Olympus gets it, why can’t everyone else?
// March 10th, 2009 // Photography
I’ve been meaning to write about this since it hit, but time keeps escaping me; the tragedy of the megapixel war is that the only casuality is the consumer. Naive logic would suggest that more megapixels are always a good thing – after all, bigger numbers are always better, or at that’s what marketing tells us.
The reality is that while more megapixels gives you more to play with, that doesn’t do much good if those pixels are largely noise. As I’ve discussed previously, the sensor is the major limiting factor in extracting quality out of a given capture. Garbage in, garbage out; it still irritates me to no end to see cell phones with 6 or 12 megapixels. Sure, it sounds great, and it makes a spectacular bullet point on the back of the box, but when the sensor and lens can only capture two megapixels of usable quality information, those extra megapixels just translate into additional storage and management costs.
Sure, storage’s cheap – I personally have over four terabytes of primary and secondary storage at home, and relatively to many, I’m not that extreme. However, those larger images take longer to process, they mean I have to spend money on backing them up, and if the quality’s poor to being with, why am I bothering in the first place?
Enter Olympus, stage left. In a remarkably insightful discussion, the head of Olympus’s planning department recently said that 12 megapixels is enough for anyone other than a professional. Surprisingly, there’s been a remarkable dearth of cries of ‘luddite’ from the bowels of the Internet – it seems like most of the people ‘in the know’ get this and agree with it. 12 megapixels may not seem like enough, but it’s more than enough to get an extremely high quality standard print. It’s even enough to blow up to around a 20cm x 30cm, if you know what you’re doing, use quality lenses, and are careful in your enlargements. For the vast majority of non-studio / non-professional photographers, that’s good enough. More than good enough – the current trend seems to be towards canvases, and they’re far more forgiving of enlargements than standard print technology.
Instead, Olympus thinks the future is in autofocus and other ‘non-megapixel-related’ technologies. And personally, I agree with them – it’s one thing to be shooting for billboards and posters and yet another to be shooting for everything else.
Now, why can’t every other consumer photography vendor clue in?