Beyond Megapixels - Part III

TheTechLounge writes "Beyond Megapixels - Part I & Part II have both been posted here at Slashdot, and now it is my pleasure to bring to you Beyond Megapixels - Part III. This is the final part of this series of editorial articles examining current digital photography hardware. In this segment I will be focusing on function, filetypes, and features."

My camera

[pcmanjon]

I don't understand the whole hype about MEGApixXels.

I have a 2.0 megapixel camera. It was about 250 bucks when I purchased it.

It's an Olympus D-380 Digital Camera, it uses a (60?) meg flash memory card. Connects to the computer via USB to upload pics.

I've -never- seemed to need a new camera after this year of having owned it. Pictures are pretty clear, they're great for vacation, taking pictures of my latest case mod, pasting links of me almost naked on slashdot (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/18/15152 01&mode=nested&tid=133&tid=186&tid=214 )

Or just about anything else.

What's this growing need of a huge megepixel camera?

What? Do you enjoy being able to clearly see an ant from taking a picture with your camera 12 feet above an ant mound?

I've advised several friends on digital camera...

[Dagny Taggert]

...purchases in the last few months and I have to say that the "megapixel race" is becoming like the megahertz race in that many people use that feature alone as their determining factor. Rarely do they want to discuss optical versus digital zoom (something that Kodak is addressing with their DX6490, a 10X OPTICAL zoom in an inexpensive, well-built camera), output format, etc.

Not bad. Why not concentrate on F/OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Not bad. Why not concentrate on F/OSS abit more. As it is it doesn't look much more than any article you might find on any photography site, very photoshop centric. With barely a mention of GIMP.

Re:My camera

[Anonymous Coward]

It pretty simple. You and I and a huge percentage of the population probably don't need more than a 2 or 3 megapixel camera, but unless the companies can come up with something else to use as a marketing gimmick, they will be pushing the megapixels.

Re:My camera

[SushiFugu]

Have you ever tried printing those 2 megapixel images? 2.0 may be all well and good on a monitor, but printing is a whole 'nother ballgame. You won't be getting any kind of acceptable 8x10's out of that. And we're not even talking professional use here, just simple at home printing, when you start talking about actually selling your images or doing other serious work with them, the need for 5+ megapixels becomes painfully clear.

So yes, 2.0 is enough if all you're doing is posting the images online or archiving them for the heck of it, but when it comes to really putting them to work, whether it be printing just for at home framing or for professional work, you'll quickly see the need for those "hyped" high megapixels.

Re:I've advised several friends on digital camera.

[FraggedSquid]

I remember watching a review of digital cameras on a gadget show a year or so ago. The reviewer pointed out that the key to the image was the lens, if that is bad, then nothing else matters.

Don't talk pixels, talk optics.

Re:Linux and RAW.

[afidel]

Yeah but when you convert you lose the ability to do all of the advanced image manipulation stuff based on sensor information. There are tons of different transforms that work MUCH better if they have the info directly from the sensors rather than a pixel value extrapolated from those values. Personally I think I would run Photoshop and my camera vendors RAW utilities under xover office before just dumping the data to TIFF, otherwise why not just use superfine JPEG?

RTFA!

[mx.2000]

There's barely a mention of Photoshop either. The article is about the cameras.

Re:You know

[ttsalo]

Theirs just something about developing your own B and W film. You just can't do that with digital.

You mean sloshing chemicals around in a closed tank? I didn't find that very interesting :-) Making prints was a different ballgame though. If you want the ultimate B&W print, I don't think you can beat all-chemical process.

But making color prints was a real pain in the butt. I did prints from color negatives and Ilfochromes from slides, but most of the time I ran out of patience before getting everything just right. Sending the images over the net to a printing service, where they are printed straight onto photographic paper, and sent to me via the post, is so much easier and produces so good results that I don't want to go back to the color chemicals ever again.

--

Re:My camera

[lintux]

I think it's like most things in the computer world. Megapixels are numbers which can easily be compared with each other, whereas you can't just easily state that camera A has a better picture quality than camera B. Partially, maybe, because it's a matter of taste, but mainly because the picture quality can't be measured in a number that can be put on the label that also tells the customer how expensive the cam is.

And well, as some people say, higher resolutions can be useful when you want large prints of the pictures.

Re:The Camera for a Serious Amatuer

[Zog The Undeniable]

Don't good LCD viewfinders make SLRs redundant for digital cameras? There really isn't much point in having all that moving-mirror hardware; if you must have a bigger image for focusing, electronic viewfinders are available. I speak as someone who also uses a medium format SLR, by the way.

There are no good LCD viewfinders.

[Agent Green]

Firstly, there are no good LCD viewfinders...especially when we're talking about still frame quality of any kind. Secondly, there is no need for an SLR mechanism on a digital LCD viewfinder, since the picture is being fed from the imaging CCD anyways. Cameras such as the Canon D300, 10D or any other digital SLR don't use LCD viewfinders, because that's not what their customers really want or need...and it would defeat the purpose anyway.

