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Beyond Megapixels
TheTechLounge points to this "first of a three-part series of editorial articles examining current digital photography hardware, as well as the author's views of what is to come." It boils down to the excellent point that pixel count alone is not the way to evaluate digital camera capabilities.
comes down to the lens. No matter how many billions of pixels you fit behind it, the lens is going to determine the first determining factor of the photo quality. It's certainly not the last (thus we move to 3 CCD systems etc. for better color reproduction) but the lens.. is always going to be the biggest factor.
more isn't better?
at least it looks like bigger is still better, the sensors the author likes are physically larger.
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I agree that there's much more to it than megapixels. Excellent images can be produced with the 4 MP Nikon D2h, for example. That said, I still prefer film to digital. And I can't think of anyone who prefers APS to 35 mm. People certainly do care about resolution in the analog world. It's why people use medium and large format cameras.
Maybe we could translate it into ISO instead?
Isn't Spirit's PanCam using this same idea to capture images?
Because APS was as good for small as prints as 35mm was.
Some digital camera still don't product pictures that look as good as 3x5 film prints, so they are still chasing higher megapixels for that perfect image quality that they desire.
And with APS or 35mm, people didn't have the capability to crop and enlarge from the comfort of their own home, now resolution matters to them if it means being apple to crop grand ma out of a wide shot and print out a perfect looking picture at home.
to tell you the truth, i've not taken a picture with a digital camera that i've not resized to something smaller than 640x480. even that's pretty large, i usually size them down to 320x240 so they look like pictures and not overly magnified illustrator documents.
i mean, 1600x1200 is only 2MP, and that's freakin' huge. the only reason i'd need something like 8MP (~3200x2400) would be if i was taking pictures of blueprints, bond-style, or needed a picture to be blown up to letter-sized proportions or larger. and, truthfully, if i was going to take a picture of something i needed to blow up to large proportions, i sure as hell wouldn't be using a digital camera.
interesting to note: 3200x2400 @ 300 dpi yields an image about the size of standard letter-sized paper. sorry, if i want prints, i'll use 35mm. no reason to print pictures out if i have a digital camera. i'll keep my 640x480 pictures.
-mike
CCD size/quality
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Then look at MP and other features (including price/battery life other doodads)
e.
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It's not just for large prints, it's for creative freedom.
With a high megapixel camera I can take a picture of a statue from far away, get home and crap 3/4 of the picture out and still be left with a picture that's high quality enough for a print.
I have a 2 megapixel camera and it's good (not great) for 3x5 prints but I am not able to crop any of my picture or the quality loss is evident in prints.
i agree with you.
unfortunately, i haven't seen many (if any) cameras with an optical zoom capability higher than 3X. they'll advertise the "859869X digital zoom" all day long, but digital zoom is an absolutely worthless feature, in my opinion.
i imagine they make such a big deal of it in order to attract the dolts that number-shop.
-mike
Megapixles don't mean shit if the lens the light had to go through is distorted in a bad lens. Nikon cameras are more expensive mainly because of this. Take the camera on the mars rover for example. Not a 10 mp camera, but a 1 mp with a damn good lens. Yeah, they also break the colors up but that's not the point.
Manufacterers like kodak and hp don't have a lot of experience in camera design and that's why they're so cheap compared to a good nikon or canon digital SLR with much much better lenses.
As in anything with computers, you get what you pay for, the problem has been though that most people compare cameras based soley on the number of pixels.
Having just purchased the new Nikon D70 digital SLR camera I can say that pixel count is definitely not what you should look at. At 6.1 megapixels, the D70 is relatively high but some of my friends derided me for not getting an 8 megapixel non-changeable lens camera. Trying to explain to them the benefit of having a real SLR body, the ablity to change lenses, manually adjust all settings etc. is a lost cause. Many people don't understand that although I spent twice as much for less resolution I can do things with this camera that they could never dream of with a traditional digital camera, regardless of resolution. Light sensitivity, signal to noise and optics all rank above resolution in my book. The ability to manually adjust all settings is right up there too.
:-)
Of course if you're just taking snapshots to send to grandma then forget everything I've just said
Yup. I remember when I was at CompUSA once and some stupid guy was buying a computer. He was interested in only a few things. Will I be able to burn cds with this? Can I do e-mail? Can I plug my camera into it? etc. You just need enough power to be able to get the functionality you desire. Excess power is money wasted.
