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

Maybe not.

[fyngyrz]

The megapixel wars may be drawing to a close, but they sure aren't doing it at 12 mp. Canon's 50D prvides 15mp in an APS-C sensor size, which is pretty tight, but users are achieving excellent results at that density... it just takes decent lenses, of which there are plenty in the Canon line.

15mp in APS-C format is a square sensel of about 4.6 m.

Canon's 5DmkII, on the other hand, is a full frame sensor, and it sports a whopping 21 mp... and does so by only going to 6.4 m, so there's quite a bit of room left there.

The 50D's got some noise issues, but the 5DmkII is a quiet design and they've clearly got some room to go.

So I think Olympus is actually saying that they can't, or don't want to, compete in the remaining space in the megapixel wars; withdrawal, if you will, rather than an actual end.

Re:Maybe not.

[The Phantom Mensch]

I'll agree that the war isn't over yet in the DSLR world, but in the point&shoot world there really is no point in going any higher than they have achieved. If you shove 12 megapixels into a sensor that is 1/4 the surface area of an APS-C sensor you should really couple it with a lens system that is 4 times more precise than the one used on your APS-C camera to get equivalent resolution. But the camera makers aren't doing anything like that. They're putting out junk lenses and big sensors because that's what marketing tells them to do.

Re:Maybe not.

[QuasiEvil]

You're right, my 50D does have some noise. I thought my 40D would become my backup body, but it hasn't. I still like the image quality coming off the 40 better than the 50.

I'd say from here, DSLR designers should start working on noise issues. The pixel density of a 15mpxl APS-C sensor is adequate for almost everything I do, and I'd much rather have lower noise. I've been scanning a bit of old Kodachrome over the weekend, and it's remarkable how quiet, smooth, and colorful K25 really was. If the practical increase in resolution can be shown, working on eliminating Bayer-pattern sensors in favor of sensors capable of RGB at every detector site might be another path of progress (such as Foveon's part).

On the "me specific" feature list, integrated GPS for geocoding would be darn handy, too. Not sure how many photographers would use it, but for those of us who spend a good amount of time out hiking through the mountains with our cameras, it would be easier than juggling a separate GPS and keeping notes (or post-processing everything together).

Re:Maybe not.

[cabjf]

This isn't much different than the Megahertz wars. Chips were getting faster, but at a cost of ignoring just about everything else (plus other bottlenecks prevented the speed from being effective past a point). Now we have plenty of Megapixels (at least enough to be better than consumer grade film was) but the demand has shifted to actually being capable of taking decent pictures.

Re:Maybe not.

[ColdWetDog]

The megapixel market isn't running to a close at all.

But it is getting asymptotic to a maximum. In the DSLR field you have the 20+ megapixel cameras (Nikon D3x, Sony A900, Canon ID Mark III). These are all high end machines which require excellent optics and, more important, excellent techniques to get the most out of the camera. Yeah, you go on the DP reviewsforums and folks will whine about wanting more (although nobody seems to want to pay more...). But like most high end things, you're out of the sweet spot. You end up paying a lot of money for a limited increase in performance. For some, that will be worth it but for the consumer market, 10-12 megapixels is more than enough.

Dynamic range (the ability to hold shadows and highlights in a high contrast scene without a lot of fiddling) has lots of room to grow. That seems to be a tough nut to crack, especially in the smaller sensors.

Re:Maybe not.

[fyngyrz]

You need to print pretty large or crop pretty aggressively to get a significant benefit from extra pixels.

Sometimes, yes, you do. But there's no problem or waste associated with this, and the extra magnification you get with small sensels and good enough glass to resolve to them results in a perfectly usable and quantifiable benefit; resolution. The term "pixel peeper" is a silly one coined by people who can only imagine using the full result of the camera. There's nothing wrong with using the full result, but there's nothing wrong with using a cropped region, either.

For instance, this image of the Orion nebula of mine, taken with a 50D, is a crop that you can't really get much past; I took it at f/2.8 and 200mm, using ISO 6400 and multiple stacked exposures of one second duration. It is only 416 pixels square -- not large at all -- and a lower resolution sensor than the 15mp one in the 50D would have resulted in an even smaller usable crop.

