What to Fight Over After Megapixels?

NewScientist has a quick look at where the digital image crowd is headed now that the megapixel wars are drawing to a close. Looks like an emphasis on low-light performance and color accuracy in addition to fun software tools are the new hotness. "For years, consumers have been sold digital cameras largely on the basis of one number - the megapixels crammed onto its image sensor. But recently an industry bigwig admitted that squeezing in ever more resolution has become meaningless. Akira Watanabe, head of Olympus' SLR planning department, said that 12 megapixels is plenty for most photography purposes and that his company will henceforth be focusing on improving color accuracy and low-light performance."

Comments

It's all about the optics again.

[Dr. Spork]

As was the case in the 35mm film days, the cameras that are best are the ones with the good lenses and good auto focus mechanisms. Secondary are good light meters. The pixel density is definitely high enough at 12M. At the start of digital photography, the CCD was definitely the primary bottleneck for picture quality. But those days are definitively over.

Cropping is a big win for pixel count

[davidwr]

I can't tell you how many times I've looked at a picture, analog or digital, and wished I could turn a small part into a poster.

Back in the day, that's what they used large-format film for.

Imagine if a movie editor could decide, in post-production, to "zoom 10x closer" in on a subject?

Just because you can't benefit from them when viewing "full frame" doesn't make extra pixels worthless.

Besides, even if you aren't cropping, to emulate the resolution of 35mm at 100 a typical line-pair-per-mm resolution, you'll nominally need 5000 dots per inch, or 33 megapixels. I'd prefer 4x as many to handle worst-case situations. Now, in practice, how many of our photographs wind up as 2' x 3' posters? Not many. If the biggest you will ever enlarge is 1/3 of that, then your resolution can drop to 1/9th. Depending on how demanding you are, you won't need more than 4-16 megapixels to produce a nice 8"x12" print. Consumer- and pro- 16 megapixel cameras are here today.