How was this guy stupid? He knew what he wanted to do with a PC and wanted the salesman to recommend a basic system for his tasks. Sounds like an average consumer with reasonable expectations. He seems much smarter than some guy who wants a 4GigaHurts machine with 2 GigaBites of RAM and 200 Gig hard drive so he can "surf the web faster" on his dialup and "print photos faster" on his ink jet.
Going back to cameras, 4 megapixels are good enough for most people to replace their 35mm cameras. Since 4MP cameras are still expensive, there is the perception more is better. But soon 4MP cameras will be $100, and people will realize 12MP cameras are not worth their dollars for what they use. Just give it some time.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
...wait until you meet your colleagues that actively try to push 8 MP cameras on consumers that want 5 MP, because they're higher profit. That's one of the reasons I like to review products online rather than ask salesmen for help. Granted, most are trying to be helpful but I've definately overheard advice that makes my stomach cringe.
Kjella
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I'd like a digital camera that responds as quickly as a film camera. I hate holding down the button and waiting for the camera to decide if it will take the picture or not. I want a digital camera that will take the picture when I press down the button not 1/2 to 3 seconds later.
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once in a while, I take a picture that is worth enlarging to 70x50cm or bigger and putting on my wall for that I either need 35mm or a lot of pixels.
.. for ever.
.. will I be able to retrieve data from a 50 year old HD/CD/DVD?
I have yet to shift totally to digital. The combination of a good SLR (Nikon FE) and a filmscanner (Minolta Dual Scan III) is giving 10.8 MP quality.
The good thing with 35mm is that the medium carries the storrage in itself. With Digital you have to set aside HD/CD/DVD-space
I know, that I can develop fresh pictures from 50 year old negatives
One thing I hope future articles touch on is ergonomics. Unlike SLR's, which have had the same basic layout since the Exaktaflex, digital cameras are a hodgepodge of knobs, buttons and dials, laid out (apparently) at random at times. And the difference in features between cameras of the same pixel size can be stunning.
When people as me what's the best camera out there, I usually tell them find one that they find first easy to use, is a camera-brand (better glass), and has a decent image size. No amount of features will make up for a missed photo due to fumbling with a camera, and what's important to me (manual controls, accessory shoe, RAW/TIF, etc) may not be important to them."Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Anything longer than 3x optical zoom requires some optical tirickery, which results in a) higher price if done right or b) lower quality if it's done cheaply. And beyond that, the more glass = slower lens f-stop, means more need to use flash (and shorter flash when you do) or it means having to use a higher IS) equivalent, which means more noise on your pictures (think gain-up).
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
What an excellent point to make!
And how non-obvious!
I mean, who would have thought that whether blue actually looks blue might be a teeny weeny little bit important as well?
Sheesh. And I thought Slashdot was inane before.
If you were making an optical print, it would take 8.6 megapixels to equal the effective resolution of the emulsion on a 4x6" sheet of photographic paper. There ARE inkjet printers out there that will reproduce in excess of 2000dpi, but most people don't spend the $2-10k necessary to have that capability.
So, yeah, knowing they have a at best a crappy 600dpi printer on their desk, they're being idiots, but not complete idiots as in both theory and practice, an 8MP image would look almost as good as a 35mm print... of course, their idea of "35mm print" is also "using a 3mm lens on a $10 disposable camera using $2 film" so, suffice it to say, their idea of "film quality" is already pretty sad.
Sigh...
I think that in additional to the light gathering capability of a good lens, the most valuable factor in getting a good photo is depth of field. There are certain areas of a photo where I just dont *want* detail to show. Once newcomers understand how depth of field allows you to isolate their subjects, a whole new world opens up.
- rabs
I think that demonstrates the problem here perfectly. People are chasing bigger MP, not because 2 or 3 MP wasn't sufficient to give decent looking snapshots, but because they are trying to print those snapshots at home and then comparing them to professionally printed photos from film.
Send your photos off to a professional company, and pay them 20c per photo to print them on their $10,000+ professional laser printer instead of pissing about with your $100 inkjet that is probably costing you more than 20c per picture in overpriced ink cartridges anyway. Then you will see that even 2MP gives at least as good results as a compact film camera, and 3MP with a decent lens probably comes close to a 35mm SLR.