Getting closer - that is, using a longer lens - is problematic, for several reasons. First, as lenses get longer in the same approximate price range, they get slower, so I'd lose my f/2.8 option pretty quickly, or else end up spending a *lot* more for the lens. Secondly, exposure time is limited, as the stars move, or else again, I end up spending more money on a tracking mount (or time building a barnyard door or other homebrew tracker.)

As it stands, the 15 mp of the 50D is directly useful to me in that it gets me a more detailed, closer, image than I would get with, for instance, the 40D, which is 10 mp. I like that.

Basically, any situation where you can't really get any closer to the thing you want to shoot, and you're not filling the frame with the subject, higher resolution sensors help by giving you more detail; you can either use that detail directly, as I do for the nebula shot I linked above, or you can opt to average regions and reduce the noise if the number of pixels really seems to be too many to you, or the noise level seems to demand such treatment.

As with most photography issues, for every person you can find who uses a camera one way, there's someone else who uses it another. Various kinds of noise, spatial resolution, color depth, speed... these are all trade offs with any given sensor technology, and I honestly think there's plenty of room left for manufacturers to push any one at the expense of the others. Olympus wants to go for low noise, I'm all for it -- there's going to be a lot of people who want that above all - but I'm not giving up my 50D's resolution (or my investment in Canon mount lenses) to get it. Plus, it's always entertaining to see what comes next in any one camera's product line. I don't think Canon, the manufacturer of my camera, is likely to be out of places to go quite yet. I'm hoping for a "60D" model that is still 15mp, but lower noise and/or goes beyond the current pushed ISO 12800 limit. If they pull that off, I'll buy.

I'm not sure if I'd buy to go past 15 mp... I've got some good lenses, and 15 mp is really quite a challenge to use well. Plus diffraction blurring affects higher density sensors ability to achieve per pixel sharpness; 15 mp already strongly compromises (via diffraction effects) shots taken at f/11, going past 15 mp is just going to make deeper DOF shots less able to take advantage of the higher densities.

Re:Maybe not.

[Alex Zepeda]

Of course Olympus is saying they don't want to compete in the megapixel race. They can't. Oly is pushing the 4/3 standard which uses the smallest sensors of any common DSLR system. Nikon and Canon have rather compact full-frame cameras available, and are thus able to hype the super high pixel count sensors. Maybe Olympus can compete in other areas, but Fuji's been hard at work with the low light sensitivity (with their SuperCCD) and Sigma's been working with Foveon on high dynamic range sensors (and already have a 12MP equivalent sensor).

This strikes me as similar to AMD claiming that clock speed was a bad performance metric back when their stuff was clocked slower and couldn't quite compete with Intel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Thirds_System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveon_X3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_CCD

Re:Maybe not.

[AlecC]

Having worked in the industry, they are already transitioning to 10bits/sample, and may go to 12, but I really don't expect them to go to 16. And the standard "4k" size is 4k x 3k. Bot of those shrink your numbers a bit. And they haven't really developed the compression for stereo, which ought to be extremely efficient because the two images are nearly identical.

Re:Maybe not.

[Firehed]

That trick is true for pretty much any body when you're shooting RAW. Noise shows up much more in darker portions of the image since there's less raw material (light) to work with. When you intentionally overexpose the image by a stop, you've got twice as much light coming into the camera, so the sensor and processor have less guesswork to do. And of course since you're shooting RAW (combined with the 12-to-14-bit sensor), it's easy to pull that back into a normal exposure and let the computer effectively downsample it while retaining the detail.

But if you're obsessing over noise at ISO100, then you're not focusing on creating a good image anyways. I start to get a bit twitchy about noise in the darker portions of shots at ISO800-1000+ on my 40D, but I'll still go to ISO3200 if that's what it takes to get the shot. Yeah it'll be noisy, but I'll take noisy over not getting it.

Re:Maybe not.

[swb]

More pixels = the option for bigger pictures. So if I want that life-size picture of the naked chick I zoomed into from my dormroom then i should be able....hmm wait, nothing to see here move along.

You joke, but on more than one occasion I've taken a shot of something and realized that a very small subset of something would make a good picture, but there's just not enough pixels to make it a decent picture.

Re:Maybe not.

