longer less sharp, less color pop and contrast lens ???
Am I the only person worried ?
You're right to be concerned, because here's the real truth. The sensor is comparable to a P900/B700.....the major difference is the longer focal length. The P1000 has the same sensor type as the B700....except it's 16MP instead of 20MP. That's it. And given that the B700 is only 2 years old, I doubt they've come out with a significantly improved sensor like you see every 4-8 years in camera sensors. So the sensor is likely not improved at all, and just a lower megapixel B700 sensor. Even if it was improved, we're talking maybe a 1/3rd of a stop or less at best, which you won't even notice.
Now as for the sharpness at zooms, here's a hard fact: Lenses do technically have megapixel limits. So one lens for example, might be able to resolve 50MP sharply with a 50MP camera.....use a 100MP camera with that lens and you'll still get more detail, but it won't be as sharp, meaning it's almost a waste to use a higher megapixel sensor.
Now here's the kicker.... when you factor in the fact that when you zoom, you are effectively using a smaller portion of the center of the lens....you are getting less megapixels worth of resolving power out of that lens! It's not a hard megapixel limit though, you can still resolve more detail, it just won't be as sharp, or noisier, diffracted, etc.
So if you have a 50MP sharp lens, and are zooming into only 50% of the center, you are effectively down to a 25MP resolving power. Let's keep in mind that even most expensive lenses that cost thousands of dollars, aren't even rated for 50MP.
The problem is, super zooms like the P1000 at long zoom use a WAY smaller area of the lens than 50%. We're talking about just a few millimeters in the center of the lens being used at longer zooms. That's a major factor why longer zooms have a degradation in quality and sharpness. There are other factors based on lens characteristics though, physics limits, etc.
That's another reason why the P1000 is only 16MP....if they put a 20MP+ sensor on it, the image quality would likely be indistinguishable or worse due to the megapixel limit of lenses, and they're definitely already past the megapixel limit of the lens at 16MP anyways.
When it comes to camera design, the amount of megapixels the lens can resolve isn't matched to the megapixel count the sensor can deliver, it's more like a "good enough" approach.
Another thing that degrades image quality is the atmosphere. It will reduce sharpness, and color detail, along with other effects like image distortion from atmospheric turbulence....like the wavy air you see on a hot day, or from a warm homes open window in winter.
Even 100ft can make a huge difference in image quality. Here's a good example video by the Northrup's that shows this directly:
But to get to the meat of it, this is the difference even a short distance can make on image quality, even with a whopping $10,000 500mm lens:
This 500mm shot was only taken at about 3 houses down! Not very far.
So while you can get more zoom with the P1000 on things closer, you'll still run into that lens megapixel limit that affects the quality of the image, and if you zoom on further away things, you'll just be adding up to potentially miles of atmosphere between you and your subject, further degrading image quality.
This next image is taken from a Nikon P1000 zoom test video:
This is an actual image from the P1000 at full zoom on a semi-far building in a city:
Not very appealing is it? Notice all of the distortion from atmospheric turbulence, how unsharp it is, and how washed out all the colors are.
So while 3000mm zoom is a first in consumer camera capability, it's not without its major downfalls, and it can be said fairly that it zooms too much for its own good, because unless you're zooming on something fairly close anyways, you are running into real hard environmental limits, and even when zoomed to closer objects, you're still running into those lens limits. And that's all before you consider the fact that it's still just basically a run of the mill 1/2.3 sensor, which also affects image quality.