I'm no camera expert, but it seems to me the biggest selling point of APS was how idiot-proof the format was. No 35mm film loading difficulties, no guesswork about how many shots are left on the film, and so forth. The quality didn't match 35mm, but that was never the point. Then along came digital photography and suddenly APS' niche vanished. It was an idea that came too late to catch on, I think.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
The images produced from a DSLR are generally deeper, with superior dynamic range, color depth and detail resolved (albeit smaller numerical resolution).
Right as far as dynamic range and noise are concerned. Wrong as far as "detail resolved" is concerned. A small 8 Mpixel sensor, given sufficient light, will resolve more detail than even the largest 4 Mpixel sensor. Furthermore, in particular for digital SLR sensors, you are better off taking the higher resolution and smaller pixels and removing noise in software than to limit yourself by an otherwise equivalent lower resolution sensor.
Thankfully, some manufacturers have moved beyond pushing megapixels. Cameras that utilize Foveon's X3 sensor produce smaller images, but they are much sharper, as red, blue and green color channels are captured in every photosite, as opposed to the more standard use of Bayer interpolation.
]Foveon's images have not lived up to the hype in tests, and there is no reason to believe that they would. The Foveon sensor really does have 1/4 the spatial resolution of a regular CCD sensor. In return, it avoids some color artifacts and requires a bit less post-processing. But that turns out not to be a very good tradeoff.
Fujifilm is also taking things up a notch by adding a set of photosites just for the purpose of improving dynamic range with their SuperCCD IV SR sensors.
That was a nice idea. It's too bad that it makes very little difference in practice.
Basically, the same kind of people that used to endlessly tout the virtues of film and vinyl records are now out in force making similarly silly arguments about digital cameras.
Yes, you should remember that higher resolution does not guarantee better quality: a lot of factors need to come together. But high resolution also isn't intrinsically bad and low resolution is no guarantee of lower image noise either. Furthermore, companies like Foveon and Fuji are guilty of using inflated pixel counts to make up for what are actually low actual resolution in their cameras compared to similarly priced models--generally, their cameras are just not good deals.
If you want to know how well a camera works, the only way to do it is to look at tests and at real images. And within each market segment, both resolution and quality keep going up, and that is no accident.
And the reason why people want higher resolutions is no accident either: it permits cropping, image processing, big enlargements, and gives people far more flexibility for post-processing. And we can go way beyond 8 or 14 Mpixels before people's thirst for additional resolution will be satisfied.
The sensor is just as important as the lens. I don't care if you lens comes from these guys. Unless you have a decent sensor on the end of it aswell, it's going to be just as crap as a bad lens on a good sensor.
they proceed to tell me it's going to make their 4x6 prints really nice...
If you get a lab to print your JPEGs, they're probably going to use something like a Fuji Frontier, which uses lasers to print onto photographic paper like Fuji Crystal Archive. This is professional-quality printing, and side by side is noticeably better than what even a good home inkjet can do. A Frontier prints at 300 DPI. Tell 'em that anything above 1800x1200 pixels is wasted anyway!
Unfortuately, if you crop out 50% of the image (half of the pixels in each direction) of an 8 MP camera, you are left with 2 MP (0.5 * 0.5 == 0.25).
Since 8 MP cams have usually smaller sensors, this means you get the noisy 2 MP from the center of the image, and you gained only a zoom factor of 2 (50% ==> factor 2!).
and useability are the only things that matter. No one has produced a digital that can come close to my 27 year old Nikon F2, full manual, no auto features. When they do, I'll buy one, but I will not take a step down at the prices a decent digital costs.
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Each of these cameras has a shutter lag of 40-100ms. For most people, it won't be perceptible at all.
What may have happened to these shooters is the Canon shutter "bug" that many sports pros complained about: the 1D lag varies randomly between 70ms and 80ms (10ms of variability), which may mean difficulty getting the timing right for pros who shoot high-action photography and need to be able to anticipate the exact moment to press the shutter. To my knowledge, the forthcoming 1DII is supposed to reduce this variance to +/- 1ms.
Most people who are complaining about digital shutter lag are complaining about delays of a full second or more between pressing the button and taking a shot and the inability of consumer cameras to take a second shot until the image is fully written to the storage card... They aren't usually complaining about a delay on the order of 80 milliseconds.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
so it's all about the quickness, right? ie, you can take the picture and *immediately* have it available on your computer for scrutinizing, etc...
Is there some reason you're so emotional about this?
It is more about being able to see exactly what is on the "film" rather than the quickness -- I can instantly tell if I have to retake a picture. Handy for people such as myself who aren't all that photographically inclined.
Incidentally, it's also why I give the pictures I want printed to a photographer -- He can make them look far better for far less cost to me than I could do myself.
When I was a kid (10 yrs old, as opposed to 20), my dad had me use that companies film in my cheap 35mm camera on our annual shopping trip to Marshall Fields in Chicago. The reason?
If you ordered it, they'd send you back a bootable floppy disk that would run a slide show of your pictures. Something not many people did back in 1994.
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The hottest selling point and click was the Olypus Stylus - a 35mm Camera.
and rightly so. it is by far the best value in small film cameras. the is no other pocket size camera (aside from $1000+ rollei or leicas) that has a 2.8f lens and that can focus in COMPLETE darkness. not to mention having pro/amateur features like half shutter to pre-focus, reframe, release.
fantastic camera.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
You are wrong on several points:
1) White balance is an essential setting on the camera since the manual setting usually requires you to point the camera at a (supposedly) white object to remove color cast. This item is often not in the image, but is a grey-card that you carry with. This would be impossible to do in post-processing.
2) Flash control is essential. Often, I prefer no flash at all. Either that or I use full-on. Auto mode is mostly useless for me, but would be great for people who don't care. Flash is something that cannot be post-processed and something the pros care about a lot. The absence or presence of an external flsh is not enough info.
3) Priority modes are necessary. They allow you to fix one setting while allowing the other to be auto-chosen.
4) RAW files are prohibitively large, and often slow to write to CF card. IF you want to go buy 4GB high speed cards, be my guest, but most people would appreciate some mileage for their cards. This also means allowing lower resolution photos. You get more per card and you don't have to resize them down to share with others.
Yes, it can. I have never heard this criticism before and I can think of nothing that would explain it. Digital cameras have wide color spaces and high dynamic range (from the perspective of this conversation). Color resolution is not and issue in any way.
Films, on the other hand, are frequently unfaithful when it comes to color accuracy and many don't realize it. People often have preferences for film based specifically on the nature of their color "infidelity" and perhaps this explains your issue. Digital cameras are very linear and not hypersaturated. This is not the case for many films.
Regarding ADC resolution, most are 10-12 bits. The new Fuji S3 will have 14 bit ADC's. When an image is converted to a color space (gamma applied), resolution is lost so you can't compare a 16 bit output file to the raw ADC resolution. In any event, output devices don't have the ability to use the extra dynamic range that 12 vs. 16 bit provides so it doesn't really matter. All those bits are for exposure latitude.
APS had the advantage of allowing the cameras to be quite a bit smaller than 35mm before good quality digital cameras were affordable. Of course, these days, anyone wanting a small camera will get a pocket sized 2MP digital camera.
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I bought a 3.1MP digital camera for my vacation in October. Two days into a one month vacation, I wondered how I'd survived without one. I had **750** shots left on the 'roll' on the first morning. I could review the picture to see if it had turned out, and delete and reshoot if the light was bad or something. I could hold the camera in a place where my eye couldn't be against the thing (ie. throgh the fence at the WTC site), and still see exactly what the final picture would look like. On top of that, I took 1443 photos in 30 days. Film developing costs alone would have paid for the camera (let alone the price difference between a digital and an analog, since I needed a new camera anyways), and film purchasing paid for the 1GB memory card. I've taken another 1000 pictures since then, and have yet to develop a single one. And when I do decide to develop 100-200 photos, I only pay for the exact pictures I want developed.
Why digital? Duh!
I think we have cornered a conundrum.
My point is that APS failed in part because it lacked professional viability. There being no commercial use for the product, the consumer use was stifled.
I wholly agree that pros can handle 35mm cartridges - hell they can handle 110 - 220 rolls most of the time. The problem is in the sybiotic relationship betwen consumers and pros.
Pros prove the viability of the system. Galen Rowel climbs a rock in yosemite and takes this awesome National Geographic cover on a 35mm Camera - behind him are a million ameturs trying to emulate Galen Rowel - while many of those would buy a 35mm camera in spite of its inferiority to medium format - how does the APS model ignite this process of stunning example and eager emulation.
What you end up with is an uninspiring product.
The only niche for APS was the elph - the smallest consumer film camera.
AIK