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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."
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
"12 megapixels should be enough for anybody." - Akira Watanabe
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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.
I suspect there will be a need for quite some time, for some purposes, to keep increasing the resolution. Usage (at least in some subset of people) will adapt and innovate. After all, if all the digital camera was for was to replace those 4x6 prints you all have in your photo albums, 3 MP would have been the end of it.
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.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
god damnit, I'm tired of having to risk getting arrested just to get a blurry up-skirt shot, I want to be able to have my camera see through anything!
Monstar L
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.
Optical SVG - the ultimate! Forget pixels. Have cameras sketch accurate SVGs of a scene with the ability to show or print at any resolution.
Good luck with that one. It's a lot harder than it sounds. Try tracing a simple 2-color bitmap in Inkscape sometime and zoom in real close. Now try tracing a full-color, full page photograph in the maximum number of colors possible.
Oh, BTW, hope you got lots of RAM and time to wait....
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http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/
http://www-bcs.mit.edu/people/jyawang/demos/plenoptic/plenoptic.html
I want the following from a digital camera...
1. Small phyiscal size (I wanna slip it in my pocket).
2. Good image quality
3. Good telephoto lens.
4. ???
5. Profit (sorry, couldn't resist)
Currently I use a Canon G9, but I'm sure they can do better!
Pick 2...and small physical size isn't an option yet
1. Small phyiscal size (I wanna slip it in my pocket).
3. Good telephoto lens.
I think those two are mutually exclusive.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"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.
When i last upgraded my camera, the megapixels didnt change much, thats not what i was interested it, but it went from a 3X to a 12X optical zoom, there is alot of stuff out there that is worth taking a picture of, but is too far away to get a decent picture of, obviously if you go much higher you are going to need a tripod, or better image stabalisation, so i wonder how long before people want better zooms for their holiday and wildlife snaps, with better image stabalisation to support it
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.
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.)
That's as good as anything to get a 1-data-point comparison on camera sensors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range)
Real -quality- factors, such as low light performance, color accuracy, etc, are a lot harder to quantify.
dave
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?
The cameras need built in AIs that talk to you.
"Beep! This image is framed poorly."
"Beep! The subject requires better lighting."
"Beep! The subject needs clothes. Seriously. This is not porn material."
"Beep! The current angle will not sufficiently capture the dark and depressive mood for which you were aiming. I have wirelessly ordered you some Zoloft."
"Beep! Wow, that's just... really... may I suggest a different hobby?"
"Beep! This camera will now self destruct to save your family, friends and the world in general from your mind numbingly boring vacation photography. You have 30 seconds to reach minimum safe distance."
As someone who shoots weddings as a side business, I don't need any more megapixels. For me, it's all about low-light performance. I'd like to be able to shoot in a dim church without having to resort to flash. I currently shoot a Nikon D200, which is 10 megapixels. That is plenty for everything I do, even enlargements. I'm saving up for a D700 which has incredible low-light performance. I've seen shots taken with the D700 (or D3, which has the same sensor) at absurd ISOs like 3200 or 6400 that have as much noise as my D200 has at ISO 800.
More megapixels actually introduces the (relatively small) problem of storage. More megapixels = larger filesize = I need to buy more compact flash cards and long-term storage. But, this isn't a huge problem since storage is relatively inexpensive.
What to Fight Over After Megapixels?
Simple. Gigapixels.
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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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The megapixel size, like the battery life, the clock speed on a CPU, the amount of memory, etc, is mostly used in ad copy to make people think they are getting a better product. In most cases what has in fact happened is that designers put in a badly integrated laundry list of features so that even though the components sound good, it end up being a cheaply made crap product. We see this, for instance, in computer with fast processors but slow front side buses.
The point where it is going to make sense to go to a higher megapixel count is when we move to a full size 35X24mm CCD. What is happening right now is that the pixel density is getting so tight, we are not seeing appreciable quality. Additionally, I don't think the current CCDs utilize the full field of the lens. Right now cameras like the D3X is relatively expensive, but as production ramps up we may see cameras that use the full size CCD appear in the 2000 price range. At that point the 25-30 megapixel will actually be useful. The density will drop from 4000 pixels per square mm to 3000 pixels per square mm. I have seen no definitive answer on this, but some have suggested that the CCD goes as high as 4000, the noise can become a big issue.
Which is just to say, the megapixel war for the past couple years has been a gimmick, and what we might be asking for instead is larger CCD and better optics, even if the number of pixels does not change.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
Startup time to first shot. Expect to see lots of fudged numbers there, where they'll do start up to LCD screen on, or to first shot in "super crappy mode", or fast first shot, but massive reload times.
Battery life. It'll be marketed as "Get X thousand shots from a single battery" (in super crappy mode writing to a propritary format on a low-energy drain SD card using nucluar powered batteries that the end user does not have access to)
UI. Roll out the bells and whistles that let you wipe out Granny's redeye right on the preview screen. Omit the fifteen button presses it takes and the five minutes of camera-cpu processing time. I'm sure the words "warm" and "natural" will be used somewhere.
Interconnectivity. Snap a shot, have it instantly wifi 2.0'd to you faceblog picturebucket. 3G service fee extra.
Thinness. Our camera is thinner than our competitor. Oh, snap! (With snap being the sound your camera makes after parts warranty expires)
UTF-8: There and Back Again
16*20*300*300 = 28.8 megapixels.