[ColdWetDog]

Yes, there are numerous HDR programs out there. Even Photoshop has added that function to it's enormous bag of forks and spoons. Current high end DSLRs get about 10-11 stops of range. Many scenes run 15 -20 stops. Getting all or even most of that in one shot would give me more of a reason to upgrade than more megapixels.

Give me both and I'm even happier.

Re:Maybe not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, let's take that to an extreme. I shoot ISO 3200 on my 50D at NBA games as a member of the Miami Heat media. The shots are very usable, and although there's considerable luminance noise in a 100% crop, it's perfectly fine for an 8x10 print; considerably larger than newspapers or magazines generally print.

That wouldn't even have been a remote thought 5 years ago even on a 35mm sensor, and here I am with an APS-C sensor.

Re:Maybe not.

[Lumpy]

How about filenames other than peculiar serial numbers like dsc-12345.jpg? How about an option to use the timestamp as a filename? How about a datestamp and serial number?

the #1 feature needed in DSLR cameras. LET ME CHOOSE THOSE first 3 LETTERS!!!!

when I have a shooting team covering an event I would LOVE to have each camera they use set to their initials for the filename. Or set the event ID, etc....

Honestly the firmware in all cameras, just sucks. they really could add features that pro photographers would kill for and others would find incredibly useful.

Re:Maybe not.

[steelfood]

Do you seriously go to the DP Review forums? Nobody whines about MP. In fact, most photographres using P&S cameras would like theirs capped at 6MP.

But that's because they're mostly serious photographers, who are interested in printing their photos, not in storing them on a disk and pixel-peeping occasionally through a monitor. And there is both a physical limit with prints, and a physical limit with sensors. 6MP, most people on those forum seems to agree, is the sweet spot for a small (> 1/1.6") sensor.

Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

That not surprising. Look at the Amazon reviews for any camera with a huge megapixel count, like the Canon G-10, and you'll see dozens of people complaining that, yes, the megapixels are nice, but the sensor may be noisy or the colours may be off. Too bad the industry didn't give more attention to accuracy earlier. I'd be happy to have a mere 7 megapixels if noise is seriously minimized.

Re:Not surprising

[i.r.id10t]

Not to mention frame rates... be nice to be able to get those big hi-res images at say, 10 frames/sec. Not motion video (that would be nice too) but at least fast enough to have a really nice "sport/action" mode going on...

HDR? Depth channel? Optical SVG?

[boeroboy]

To make the cameras of the future, you gotta have three things (any threebrain fans out there?): 1. HDR - floating point color channels to allow the adjustment of exposure in post. 2. Depth channel - either with stereoscopic setup or range finder. Allows depth of field focus in post. 3. Optical SVG - the ultimate! Forget pixels. Have cameras sketch accurate SVGs of a scene with the ability to show or print at any resolution.

16 Megapixels is point of diminishing returns

[Locke2005]

The accuracy of the human eye is such that you can only distinguish ~4000 pixels in a line while still being able to see the whole picture. 4000x4000=16 megapixels for a square image, or 12 megapixels for a 4:3 aspect ratio picture. Having more resolution than that is only useful if you are going to take part of the image and blow it up or otherwise focus on just a part of the image. So yes, once they achieve 12 megapixels CCDs, they should focus on something else, like speed for example. I have several pictures of "the couch where my daughter was a second ago" because my Nikon Coolpix inserts a huge delay between the time I push the button and the time the picture is actually recorded. Color accuracy would be nice too, or perhaps doing something about the graininess the CCDs seem to exhibit in low light conditions.

Megapixel wars? Were they?

[jw3]

"Fighting over megapixels" -- for someone who knows basics of photography, this is like fighting over which laptop comes with more preinstalled software tools, or number of features a text editor has. Like, there is *some* point of the discussion up to a certain level, and not much after that, and definitely nowadays this is not the most important factor for a decision which laptop to buy. The "megapixel wars" have ceased a long, long time ago in most of photography-related forums.

Except for professionals, 10MP and more is something like audiophily. And definitely an overkill for a pocket camera, where you are much more likely to hit the resolution boundary of the optical system itself (this is why professional cameras tend to be rather large...). Even 3MP (which was standard years ago) is sufficient for many purposes (given a high quality of the lens).