When I was in the camera market, I was going for either the Digital Rebel or the gigantic Sony 8MP thing...and eventually settled on the rebel. (Okay, its was the EF Lens capability that won me over). I find that being able to make image adjustments is a lot easier when I'm looking at exactly what will be photographed, instead of some downsized representation. That, and I take good pictures from anywhere in the ballpark with an additional zoom lens. :) More or less, I can do more serious amateur photography without spending my entire livelihood on film/development/printing, which allows me to take many, many more pictures.

Granted, this works because I bought my camera to be a camera...not some kind of camcorder...which is one feature most LCD viewfinder cameras offer.

You're well out-of-date

[ianscot]

Two MP was maybe the standard, what, two years ago? Three hundred for a 2 MP camera today would be extravagantly overpriced unless it was small enough to fit inside your shirt button or something. You can get 2 MP for half that price, $150 [target.com], from a commodity discount store.

Three MP, or something like 3.2, is now below $300, more like $250.

The mid-range models are now at four -- that's the current standard, more-or-less, for solid point-and-shooters.

Personally I know from experience that if you're going to want to make enlargements, you want something like four at least. Three will be okay, but there's some degradation of the image, especially if you're going up to 8x10. That's not a microscope, it's just a picture for your desk at work. A 2 MP camera is going to be painful at that size.

The C-3000 doesn't have interchangeable lenses...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and is nothing like a 'regular film SLR'.

Who modded this +5 Informative for Christ's sake?

The guy doesn't know shit!

Re:Why Megapixels?

[StateOfTheUnion]

* a good optical lens (come on, an f of 2.8 is not that great, unless you live in a really sunny country) with a solid optical zoom (who CARES about digital zoom?).

There's a lot more to a lens than the F-stop . . . 2.8 is pretty darn good in a lot of the pro-lense market for SLR's. Getting larger aperatures than this often causes significant distortion in the lens . . . hence the super-expensive cost of the really fast lens, or in the case of a lot of consumer level digital cameras, crummy optics that result in a loss of sharpness . . . this is going the way of the megapixel wars . . . uninformed consumers think that larger aperature and bigger zoom = better camera . . . typically the truth is larger aperature and bigger zoom = crappier overall sharpness and more lens distortion . . . which amounts to crappy looking pictures.

Personally, I'll take my Nikon Coolpix 5000 with its slower lens (3.3) over just about any faster lens consumer digital camera any day . . . I know that the optics aren't perfect, I bought it 4 years ago, but even by today's standards, the optics are a lot better than most consumer digi-cams I've seen. And I'll take my Digital SLR over that . . . any day.

Re:I've advised several friends on digital camera.

[Basje]

Sigh. Zoomfactor is just as much a non-informative factor as megapixels.

10x what? 28mm (equiv)? 35mm? 38?

That's quite a difference. And the wide angle is more important than the zoomfactor anyway, in 9 out of 10 cases.

Flash Capabilities

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Other than a brief mention of "virtual fill flash" from Nikon, I don't see anything in any of these articles about flash capabilities. I don't care about the built-in flash, but having an external, powerful, fully integrated flash unit sitting a foot above my lens, held by a high-quality bracket, is extremely important to me. My Nikon F5 is almost never used without the SB28 flash unit (I tend to shoot people, indoors) and the combination is *SO* much more than the sum of the parts.

So here's my question and one of my big selection criteria: What non-interchangeable lens digital cameras are available with highly integrated and powerful external flash systems? All the usual requirement of a good lens, etc., also apply. Anybody have any experience/knowledge to share?

Re:Megapixel

[grannyknot]

I really don't think there's much difference once you get over 2 megapixels though

2.0 megapixels may be fine for you, but if you want enlarged colour prints, good luck.

And that's not really the point of this (extremely brief) article anyhow - it's not the number of pixels you have so much as how you use them (or what physical size within the camear they happen to be).

Re:My camera

[s.o.terica]

Displays have approximately 100 DPI (dots per inch) of resolution. Printing on a cheapie inkjet has 300 DPI. Printing on a high-quality but still consumer-level laser printer tops out around 1200 DPI. Each time you double the DPI, you need 4 times as many pixels to attain it.

Technically true, but misleading. Displays have 100dpi at 24 bits per "dot" (pixel) for a possibility of any of 16.7 million colors per pixel; printers have (approximately, since black is basically equivalent to adding the other colors other colors) 3 bits per dot (On or Off for Cyan, Magenta and Yellow) for a total of 8 possible colors per dot. This means that you have to use a matrix of at least eight dots to even attempt to replicate the same color space that a monitor can display with one dot. This is why antialiasing is so effective on monitors, because a monitor's resolution is three-dimensional instead of two-dimensional