I agree that 12 megapixels is fine for most people who never make big enlargements (or for those who do, do not care about viewing detail in these prints from a couple feet away).
Heck, I still shoot 4x5" large format simply because the quality is amazing even in a 8x10 print. They say the eye can only resolve 400dpi or so, but my prints say otherwise. 4x5" sheet film scanned at a modest 2000dpi gives (4*5*2000*2000) 80 megapixels.
The dynamic range of our linear sensors is the weakest part of the chain. Film sucks compared to modern digital in all ways except their response curve: many films don't capture light levels in a linear way, so they can discriminate details in the clouds in a bright sky even while capturing details in the shadows. Almost all digital sensors are on the order of 9~12 stops of acceptable dynamic range, and they've been there for nearly a decade.
Cameras tend to expose for the midrange automatically. To avoid blowing the highlights, which is very visible on a screen or printout of our photos, we have to artificially adjust that exposure, called "stopping down," until we capture details in the highlights, at the expense of detail in the shadows.
There are some combinatorial techniques to achieving high dynamic range; you take multiple exposures and mathematically or artistically mix them to achieve both shadow and highlight details. But this technique is not well suited to movies or still-shots of moving scenes.
Sensors need to get a LOT better at achieving a dynamic range of 20 stops or more.
[
P.S. - and an INDUSTRY STANDARD RAW file format!
I'm out of mod points, so I can't help there, but damn straight, get the dynamic range up there.
Right now, cameras can't get even close to the mark 1 eyeball where dynamic range is concerned.
I'll raise you on the wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging
Yes, there are people "abusing" the HDR process and producing things that "just don't look right" to many people, but done right, it's awesome.
This should be in the camera, not in post-processing SW.
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.
For a 16x20" print at 300dpi, 16MP is woefully inadequate. You'd need about 33 mega pixels. 300dpi is photo quality, btw.
"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?
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Um, not quite. If you want to have the same magnification, you have to make the focal length / sensor size constant, so your position relative to the subject doesn't change, so the whole "Light decreases at the square of the distance." bit is irrelevant.
The focal length compared to the diagonal size of the senor determines what is considered "telephoto".
The aperture ratio (or f-stop) says how much light the lens gathers per unit area of sensor, and is irrelevant of sensor size, but is very dependent on focal length. (It is focal length / appearant pupil size) A shorter lens can get away with a smaller virtual entrance pupil.
So a 10mm f/2.8 lens could be very small, and given a small enough sensor that could be a good telephoto.
On the other hand, a 100mm f/2.8 is about 10 times bigger, and on a APS-C sized sensor that is a moderate telephoto.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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.
Actually for professional looking photos, sensor size does matter, again as the result of basic physics. You can downsize the sensor all you want but you can't downsize the wavelength of visible light. Come on Pentax, Mamaiya, Rollie or somebody, please release an affordable digital medium format camera!
I mean *really* faster. I recently acquired a professional-grade digital SLR and was astonished to find that the "3d matrix motion sensitive autofocus tracking" or whatever it's called, wouldn't accurately track a dog chasing a ball. The camera would graciously show me the autofocus points of successive frames -- clumps of grass, small pebbles, a trash can, and occasionally the actual subject. It was somewhat surprising to me that, to get accurate focus of moving objects, I could get better results by turning off all the "moving object" settings and rely on my own targeting skills. With all the computer power at our disposal, the durned camera should be able to recognize, not just distance and color and lighting, but the *shape* of the object I first targeted, and then track that object for successive shots as it moves around on the screen.
I've ranted about this on other subjects, but it's worth a small rant here: stop making memory -- in this case the memory buffer -- a selling point to get you to pay for overpriced pro models. Memory is *cheap*. The first major company that puts a substantial memory buffer in all their models, enabling a significant number of continuous frames before writing to the card -- is going to clean up. I have a friend who not long ago bought a pair (his and hers) of high-end snapshot cameras (you know what I mean -- fixed lens but mechanical zoom and nice glass) only to find (while on vacation) that the write speed was so poor as to make them unusable in the field. I know, you can fix this a little with faster memory cards, but ram will always be orders-of-magnitude faster than mass storage. This is a cheap addition that makes a huge difference in the user experience.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
As pixel density increases, image quality decreases. These companies are cramming more pixels into the same size sensor. Bigger pixels = better quality. By the same token, I think the wars could (and maybe should?) go to sensor size eventually. There are already several full-frame (35mm film frame sized) DSLR's out there now. The image quality of any of these cameras (even ones with less pixels) will blow any ultracompact point-and-shoot camera out of the water. Bigger sensors = better quality. Bring on the sensor size wars!
m@
Akira Watanabe is playing self-serving marketing games. It is not about any particular number of megapixels, it is about the size of the light well of each pixel, or "pixel density" if you will. That determines the dynamic range and sharpness per pixel. Mr. Watanabe's company has pushed that past their main competitors despite the fact that those competitors have larger number of megapixels in their top cameras. How is it possible? Sensor size. Let's look at some of the offerings today on the market (the smaller the density the better):
So yes, Olympus is now hitting 5+ MP/cm2 on their SLRs despite having much lower number of pixels than Canon with their 5DMkII, Sony A900, or Nikon D3X. This is because Olympus boxed themselves into a smaller sensor (4/3). All the posturing about how 12MP is enough is only designed to hide their shortsightedness.
(BTW, /. seriously needs to allow <pre> tags)
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