For photographers, the main fetish was and remains The Lens. A good lens may cost an order of magnitude more than your camera body. In the times of analog film, people often referred to the camera body as "film box", disrespecting its features and extras, compared to the importance of selecting the right lens.

I think the whole "megapixel war" issue started because photography became very popular with digital cameras, however people were not yet aware of the more important points -- and started to project what they knew about image quality (i.e. resolution) to what cameras they buy.

Now the knowledge starts to slowly infiltrate the "casual" photographer community. Having a few cameras, they start to notice other things: quality of the lens, haptics (how the camera "feels" in your hands), stabiliser, reaction time (time between pressing the button and the camera making the photo) etc.

j.

Re:Megapixel wars? Were they?

[johnjaydk]

For photographers, the main fetish was and remains The Lens. A good lens may cost an order of magnitude more than your camera body. In the times of analog film, people often referred to the camera body as "film box", disrespecting its features and extras, compared to the importance of selecting the right lens.

Without good (and fast) glass everything else is moth. BUT a D3 still sets You back more than say a 14-24 and a 24-70 combined. Throw in a 70-200 and we're talking more glass than body. All full frame 2.8 of course.

At the sharp end, You really need the new bodies to stay competitive. Noise is all the rage these days and hack's like noise-ninja isn't enough to cut it. You can't always carry around a super-nova when You shoot sports in a poor lit arena (more like a cave sometimes).

Low Light

[cpuh0g]

For me the biggest problem in pt-and-shoots, and in DSLRs to a lesser extent, is not lack of megapixels, but the lack of performance in low-light. The latest D-SLRs from Canon and Nikon, the higher-end ones (not the entry level SLRs) are getting much better, but for the most part, low-light performance of the current CCDs sucks.

More dynamic range, and in-camera scan stiching.

[kimgkimg]

I'd like to see more dynamic range being captured and also outside visible spectrum. You could do some really cool stuff with being able to merge in stuff from an infrared channel (would be great for smoothing skin tones for example.) Also I'd like to see something akin to Sony's panshot mode, but implemented at a larger resolution (Sony's images top out at 1000 pixels of vertical resolution.)

What if digital threw away the film conventions?

[joeflies]

Digital cameras largely carry over the conventions of film, such as ISO film speed. But these notions that higher speed "film" equals noise/grain are going out the window, as newer cameras are able to achiever clean pictures that were impossible to do with film.

Similar notions go that exposure is rated the same way that film cameras did, such as stops above/below aperature+shutter speed.

Suppose if Digital cameras were invented without these notions of what film cameras did. Wouldn't there be a better way to measure aperature, shutter speed, exposure, film speed, etc than the conventions that we have now? Couldn't digital cameras redesign the scales so that they aren't measured in fractions of seconds or tenths of a decimal?

Compression

[goombah99]

although the megapixel count is still increasing, it's becoming less important than other aspects of the camera

For me compression is an issue.

The statement that 12 mega pixels is enough for general use has an information theoretic interpretation. namely for the standard lens fields of view and typical range of distance to target that there is no added information in having finer resolution. Or at least the amount of information useful to humans is diminshing.

Assuming this statement is true then it ought to be that the ideal photo compression algorithm produces the same size image file no matter how many pixels went into it. That is to say a lossy compression algorithm would only be discarding detail of no human interest.

This is not true, the compression does not seem to be getting better. This suggests that the compression algorithms in use are not scaling properly for increased pixels.

Hence more research is needed to find compression algorithms with this property.

I dislike high mega pixel cameras because they are increasing in stored picture size faster than my hard drives are keeping up. e.g. when I went from a 4 mega pixel camera to an 8 mega pixel camera my file sizes became 4 times larger. My internal disk drive did not become 4 times larger in that time so I had to start using external storage. It became harder to squeeze these onto ipods.

But you end up buying these 8 mega pixels ones because even though you might be happy with fewer megapixels, the 8 mega pixel ones take better pictures simply because they have better light sensors, greater sensitivity, anti-shake, and so-forth that the cheap 4 mega pixel cams lack.

Re:Compression

[goombah99]

You are confusing pixels with magification.

