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.

[poetmatt]

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

All this means is "we want to extort people more putting the same CCD into a product and adding new features, maybe adding a megapixel here and there"

Be on the watch for a federal price fixing lawsuit as there are a lot of under the table agreements on price here.

The real "megapixel war" end is around 22 megapixels after which it currently becomes more expensive exponentially, with current technology. Up until that point, don't believe a word about this stuff. By next year for example, that megapixel threshold will go up a megapixel or two. Not that this means they'll try to extort people any less for the same 9-10MP cameras.

I do agree better quality CCD's and soforth are far more important than megapixel, but this "slowdown" by makers of cameras is voluntary.

Re:Maybe not.

[gnick]

the special 'u' used for microns;

Its name is mu (a lower case Greek letter).

In response to your original post, I think that they're saying that, although the megapixel count is still increasing, it's becoming less important than other aspects of the camera. A 12 megapixel camera with good low-level-light capabilities may be more attractive to a consumer than a 21 megapixel camera with problems in that arena. Still, I don't totally believe that the mass market will stop just buying the camera with the biggest number. It amazes me how many people will drop $1k+ without bothering to do some basic research on what they're buying. Ignorance is bliss I guess - The handful of people I know that have done this are very happy with what they've got despite the fact that they could have possibly done much better if they'd done their homework.

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.

[interiot]

What about the Red Epic 617 that will deliver 261.4 megapixels at 30fps, that's supposed to be available for $53k next spring?

I had thought that Japan's 4320p HDTV (33 megapixels) cameras were nuts, but Red's sensors are pushing far far past that.

Cameras and displays are getting to the point that they push more data than any network we've built (and so are obviously many orders of magnitude faster than the human optic nerve).

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.

[vlm]

integrated GPS for geocoding would be darn handy

How about a built in digital compass that records the direction as part or the filename to help panoramic stitching software, or just because it sounds cool?

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?

How about a shutter response faster than 500 ms? My dads spotmatic and my old K1000 back in the 80s had a shutter response time somewhere around zero (or at least no longer than typical human or video game player reflexes) but my wife's couple year old nikon takes almost a second to take a picture after the button is pressed, almost useless for action shots.

How about a camera that stops shutting off constantly every 30 seconds? Some people take pictures of events that last longer than that, so its just wasting batteries turning on and off over and over. At least put in a menu to shut off the "battery saver" (battery waster, more likely)

How about a tripod mount that isn't made of plastic? Yeah I know the whole cam is plastic, not like the old days, but still, at least some metal threads that won't strip. And make the tripod mount screw deeper than like 3 thread pitch.

What I don't want is cutesy bloatware software for legacy windows boxes... just gimme a SD or CF that plugs into any desktop or wii or laptop anywhere in the world with no weird software install needed.

Also I don't want an irreplaceable and/or unremovable and/or rechargeable battery. I can buy AA batteries anywhere in the world and carry a ridiculous number of spares in my backpack. A rechargeable bettery thats usually discharged or runs out at a bad time or can never be replaced or can't be charged in less than 15 minutes is useless for me. And that applies 10x for mp3 players too. Its not like the "expense" of batteries will bankrupt me compared to the staggering expense of good equipment. And make the camera compatible with 1.2 volt rechargeables not just 1.5 volt alkalines.

I also don't want effort put into stupid sounds that make it sound like an old polaroid when you press the button. I want it silent for wedding/baptism photos or photos of pets/animals/hunting. Or at least a mostly inoffensive beep. Or at worst, an easily found speaker I can tape over. Please god no "ringtones" for the camera shutter sound.

Re:Maybe not.

[elrous0]

Poor light performance has ALWAYS been the biggest problem I've had with digital cameras. What good is a million megapixels when you can't even see your subject without shooting in direct sunlight? Low light performance has always lagged behind on digitals (most of them I've bought over the years have had the light performance of equivalent of about 200 ISO film).

Re:Maybe not.

