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13.8MP Kodak Tops Previously Leaked Canon
MadCow42 writes "With the professional imaging trade show Photokina opening this week in Koln Germany, digital camera manufacturers are announcing a stunning new lineup of professional digital cameras. These include a 13.8 megapixel monster from Kodak, and a 11.1 megapixel camera from Canon. I'm sure Nikon isn't too far behind, but no news yet on their offerings. These cameras are positioned for the professional photographer, but with list prices from under $4k to $6k, they're not out of reach for the 'pro-sumer' market either. The best news is that new products like this will push prices down on the 4-6MP cameras at the high end of the consumer level." We mentioned the premature release giving Canon's hand away; like MadCow42, I want to see what Nikon has to say.
Too lazy to log in. Anyways, 300ppi on a good printer (which may be 1440dpi and up) or output via LEDs to wet-chemistry photo paper gives results pretty much indistinguishable from film.
So, for an 8x10 this would require 2400x3000 pixels. or 7.2 megapixels.
With a 13.8 megapixel sensor, you could do an 11x14 at 300ppi. That'd be good for pretty much anything I would use it for.
Basically, for the vast majority of people this next round of cameras will make film redundant from a resolution point of view (there are other criteria though).
This camera will not be for the average users which you can see from the price. Unless the user is a camera freak and has a 6 digit salary. When I see the price I thought that could be a used car or a very nice computer system. but maybe thats just me.
These cameras are positioned for the professional photographer, but with list prices from under $4k to $6k, they're not out of reach for the 'pro-sumer' market either.
Since when was $4k-6k "pro-sumer" range? I'm no photography/digital camera buff by any stretch of the imagination so maybe this is just my naivete but I can't see spending that much money on one of these cameras unless you are professional when a 4-6 megapixel camera delivers damn good quality pictures and will be significantly less expensive.
But what the FSCK are we gonna do with a 100 million pixel camera (around 2010ish???) WTF? Any serious uses, I'd love to hear imaginations run wild. And no, I'm not talking pr0n, I mean medical, etc. I just don't see a use for it. Do you?
"The best news is that new products like this will push prices down on the 4-6MP cameras at the high end of the consumer level."
IMHO, they won't have a real impact on that market. Canon's excellent G2, a 4-megapixel camera, is currently selling at a street price of $600-$650. Others are in that same range, between $500 and $1000. Do you really think that someone considering the purchase of a $700 camera is going to be swayed by a $4000 camera with less than twice the resolution (noting that resolution varies with the square of the pixel count)? And remember, interchangeable lenses means they're extra, so the actual price difference is actually greater.
I'm really excited about these new cameras and sensors, and I think they're going to make a big impact in the film-dominated pro market, but to think they're going to generate price pressure on sub-$1000 cameras would be like Toyota dropping Camry prices to compete with the newest Lamborghini.
However, the imaging characteristics of film and digital are just different; resolution isn't everything and you can't compare them that way. For practical purposes, a 4 or 5 Megapixel gives most amateurs and professionals similar functionality to what they get with 35mm. Under many conditions, a 5 Mpixel digital camera produces nicer images than a 35mm film camera with any film, and under some other conditions, it's worse.
In fact, scaling up such estimates to medium format is particularly silly. People generally don't use MF or LF for higher resolution, but for characteristics like tonality and DOF. Even if you manage to get the right film and the right lens on your MF system, the longer shutter speeds and smaller DOF will likely counteract any theoretical gain in resolution under most conditions; and films for MF on the whole aren't as good for 35mm either. A Rolleiflex (maybe even loaded with Tri-X) or Pentax67 can't compete with modern 35mm SLR systems and lenses, but that's not the point.
So, don't wait for some big, high-resolution digital camera to do digital imaging. 12 Megapixels is nice, and some people may need, but most amateurs and professionals probably don't. The real news about the two latest SLRs is that they have no focal length multiplier, and that means that we finally get real wide-angles. That's been the real limitation of digital cameras so far.
Printer DPI and photographic image DPI are entirely different.
A 720DPI printer, for example, will be able to spit about half a million ink droplets per square inch of paper, but one ink droplet != 1 pixel. Remember, as the previous reply stated, the printer uses many small droplets of exactly four colors (some inkjets use up to eight colors) of ink and attempts to create the perception of a certain color by mixing dots of those, much like your monitor uses different and separate intensities of red, green, and blue to approximate a color other than one of those three.
So how does the DPI rating of an ink printer relate to the DPI of a digital camera? It doesn't necessarily. In fact, most parts of any color printout will not have the maximum number of ink droplets (even if using absorbent photo paper) because far fewer are needed, particularly with light colors. There is absolutely no way to compare the two, but in general a 300DPI image will look better than most modern ink printers can accurately portray, and 600DPI will approach the representational limits of color laser, dye sublimation, and good thermal wax printers.
The DPI-to-paper ratio is a simple matter of comparing the resolutions (say, 1600x1200) of the digital camera image with the size of the printout (say, 8x10")
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
If I were going on a few weeks expedition over the Sahara, I would be very hesitating taking digital camera. These babies eat batteries like there is no tomorrow. I wouldn't leave civilzation with one. I think every photographer who ventures in a remote location of the earth will be nervous without at least one camera that works on musclepower only. (My Olympus OM-1 still works, I haven't put battery in it for years)
Just like you have reverb, chorus and delay in your audio editor, you can have Tri-X, T-MAX, Agfa PAN APX etc in your photo editor. One example is Convert to B/W Pro.
(p.s. I don't have any lenses from the 1970s, but I'm still glad that my modest investment in recent af nikkor lenses will not be wasted when i move to digital)
Throughout this thread people seem to be assuming that the whole picture will be printed out at a reasonable size. While there certainly is a limit to the number of useful megapixels in printing out a picture at 8 1/2 by 11 (I don't have the technical expertise to say where that limit is, and it will surely change as printer technology progresses), I look forward to being able to get good quality printouts from a small cropped portion of a picture. For example, taking a group shot of 20 or 30 people, and then printing out close-ups of each of the people photographed rather than taking 30 separate photos.
:) (Though I still haven't filled my twenty gig hard drive, and it's on it's last leg.) But I digress, my main point is that like many computer components, we are approaching quite comfortable, but more is always nice.
While I wouldn't pay thousands for this capability, I'll love having every megapixel I can get. It's like hard drive capacity, who could ever use 40 megs, I mean a gig, scratch that 20 gigs.