Megapixel Madness

Found this site this morning: Petavoxel, a brand new blog that so far seems to talk mostly about the hardware aspects of photography, especially about why the rush for more megapixels in a point-and-shoot camera is an exercise in stupidity.

The most interesting from a visual aspect is this article: it shows a crop (not magnified or otherwise distorted) from a photo taken by an ordinary point-and-shoot (I so want to abbreviate that to POS -- Must. Stop.). The artifacts from the ultra-tiny pixels on the CCD are all too obvious once the rest of the photo is ignored and hidden.

From a technical viewpoint, this article is equally as interesting: it lays the groundwork as to why the image from the previous article is so bad. His latest article states that you should be looking at cameras with sensors that have pixels greater than 2 microns in size.

The summary is this: putting more megapixels in a point-and-shoot camera is a waste of time (the author goes even stronger, he calls it a marketing fraud); the reason why the best photos come from a DSLR is not necessarily because of the bigger, better lenses, but because of the bigger sensor.

Posted via email from Julian's posterous

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