Olympus declares 12mp is enough

swintonphoto

Interesting article - in line with my thinking for years:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-10189546-39.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Tee Why

I agree, for most uses 12MP is enough.
It's really nice in a full frame format IMO.

Toshido

Say what you will but I am looking forward to going from 8 to 15 with my jump from XT to 50D.

ziggy53

Anybody remember when 6MPix in a dSLR was just, "wow"?

Robinivich

Hooray!

Too bad that this is only the 2x crop manufacturer setting limits on megapixels.

4/3rds has a sensor surface area of 2.43 cm square

Canon APS-C surface area 3.32 cm square

Full frame is 8.61 cm square

If 4/3rds says 12mp is enough, that's like canon stopping it's APS-C lineup at 16 megapixels or so, and the full frame limit being set at a whopping 42 megapixels...

I wish I could confidently say they'd stop APS-C at 16 megapixels, but they've already got the G10 with a 0.43 cm square sensor at practically 15 megapixels...

Malte

I heard somewhere tha a small format colour positive contains silver granules equivalent of a 13 MP sensor. I don't remember any details on this, such as film speed which would be interesting, but it does say something about the pixelrace.

Malte

pathfinder

I was about to say that I disagree with the premise that 12 Mpxl is enuff, but then I realized that the 5D is 12.8 and it seems very adequate after all, but then so is the G9 ( 12.1 Mpxls )

It really, REALLY does depend on the quality of the individual pixels. Generally speaking, bigger pixel wells are less noisier.

Robinivich

pathfinder wrote:

I was about to say that I disagree with the premise that 12 Mpxl is enuff, but then I realized that the 5D is 12.8 and it seems very adequate after all, but then so is the G9 ( 12.1 Mpxls )

It really, REALLY does depend on the quality of the individual pixels. Generally speaking, bigger pixel wells are less noisier.

Also remember they're not saying that 12 megapixels is ALWAYS enough, just that for the typical user it's plenty. There are people out there shooting medium format monster cameras who certainly would argue they need more than 12...

ziggy53

Robinivich wrote:

Also remember they're not saying that 12 megapixels is ALWAYS enough, just that for the typical user it's plenty. There are people out there shooting medium format monster cameras who certainly would argue they need more than 12...

... and those large format people who use scanning backs and scan large-format film. That's the good stuff.

... and then there's our own Baldy, not happy with 21MPix, who pastes together hundreds of images:

http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=101529