GrahamO wrote:
Of course it don't Rich. I did explain that if you bothered reading my contribution. One of my points was that modern DLSRs have an excess of resolution and that it doesn't matter to loose some. My first DSLR had 6mp. My second one had 13mp. My third one had 22mp and my present one has 36mp, as well as a few other digital cameras in between. They all had satisfactory resolution. So if I crop my 5D4 images by removing 1/3 I'm back to the same resolution approximately as my previous 5D3. So where is the problem with that?
Of course it don't Rich. I did explain that if you... (
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According to Roger N. Clark (Ph.D., MIT in planetary science), a 8" x 10" large format film
camera loaded with B&W film has the equivalent resolution of
960 digital megapixels.
That's almost a gigapixel.
So you've gone from 6MP to 13MP to 22 MP to 35MP. I'm glad that's working out for you.
But that isn't the whole story of world photography, is it? It didn't start with a 6MP digital camera.
In the 1940s, even Kodak Brownie's were medium format (120 film) or larger. On the Baby Brownie
was 35 mm.
In the 1950s, 35 mm became popular with amateurs and photojournalists. If you're final print
is a 3 x 5" in an album or 1-colum wide in a newspaper, you don't need much resolution.
All other professionals continued to use medium and large format for serious work.
And there other things a large format view camera can do that a digital camera can't: like tilt.
That's rather important if you're photographing architecture--or even landscapes.
Glad it's gettin' better for ya', but for photographers that need a lot of resolution, it hasn't gotten better.
Large format film still overs the best resolution by almost two orders of magnitude. What's happened
is that medium format digital cameras are now extremely expensive compared to what we used to pay
for medium format film cameras.
Nothing wrong with driving a Honda Civic -- unless you have four kids or need to haul firewood.
Some people might need an SUV or a pickup truck. Why can't a tiny format have huge optical
resolution? Same reason a Honda Civic can't haul much firewood--physical laws.
An optical image cannot be focused infinitely small. If nothing else limits it, it is limited by diffraction.
And no lens is prefect: they all have aberrations that also limit how small an image can be projected.
For these reasons, a point source (such as a star in the night sky) does not appear as a point, but as a
circle-of-confusion and/or Airy pattern. Try to project an image that is too small, and all you get is
a blur.
There are also technical limitations on pixel density. These are improving--slowy. But the phyiscal
laws are not going to change, and lenses are just about as good as they are likely to get.
Frankly, the best lenses haven't improved very much in the last 30 years. The last big improvements were
calcium fluorite elements and aspherical lenses. This is fact of optical engineering. Zoom lenses have
improved greatly thanks to computer design -- but zoom lenses never have the fewest aberrations--the
design of a zoom lens inherently involves compromises--unless you want to swop out whole groups.
Consumer want everything miniaturized, and don't seem to care about making prints anymore. So the
industry has gone in that direction. If you never make prints and don't own a large, high-res montior,
you may nrbrt notice how poor the resolution is. All thumnnails look sharp.
Hey, if that's good enough for you, fine. Just please don't assume that means it's good enough for everybody.
And don't assume that because your camera generates a 35 MP pixel array, it actually captured that much
information. Image sensors are far from perfect. And it takes your color sensor 3 photocells (with color filters)
to do the job of one photocelll on a monochrome sensor.
There's still no "one size fits all" in cameras--and here never will be. You gotta have the right vehicle for the job.