Wednesday 11 July 2007

The Megapixel Wars

When I'm with clients, I'm often asked about my cameras. The usual first question is "How many megapixels is that?" In fact, that's often the ONLY question they ask. If I tell them it's 10 megapixels (a Nikon D200), I risk getting the response "Oh, my wife has a 10 megapixel [insert any Japanese brand here] in her handbag!"

Maybe it's my insecurity, but clients seem to want to hear a bigger number - much bigger than anything their wife/son/brother has. The perception (to those that don't know) is that "more megapixels equals more quality" and that the more megapixels a camera has, the "better" a picture it's going to take. Which is, of course, nonsense - from both technical and creative standpoints.

I'm not going to go into the technicalities here, but I will sum it up with this statement: not all pixels are created equal! There are numerous factors involved - the sensor size, the pixel receptor size, the internal processing electronics, the lens resolution, the lens distortion, and so on. Then there's the post-processing - what you actually DO with the pixels the camera gives you. I shoot RAW exclusively: meaning I bypass all the internal jiggery-pokery in the camera and feed the "raw" pixel data from the sensor into a big, powerful computer and some fabulous software which actually improves on what the camera gave me. The resulting picture is NOTHING LIKE what you'd get from even the best 10 megapixel pocket camera.

Of course, for some jobs you really do need as many pixels as you can get - like when you're going to print a full-length portrait double life size. When I need to do that, I'll go out and buy a Hasselblad H3 with a 39 megapixel digital back. Until then, I'll struggle along with 10.

But the consumer world is obsessed with numbers - how many cylinders your car's engine has, how many watts your hi-fi has, how many inches your TV has - and, now, how many megapixels your camera has! Bigger is better, more is better! Give us more! More! More!

Of course, you, my rational reader, are not swayed by such marketing hype, are you? You understand that quantity is not the same as quality, right?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

there's always an issue of megapixels . can you tell me a little about those fabulous software ?

Jeremy Esland said...

DxO Optics Pro, as indicated by the link: http://www.dxo.com