How much resolution is enough on a DSLR sensor?
Monday, September 1st, 2008
Johnathan Harrell on How much is enough resolution on a DSLR sensor: The Race Continues…
Frankly, I like his writing better than his linked to Digital Photo Pro article: Megapixels: How Much Is Enough? which, while supporting his conclusion that more isn’t always better, isn’t well written and is hard to read.
His post is made in response to Canon announcing their 50D camera with a 15 megapixel sensor. To give you an idea of why he (and I) are concerned about this, look at this diagram of sensor sizes.
The Canon 50D has a APS-C (22.2×14.8mm) size with 15 million pixel sites on it. The Canon 5D has a 35mm “full frame” (36×24mm) size with 12 million pixel sites on it.
The thing that concerns many of us about putting too many pixels on a given size sensor is noise and the quality of the image that sensor will produce. Even if Canon solves the noise problem there is another and that is, how much resolution does a photographer need or want? If the RAW images coming off a given sensor are so big that one needs new digital media, a new hard disk, and an upgraded computer to deal with them, all for the possibility of printing pictures that one will never print, or radical cropping which one will rarely do, what’s the point?
Frankly, I don’t want much more resolution than my current Canon 5D has, in fact, I could do bit a bit less and would no doubt be happy with it for much of the photographic work I do.
The next year is going to hopefully bring many of these ideas to a head and we may see Canon giving up some ground to Nikon who hasn’t gone crazy putting too many pixels on their sensors on their cameras.
Richard, I guess file sizes should not really be a problem. We can now buy 500GB Portable USB Hard Drives for about USD 250 here in india, i assume these are going to cheaper in india. I have 2 one terabyte SATA 2 (3.0 Gb/s) disks on my PC which cost about USD 220 each and a 500GB Portable USB 2.0 Drive that i carry while i travel (although this USB one is not that fast as one can expect).
Days will not be far away when SSD disks are going to be common and data transfer rates pitch up to 6.0Gb/s. Infact, we can expect those in 1 year with the SATA 3 and USB 3.0 spec that is under beta.
Dilip: it’s all relative. With the computer and storage I have now, doing the things I do with both photography and everything else, I don’t want bigger files, I want smaller if anything.
How many prints have you made that required 15 megapixels? Have you ever made a print bigger than 16×24 inches? The extra resolution, while useful theoretically isn’t all that useful to me in actuality. I’m quite happy with where things are right now. What I’d like is better high ISO handling and even better color dynamics of the current sensor, not those things on top of a huge increase in resolution.
That’s just me, others will want the resolution but for what?
The Too much megapixel argument is Damn Right, 15 mega pixels is something i would not really need. I’m quite happy with 12 megapixels if i can have it. I’m although aware of people who sell on stock, which require an uncompressed file size of 48 MB (namely sites like alamy) and 15 megapixel will easily give that size when you export from CR2 format to TIFF or PSD.
Right now my 10 Megapixel Sensor will fetch 28.9 MB files in uncompressed format. 15 MP will easily do 54MB or something close to that, thereby reducing the need to use interpolation software that introduce interpolation artifacts into the images.
What i’m concerned though is the lack of input canon seems to be taking from its customers. For example, canon is stupid enough to do the following things that nikon does not or other vendors like sigma, tokina or tamron dont do.
1. The Direct Print button, have you ever in your life shot something and printed a large picture of it right to your printer, wireless? I mean, that button could be a mirror lock button, which has real usage. I spend 15 minutes on an image staring at it and deciding what i want to do with it before i upload to flickr, printing is another story altogether.
2. Lens caps dont have centre press type buttons so that you can remove and replace lens caps when you have your lens hood on. Cheap lens makers like tamron and sigma have this. Canon thinks too smart of itself to not make such trivial changes that would help make my life so easy using their lenses with hood.
3. Auto-Update feature for Canon DPP software in windows. We windows users are so used to this, any good software has this. DPP has updates you need to download and install. Suppose you have version 2.0 disk with you and 2.5 is released and then 3.0. You gotta install 2.0 from your CD, download 2.5 update (hopefully if its not removed by then from the canon site) and then the 3.0 update. It all seems stupid to me. I would at least expect to download the entire 3.0 full blown installable version off the site but i’ve never seemed to find it. My new 400D body (2nd one) came with a newer version of the software and thats how i got the newer full version.
4. Usable ISO on low end prosumer DSLR bodies are crap. On my 400D the real usable ISO is 400. 800 and 1600 are utter rubbish. Nikon handles this so well. I tried the D80 camera and it renders so much noiseless images at ISO800 compared to the canon counterpart.
There are many more but most of them are trivial and i don’t know how to use some, like for example, unavailability of spot metering in the 400D which even small point and shoots have these days.
I do however love the line-up of lenses Canon has and this probably will be the reason why i love shooting canon. At this rate though, if canon does not really do away with problems like this, i guess i might as well upgrade to full frame by changing over to Nikon. I really hope, the 5D replacement which i’m eagerly awaiting to buy has none or at least lesser of some of these problems. I guess the high ISO is probably dealt with but i don’t know what the real usable ISO is.
I assume you rented the 50D? How good is the Usable ISO on it? The new 5D replacement may very well sport the same ISO range.
Dilip: Yes, I have used the direct print button. I know it’s hip to be against it but it’s useful for some people. Canon’s sensors deal with noise quite well, at least they did until recently.
No, the 50D isn’t even out yet so I’ve not rented it nor will I. I’ve only rented the XSi which I loved but then when I bought one the image quality and auto focus wasn’t too good.
For me, the 30D and 5D are sweet spots for the sensor, I just want all the nice new ergonomic features on cameras with lower resolution.