Camera-maker Olympus is to focus on improving sensor quality instead of cramming in more marketingpixels: “Twelve megapixels is, I think, enough for covering most applications most customers need,” said Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging’s SLR planning department. [ZDnet]
“Screw megapixels!” he shrieked, throwing his brandy into the fire
8 Responses to “Screw megapixels!” he shrieked, throwing his brandy into the fire
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In the lemon market, this is what happens — people cling to old technology they know, *because* the new technology is unreliable!
Of course, it’s not the technology that’s unreliable, but the industry behind it.
20 megapixels through a crap lens onto a crap sensor won’t help your art anonymous. Sorry. This is mainly about point and shoots anyways.
More megapixels is all well and good, but two things are necessary for it to be at all worthwhile: good enough lens so that the picture is sharp right down to that tiny pixel size, and big enough sensor so that each pixel is big enough in relation to the wavelength of the light hitting it! Even with a theoretical ‘perfect’ lens (frictionless, massless and spherical, as well as perfect optically), the sensor can’t detect light accurately if the pixels are too small. See http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm for more on that. My 6 megapixel DSLR is already approaching that limit with some apertures!
Fujifilm was doing this with the SuperCCD sensor in their FinePix F30 & F31fd models. The camera had a cult following among professional photographers looking for an easy point & shoot to carry. The sensor design greatly increased low light performance. I love mine.
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilmf30/
Fine.. MOST people don’t need more megapixels, but as an artist who uses digital photos as his source material, I look forward to the day when I can make prints larger than 11 x 17 without them looking “muddy”. Give me more megapixels. MORE.
This looks like a step in the right direction. I am still not buying it. I have been using film for over 10years and will continue to use film. If you want photos larger than 11×17 35mm film can do that with ease. The images I get from scanning film typicaly have over 30million pixels with a color fidelity that I have yet to see matched by a digital camera. Digital is ok for point and shoot but if you want art and prints larger than 11 x 17 or a better ability to crop and enlarge film is still king.
About time an actual camera maker set the foot down and told the truth. I stopped caring about megapixels a long time ago.
Come on, more megapixels means you can better capture the flaws in the cheap plastic lenses!
And how can they continue driving the demand for higher capacity, faster memory cards. After all, there’s only so many photos to take!
Thank you, Mr. Watanabe, for stopping the rat race. Let’s work on quality, not quantity.