[kimvette]

That pixel count doesn't mean jack if it's loaded with noise, or has been smeared into a blurry mess by noise reduction filters. I'd rather have 10MP and usable ISO 1600, ISO 3200, and ISO 6400 modes where noise is unnoticeable.

Re:Maybe not.

[ColdWetDog]

As I said, current technology shows that about 20 megapixels for consumers. However, there are professional cameras far in excess of 50MP. I suspect this will take about 5 years for consumer cameras that aren't at obscene costs to get to that point (20+ MP). We're not talking DSLR, I'm talking pocket cameras that people carry.

But putting anything above 10 megapixels in a tiny form factor is a total waste. I shoot with a Nikon D2x and D300 - both 12 megapixel cameras. With these cameras and decent lenses you need excellent shooting skills to really tax the quality of the file. That means fast shutter speeds and decent glass. Neither of which are common on the low end cameras. Even with a fairly fast shutter speed, say 1/200 with a 50 mm lens, you can often see visible differences between a hand held shot and one set up on a tripod. There is that much data in a 12 megapixel file. Of course, that is pixel peeping which most point and shoot camera users won't do.

Big files slow the camera down - more data to push through. Slower overall response. More battery used. Bigger files, harder to email. Not saying that the manufacturers won't try this, but it's pretty pointless. There are lots of other ways to improve picture quality - better high speed capability, stabilized lenses, better optics.

Re:Maybe not.

[Registered Coward v2]

I think the people who would drop a K on the biggest MP number are also most likely to be the ones taking pictures of junior's T-ball games and birthday parties, and probably not people who especially care about the quality of the picture in the same terms that a "prosumer" photog would.

I'm amazed at the number of people I see with an 1K dSLR body and a $300 lens (usually a 50 - 300 zoom); and then complain about the quality of their pictures.

Of course, those are generally the same people that see my setup and say "What a nice camera; I bet it takes great pictures."

I advise people to spend 2/3's of their budget on glass and the rest on a body; especially since glass is an investment beyond the body. I suggest last year's dSLR body at fire sale prices is a better bet since you can always upgrade later; and most year or two old bodies are good enough for most uses. Heck, my original dReb is still a great camera.

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

[dgatwood]

Colors are always off. No two CCD brands are color calibrated in the same way. If you want accurate color, just shoot in RAW mode, then create or obtain reasonable color profiles for the camera and all your devices, at which point it's a non-issue. If your camera can't shoot in RAW, there's your problem.

As for low light response, the easiest way to get better low light response is to use bigger optics. The light gathering of optics is directly proportional to the area of the lens (the square of the radius of the lens). The big problem we have is that camera makers are trying to use progressively smaller lenses for easy portability, and that is directly contrary to the goal of improving low light response. They have to make huge strides in response just to break even.

Until the quest to keep making cameras smaller stops, the low light performance will continue to regress. It's basically unavoidable. At best, you could improve the noise response in low light by using Peltier junctions or something to cool the chip, but there goes your battery life.

Quoted in history

[hansamurai]

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

No more megapixels?

[mhn]

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.

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.

Re:16 Megapixels is point of diminishing returns

[ColdWetDog]

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.

What you want is a cheap DSLR. Even the lower end ones (D-40 / D-90, heck even the ancient D-70) have much more responsive shutters. Digicams are for still lifes. The better DLSR's (like the Nikon D-300) have really stunning low light capability. Of course, it could get better, but compared to film and the older digitals it's truly amazing.

I'm sure the manufacturers will try to stuff all of these things into the digicams, but if you can spend the money and deal with a slightly larger camera, the future is here.

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.

Re:HDR? Depth channel? Optical SVG?

[morgan_greywolf]

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....

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.

Re:Low Light

[hankwang]

The performance at low light is ultimately limited by fundamental physics. If you want to take a picture of a scene with brightness L (cd/m2), exposure time t, aperture numebr N, the amount of light reaching the sensor is H = L t /N^2. For example, at 5 cd/m2 (twilight?) and t=0.03 s, N=2.0, we find H = 0.04 lux seconds at the sensor.

