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

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.

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.

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.

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.