Canon Mistakenly Announces 11-Megapixel Digital Camera

RichardtheSmith writes " PC Magazine just confirmed that Canon mistakenly announced a new 11-Megapixel digital camera that wasn't supposed to be announced for another two weeks. This caused quite a stir on the digital photography message boards like DPReview, where Canon apparently tried to have all links to the press release taken down. The PC Magazine article is here. The original press release can be found here."

Comments

Re:11mp is waaaay too many (for most people)

[Mwongozi]

The usable resolution of 35mm in a "consumer" camera is about 7 megapixels. Double that for a professional.

This camera is probably the first to match the quality of a decent 35mm camera.

it depends what you want to do with it

[Trepidity]

Taking even a very high-resolution (for a desktop) monitor, say 1600x1200, is less than 2 Megapixels. So anything higher than that will have to be downsampled to display on a monitor anyway (either that or you'll have to scroll around). The main advantage in going higher than that is for high-quality printing. Printing a standard 3x5" photograph at 300 dpi requires a bit less than a 5 Megapixel camera, though something less will probably do okay too. Of course the more megapixels, the bigger you can print and still have it look good.

Also, if you want to do image editing, you'll want to start out with a higher-quality image than what you want as a final image, since filtering/etc. will invariably reduce the quality of the image.

So is 11 megapixel necessary? If you're taking pictures to email to grandma, certainly not. If you want to print out 8x10" photographs on high-quality photographic paper, it could be nice.

Really good 35mm film is about 20megapixels.

[MongooseCN]

If you buy really good, really slow speed film that has minimal grain, the film can hold a little less than 20 megapixels of data. But to get a good quality shot that will have enough detail to fill all that information, you need to have a very steady tripod, a very good quality lens and perfect focusing and exposure.

I have a new film scanner I use that has made scans up around 5500x3600 pixels. That's about the highest one needs to go to get all the information out of an image. Oh and that comes out to about 19.8 mega pixels, which is about a 60 meg uncompressed file (24bit RGB). You can also scan in using 16bit RGB channels resulting in an image around 120megs.

And think, that's just 35mm film, which is about 1 square inch. Imagine what a large format camera can shoot with it's 8x10" film. And the film can be even larger than that!