Food for Thought
There's a point to this story.
Some memory shots came up on Catherine's cell phone of a maternity job we had done for a client 10, or more years ago. What's interesting, and the point I want to bring up, is that these rather large canvas prints were produced off of a 12 megapixel camera, the Nikon D300! The larger of the 4 canvas's was 2 foot by 3 foot! Whereas the others were (I believe) 16x24 canvas's, and also quite large. Proof that a great number of megapixels is not needed to produce large images. And here's the rub, most people don't print at all, or maybe only 4x6 images when they do....so why does anyone need 40, 50, or 60 megapixels in the first place? Well, the manufacturer's will have you believe more is better, and it's a great marketing ploy. And no different with the average computer that people really need. Unless you are doing some serious number crunching, or scientific work, or playing high end video games, why do you need the fastest, super duper processor on your computer? For most people's needs a very average performing processor is more than adequate to produce some simple documents, or view things on the internet. Actually, if you'd want better performance you'd be better served to invest in more RAM on your PC. But, again, the manufacturer's would have you believe you'd need more throughput and have you believe the best, and fastest MPU is what you must have in your next PC. And, why not would they have you believe that, that is how they sell more units, whether it be a PC, or a camera with more megapixels! Granted, there might be those times when more megapixels would benefit you, especially if you have a tendency to crop your images deeply.
And more megapixels can have more tradeoffs, like the size of the images they produce and how much room they take on your hard drive. While loading these larger images will also take more time when you do load them on your computer. And jamming more and more smaller light gathering diodes on a sensor the size of a 35mm film negative (full frame cameras) just might impede their light gathering capabilities. And, in the end, that may produce noisier images even at native ISO settings. The sensor size geography on most of our cameras is finite...you can't build the Empire State building's footprint on the size of a residential lot in the suburbs!
I would say for the average person shooting photos today much more than 20 megapixels is plenty more than what they would need. (I can't speak of video needs because I don't do videos with our 35mm cameras) Another great example of what we once did for a client using that same 12 megapixel Nikon camera is as follows. The client had a local, and very successful real estate business and they hired us to photograph a pair of their golden retrievers dogs with the plan to post the image in an ad on local billboards! Now here's the thing with ultra large images, ironically, because of the greater viewing distances involved in viewing very large images, the actual resolution can be less than what you'd expect. And, our 12 megapixel shots worked out very well on a large billboard!
So, just some food for thought the next time you're ready to plop down some of your hard earned money on a camera (or a PC) where the mindset of the manufacturer, or the salesman is trying to upsell you on more is better. It sometimes may be, but not always!
Food for Thought
There's a point to this story.
Some memory shots came up on Catherine's cell phone of a maternity job we had done for a client 10, or more years ago. What's interesting, and the point I want to bring up, is that these rather large canvas prints were produced off of a 12 megapixel camera, the Nikon D300! The larger of the 4 canvas's was 2 foot by 3 foot! Whereas the others were (I believe) 16x24 canvas's, and also quite large. Proof that a great number of megapixels is not needed to produce large images. And here's the rub, most people don't print at all, or maybe only 4x6 images when they do....so why does anyone need 40, 50, or 60 megapixels in the first place? Well, the manufacturer's will have you believe more is better, and it's a great marketing ploy. And no different with the average computer that people really need. Unless you are doing some serious number crunching, or scientific work, or playing high end video games, why do you need the fastest, super duper processor on your computer? For most people's needs a very average performing processor is more than adequate to produce some simple documents, or view things on the internet. Actually, if you'd want better performance you'd be better served to invest in more RAM on your PC. But, again, the manufacturer's would have you believe you'd need more throughput and have you believe the best, and fastest MPU is what you must have in your next PC. And, why not would they have you believe that, that is how they sell more units, whether it be a PC, or a camera with more megapixels! Granted, there might be those times when more megapixels would benefit you, especially if you have a tendency to crop your images deeply.
And more megapixels can have more tradeoffs, like the size of the images they produce and how much room they take on your hard drive. While loading these larger images will also take more time when you do load them on your computer. And jamming more and more smaller light gathering diodes on a sensor the size of a 35mm film negative (full frame cameras) just might impede their light gathering capabilities. And, in the end, that may produce noisier images even at native ISO settings. The sensor size geography on most of our cameras is finite...you can't build the Empire State building's footprint on the size of a residential lot in the suburbs!
I would say for the average person shooting photos today much more than 20 megapixels is plenty more than what they would need. (I can't speak of video needs because I don't do videos with our 35mm cameras) Another great example of what we once did for a client using that same 12 megapixel Nikon camera is as follows. The client had a local, and very successful real estate business and they hired us to photograph a pair of their golden retrievers dogs with the plan to post the image in an ad on local billboards! Now here's the thing with ultra large images, ironically, because of the greater viewing distances involved in viewing very large images, the actual resolution can be less than what you'd expect. And, our 12 megapixel shots worked out very well on a large billboard!
So, just some food for thought the next time you're ready to plop down some of your hard earned money on a camera (or a PC) where the mindset of the manufacturer, or the salesman is trying to upsell you on more is better. It sometimes may be, but not always!