Our brain tells us that Megapixels don’t matter. And probably what cameras can deliver today are already way to much for the use we do. But you know, at the end our devil irrational side will always win and you will be happy to know that STMicroelectronics announced that they “will soon offer products with 100’s of millions of pixels.“
You just ave to take a picture with a wide angle lens and than crop the part of the image you like and still make a huge print of it. No more zooms and tele lenses needed 🙂
Source: ST.com via Image Sensor World.
12 Responses
This sounds promising but the advantages gained would only come at the lofty price of improved glass in the proposed one wide angle lens that can handle the resolution 100+ MP’s can provide.
Also, there is the matter of diffraction. A 100 MP camera needs a very large aperture lens that performs well at large aperture to avoid diffraction effects. That is going to be around f/2.8 on APS-C or f/1.6 on 1″. It is ridiculous to have cell phones with 20 MP sensors already, no improvement over a 5 MP sensor. I have a Sony camcorder with 24 MP 1/3″ sensor, totally useless. It would need an incredibly sharp f/1.2 lens to take advantage of that many pixels. Instead, it has an f/2.9 lens, which means anything above about 5 MP is useless with the sensor size.
Yeah, exactly. You’d also need an incredibly stable platform to take advantage of that resolution.
As I’m sure you’re also aware, useful density is limited by the wavelength of the light being used as is the circle of confusion due to diffraction. At some point it doesn’t make sense to increase the pixel density further because you simply can’t resolve a sharper image no matter how good the lens is.
Cropping from wideangle and shooting at telephoto are two different things. DoF is different, as is the compression effect. Also, wide angle lenses usually have different optical characteristics compared to telephoto lenses.
O rly? I’m not sure what optically magical world you live in, but I do not think that there is a difference between cropping a wide and shooting a telephoto (apart from the resolution) in this world:
http://www.scottbideauphotography.com/myths-about-lens-compression/
Only thing that matters is subject distance.
So the compression is the same, but DoF would be different ***for the same f number***. That’s because a particular f-number on a wide angle actually represents a smaller aperture because wide lenses gather more light per unit area of the sensor. The f-number is such that the light gathered is the same, not the size of the aperture.
This is why smaller sensor cameras at equivalent focal lengths and the same f number have smaller depth of field. The same happens when you crop.
Compression, on the other hand, is strictly a consequence of perspective which depends only on where the lens/camera is relative to the subject.
Applying Lytro’s technology, even DoF may be massaged in such huge images. The old ways wouldn’t even matter.
That is only true assuming perfect lenses, with no distortion, no chromatic aberrations.
Wow, huge files coming ?:)
But I like this, after all.
I don’t think that this is a bad thing – The read and write speed of various types of memory/storage has been increasing incredibly over the last couple of years, which means that file size isn’t going to be a bottle neck in the future. There might be a problem with the optics, but as far as i remember there have been talks about lenses with liquid elements which should be able to handle the diffraction (?). But until then camera systems like the lytro light field camera will benefit hugely from sensors with more megapixels.
BTW isn’t the company Italian and French?
it’s heart warming to know that we can do things better than the Japanese.
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Photo & Poetry
http://amalric2014.blogspot.it/
Having used a large format camera I have found advantages that have nothing to do with emotion. These are:
1. Ability to crop, effectively expanding the utility of every lens you own. (Why buy a 50mm and 100mm lens when you can crop any 50mm image to same image area as a 100mm at the same resolution as a “Normal” resolution camera? And you do not have to change the lenses to get this affect. Same principle works on any lens you use)
2. Ability to down sample the image, greatly improving image clarity in high noise / low light situations. This greatly increases the useful ISO range that you have available to produce quality images.
3. High resolution images, useful in themselves.
4. Ability to produce multiple scenes from a single image.
5. Reduction in loss of micro detail due to Interpolation from bayer sensor pattern processing.(I believe the elimination of Interpolation in cameras, e.g. Sigma Foveon, is fundamental to improving digital image quality.