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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.
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.
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.
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.
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*!
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."
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.
All of the digital SLRs (i.e. Canon D30/D60/10D/1D/1Ds/300D, Nikon D1X/D1H/D2H/D100/D70, Fuji S1/S2/S3, Olympus E-1/E-10/E-20, Sigma SD-9/SD-10, Pentax *istD, Kodak DCS-14N) will essentially let you click and take photos as fast as you can, zero delay, not feeling any different from an SLR film camera at all.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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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