That is about 10^16 photons per square meter. Of you cram 10 MP on a 5x5 mm sensor, that is 3000 photons per pixel. Each pixel has a color filter that on the average transmits 25% of the photons, which means 750 photons per pixel. Simple Poisson statistics means that you get a noise that is 1/sqrt(3000) = 4% for these numbers. That is if the sensor has 100% effectivity and no electronic noise.

The next number to fight over: Dynamic Range

[david.emery]

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

AI

[Quiet_Desperation]

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."

What else?

[Tarlus]

What to Fight Over After Megapixels?

Simple. Gigapixels.

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

[fyngyrz]

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.

But we're not even close to such a thing. Not by orders of magnitude. Information useful to humans extends down to the limits resolvable by light and beyond into x-rays and so on. Also, as far as "color" goes, into infrared and ultraviolet. That's why whole classes of microscopes and telescopes and long lenses and macro lenses exist; that information is useful and interesting. And there's no reason whatsoever to limit a camera to see what the unaided human eye could see -- that's just silly.

Look at the macro lens market; a good macro lens and a high resolution camera and you pretty much have a microscope, albeit only a moderate one. Check out this little bugger from my salt aquarium, he's only about 50 thousandths of an inch across. The reason we can see him so well is because of the sensor resolution being high and the lens being nothing at all like the "normal" human FOV/resolution.

Re:Compression

[Flaggday]

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.

But 4 megapixels to 8 megapixels isn't doubling the image size, it's doubling the number of pixels. So it is reasonable to expect the file size to double, not quadruple.

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

[sam_paris]

I think you're miss-understanding the original article.

The author isn't talking about the 1/1000000 person who's interesting in taking photos of protozoa on the wall of his fish-tank.

This article is about what is needed for average people taking average photos. Most people (99%+) will never print larger than 20x30 inches and most will never even print that big. Even with a 7MP camera with a decent lens, you can print perfectly fine at that size. I've tried myself and have several great examples.

Given that 7MP can produce great results at 20x30, why does the average person need 12MP? Especially when most of the cameras they use have tiny sensors. You may not realize this but there is no point in squeezes more pixels onto a small sensor because all it means is grainier photos and reduced low light quality. As each sensor receives fewer photons.

The only cameras where going > 12MP makes sense are full frame SLR's where there is obviously a good size sensor and lots of light can be let in. These cameras should the be paired with nice big lenses to make the most of the huge sensor.



TLDR version: Most people are taking vacation snaps and photos of their kids/dog. They don't need anything more than 7MP because they don't actually make any prints big enough to see the additional pixels.

Re:Compression

[arth1]

No, I'm not confusing anything. The more resolvable sensels there are on a sensor, when combined with any given lens, the more detail -- magnification -- will end up in the resulting image. This is physics.

No, it is misunderstanding physics.
The more pixel sensors there are, the more space there will be between them relative to the total area. Increase the number of pixel sensors, and you reduce the area that's covered by sensors.

Take star photography as an example -- if the light from a star hits between two pixel sensors, it won't be registered. It's immensely better that it registers as a faint pixel with less accuracy than it not being registered at all.
Another example is low-light photography, where the base ISO decrease you get by increasing the pixel count leads to more artefacts and a worse result.

To always get a benefit from an increased amount of pixels here, you have to make sure that the amount of border between pixel sensors does NOT increase. But with current technology, it does.

This is, by the way, why I much prefer a Nikon D40 over a D40x. The cameras are near identical, except for the sensor, where the D40 has a 3008x2000 ISO-200 sensor, and the D40x has a 3872x2592 ISO-100 sensor. The D40 is the better camera to use for things like star photography or low light conditions, because a larger part of the D40x sensor is dead space.

dynamic range

[Speare]

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.

Re:My 2 cents

[careysb]

P.S. - and an INDUSTRY STANDARD RAW file format!

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.

Faster autofocus tracking

[roc97007]

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.