On 29/10/2011 13:04, Jake wrote:
On Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:38:08 +0100, stuart noble
wrote:



I'm still on 3.2 megapixels for the always with camera. Never really
felt the need, or seen it as a civic duty, to upgrade :-)

I remember reading not that many years ago that 5 megapixels was about
the same definition as "professional" "film" cameras (remember those?)
and there was no need to go any higher.

OTOH, I have a magazine somewhere from the latter half of the 80s
which maintained that 64K of memory and 120 megabytes of hard disk
capacity would be enough to see me through my lifetime of computing
needs!

In the early 80's you would be able to read in magazines that 640k of
ram in a computer was enough for any conceivable application too.

BTW The magazine was wrong at the time. Depending on the ASA rating of
the film a 35mm slide would hold between 24Mpixels and 12Mpixels of data
and some slower B&W films were better still. Professional photographers
also tend to use 6x7cm as a minimum and half plate negatives for stuff
which would be enlarged to poster sizes.

Kodaks professional PCD film scanning base*16 gave 6Mpixels (amateur)
and base*64 (pro) 12Mpixels - this captures most of the detail on most
film stocks (but not for ultra fine grain slow films used with the best
lenses).

I've taken (what I think are) better shots with the 3.5 megapixel
camera in my mobile phone than with a 10 megapixel camera that the G12
has now replaced. I think there's a lot more to life than megapixels.

Cheers, Jake

The digicam Mpixel race has become somewhat silly these days as
comparatively few zoom lenses are good enough to maintain detail
sufficient to match the latest generation of sensors.

It is an easy number for marketeers to sell hence the race, but once you
go beyond about 8Mpixels with run of the mill lenses the law of
diminishing returns sets in. It is a feature rather than a benefit.

Same with "sharpness" - a lot of P&S camera by default oversharpen their
images. This is because perceived sharpness in benchmarks and reviews
sells more cameras. You see haloes round edges as a result.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown