Megapixels, what's just right?
ecphotoman
Registered Users Posts: 109 Major grins
I found a website that says 6 is the perfect compromise between pixel density and noise. Anyone have seen this or have any thoughts on this?
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When was that comment written? For a P&S or DSLR?
I like the results people are getting from several of the current 16MP DSLR's. Good ISO range and extra pixels to crop down.
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I started out with an 8mp Prosumer Point and shoot, Konica Minolta A2, but the EVF was terrible for most of my shooting, but for landscapes and other artsy shooting it was great..then my first DSLR was 6mp, also Konica Minolta 7D and I made images that I sold at 30x40, but I am not a high ISO shooter...never was...in my whole life of shooting film, I shot under 10 rolls of film that were over 100 ISO... but digital is not as sensitive as film and now I find I have to go higher to get images that I could get with 100 iso / asa film ...sorry got side tracked a bit...
with a good 6mp camera and Genuine Fractals I could easily make fantastic images that would print 60x80 and up ... but when I came to Nikon the days of the 6mp camera was gone...so in reality your question is moot... ... ... and I am not trying to be trite or anything but we will never see 6mp in new cameras again...but yes the manufacturers could have just as well improved the 6mp sensor to give much greater low light ability and I would have been just as happy as I am now with my Nikon D300...
Forum for Canadian shooters: www.canphoto.net
And Ken Rockwell posted something similar on his site.
The way Ken Rockwell explained it was that they keep dumping more and more pixels onto a tiny sensor which is more or less counter productive. I'm still learning the technical side of things so I could be way off.
I don't agree with it from the practical stand point. Theoretically, it may be accurate but practically speaking you can buy small form factor P&S's with 10MP+ that are far superior to legacy 6MP P&S's. Try finding a small FF 6MP P&S today with a quality lens and superior image processing comparable to what you will find in a Canon S100 or Panasonic Lumix LX5. You won't.
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But the file size tradeoff starts to kick in about there. Speed and space matter to me.
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pp
Flickr
As nice as more megapixels are, I sometimes cringe at the size of my raw files on a 16mp dslr, especially after an event that has 200-400 pictures-- and it only gets worse as pixel count goes higher. On the other hand, I can also crop-to-zoom with great success. So there's always a trade-off.
And of course, the elephant in the room: how many people actually make prints anymore? How many make really big prints? Does MP matter if it's going up on Facebook, or getting resized for a Flickr account? You could (barely) make a nice 8x10 print from a 3 mp camera. (I done it, it works, don't laugh, without uprezzing software.)
I do not believe that you can currently buy a camera with "too few" MP, lower end cell phones and similar devices notwithstanding.
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Absolutely....I also ask how large is your hardrives and how many do you have... The person that bought my 6mp Konica minolta 7D, was surprised at how fast her "C" drive was filling up .... ....:D
I think I'm going to settle on 12-15mp on the next camera I get in the next week or so.
Around 80-150mb depending on the detail in the shot
That's insane, you would need a super computer to process that.
Not really... my 3 1/2 year old laptop with 8GB of RAM could stitch together 350MB+ in RAW files relatively fast for panoramas etc. Did a pan with 21 5D MKII RAWs once and it was done within 5-6 minutes. The main thing is that you'd need enough RAM capacity for processing without using the HDD.
It could be my setup then. I upgraded to a new laptop a year ago and it lags when working with raw. Its tri-core, but the clocks run @2ghz.
Newer cameras have better processing and NR, which alleviates problems from increased pixel density.
Also, if you increase the pixel count in a camera you basically have the same image covered by more pixels. I assume that this would reduce softness caused by demosaicing, and pixel binning would keep noise constant even if per-pixel noise was higher.
Whats your definition of lag? Does it hang a lot or get choppy when you're working on them after loading it in from Camera RAW? It shouldn't really lag or hang at all just editing images normally with simple adjustments once they're loaded into PS.
But 300meg tiffs / layers in PS presumably... (assuming 24bit colour) ?
pp
Flickr
Yeah, an 8 bit TIFF will generally save at 1-3x the size of the RAW, depending on detail. Typically 21MP RAWs I edit are 15-30MB, and the max size of the output 8bit TIFF is 60MB, and 120MB for 16 bit TIFFs... but that's only if every single pixel has a fine sharpness to it. I usually average 30-50MB for my final output TIFF files since I convert them all to 8 bit once the work is complete. If the math is all correct, the 100MP tiffs would have a max size of very close to 300MB.
If you have layers that's a whole 'nother story. That 21 image pano I created was 1.5-2 GB or so before flattening. I don't remember exactly but I know it was north of 1.5GB.
I bet an average 5 frame pano image for the 100MP files would run 1.5-2GB or so before flattened and another few GB would be needed for processing space.