Sure we want to maginify things to the resolvable limit. But when we capture the image there may be a practical number of pixels at any given magnification beyond which the information is not really increasing.

for example, when you shoot a photo of you diatom, do you take a photo of the whole ocean with nanometer scale pixel resolution and then blow it up till the diatom is visible. No! you simply maginify till the camera is capturing the volume the diatom is in, then smap the photo using a small number of pixels.

Re:Compression

[SleepingWaterBear]

e.g. when I went from a 4 mega pixel camera to an 8 mega pixel camera my file sizes became 4 times larger.

This is normal. When you double the resolution, you double it in 2 dimensions. (Height and Width) This results in a four-fold increase in data size.

Actually, this is just plain wrong. A camera's megapixel rating specifies how many million pixels it stores, and should scale linearly with file size. So, for example, assuming a 3:2 aspect ratio (which I understand is pretty common), a 4 megapixel camera would produce images with a resolution of approximately 2450x1630 (I'm rounding to the nearest 10 pixels), and an 8 megapixel camera would produce images with an approximate resolution of 3460x2310. So both dimensions aren't in fact doubled. (They're multiplied by root 2 for those keeping track)

If an 8 megapixel camera is producing images four times as large as a 4 megapixel camera it must be using less effective compression.

300dpi photo quality.

[Samschnooks]

If you want to print at 300 dpi, which is photo quality and what publishers want, you would need at least 8 MP to do an 8x10" print at 300dpi - minimum for most publications. Now if you want to submit something to a poster company, they want a 20x30" print at 300dpi - which you'd need the $50,000, 50MP Hasselblad H3DII-50 which might be enough. You'd probably better off with film (120 at least) at that size and resolution.

Here's a chart to see how many MPs you need for photo quality digital prints.

Of course, that doesn't take into consideration noise, dynamic range, or color accuracy of the sensor.

Re:So how much is enough?

[Hanyin]

Now they just need to bring the price down where I can afford it - a $50 35mm camera is still the cheaper option.

That depends on how much film you plan to get developed over the lifetime of your camera. I was using 35mm film for a while but ended up saving quite a bit after making the intial investment to go digital. Also worth noting is that my skill in taking pictures definitely went up as I could immediately see the results.

Megapixels of 1080p HDTV and 8x10 prints

[tepples]

"12 megapixels should be enough for anybody." - Akira Watanabe

For comparison, 1920x1080-pixel HDTV is about 4 Mpx: 2 Mpx for luma and about 2 for chroma. An 8x10 print at 150 lpi has a similar pixel count. True, more Mpx in a consumer product lets you do more digital zoom after the fact, but what else is it good for?

User Customizability

[Animaether]

oh wait, NEVER gonna happen.

What I mean isn't so much hardware as firmware, by the way... basically you can deconstruct a cameras into 4 pieces..
1. Lens.
2. Sensor
3. Body
4. PU+Firmware

dSLRs already have interchangeable lenses.. although you can't put a canon mount one on a nikon mount one, for various reason beyond the "we like them to be exclusive, thus causing lock-in, because nobody is going to switch to Nikon after buying $3,000 in Canon mount lenses" crap...

The sensor you currently can't easily exchange.. if you tried, most like you'll have destroyed your focus.

The body is what it is, unless you want to take a hacksaw to it.

Leaves the firmware. There is so much room for customizability in firmware that I don't even know where to begin with that. I'll just point to DD-WRT and its ilk as great examples of what can be done when a device can be completely customized in terms of internal behavior.
No longer would I be limited by whatever shutter time presets are in the firmware.. if it offers nothing inbetween 1/750 and 1/1000, I'll just load firmware that gives me 1/800, 1/850, 1/900 and 1/950 as well.
If the auto exposure mode currently favors closing the aperture over shortening the exposure time, and I want it the other way around, I would no longer be SOL - I'd just load the firmware that gives me that.
If I want to reprogram the various modes on the dial so that I can quickly switch between 3 common setups I use so that I no longer have to enter manual mode and adjust 3-4 options myself (aperture, shutter time, ISO, white balance), then I -could-.

But, again, it'd make a whole range of cameras obsolete and makes people less likely to buy a future model if their current model can already do it with a firmware change... so, NEVER gonna happen. Not from the big names anyway.