Now that you have a ten-megapixel camera, do you sneer at miserable peons like me who are still limping along with a mere six or seven million? It turns out that you may not be getting the use of all the pixels you’re paying for. There’s an intensely technical debate between Charles Sidney Johnson and Nathan Myhrvold (yes, that Nathan Myhrvold) at The Luminous Landscape (boy, does that site ever wrap some beautiful pictures in some butt-ugly web design). Frankly, I didn’t go slowly enough to follow all the math, but that’s OK, because there’s a tutorial called Diffraction & Photography over at Cambridge in Colour with a working demo where you can see how cranking the f/-stop decimates your pixels. Oh, and while we’re on things photographic, here’s some extreme camera porn.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Anthony B. Coates (Jan 31 2007, at 01:50)
The square root of 10/6 is about 1.3, so a 10Mpixel camera only has 30% more pixels in each direction than a 6Mpixel camera. It's not a huge increase, and you will lose a lot of that increase in resolution if you take your photos as in-camera JPEGs rather than as RAW images. That's before all of the important issue about lenses, lens quality, and diffraction.
Cheers, Tony.
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From: Graham Hay (Jan 31 2007, at 13:35)
Tim, many thanks for this post. Following the links from here led me to discover www.cambridgeincolour.com an awesome site on aspects of digital photography (imaging).
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