More on the "megapixel-myth".
(If you get a big ad when clicking on the above link, please notice the tiny, tiny link on upper right which says "skip this ad".)
I have to admit, even though I completely believe what Pogue is telling us here, and shows by testing, namely that very few people can tell the difference between different pictures with sizeable differences in megapixels, I am still hooked on them. I still feel I'm compromising when I use a 6-megapixel camera instead of a 10-megapixel camera. It is silly.
3 comments:
Quite simply, the 16 by 24 inch poster is not big enough to allow the added detail in the 24M image to come through.
He kind of comes to this conclusion himself when he says that more megapixels is still good when you need to crop the image.
In my own work, I've discovered that 3 megapixels is just about sufficient for an A4 size print. Now, if we extrapolate from that:
3M = A4
6M = A3
12M = A2
24M = A1
His 16" x 24" is roughly the size of A2.
Ah, now I read it more carefully: the tested resolutions were 7M, 10M and 16,7M (not 24M).
Anyway, the 16,7 is still overkill for a 16" by 24" print.
Had they printed all three samples in A1 size, telling them apart should have been relatively easy.
I once read that the sound of an ochestra spans a spectrum ranging from a few Hertz up to more than 24 KHz.
Our ears/brains can hear only some 20 KHz, less when you get older. Even so the orchestra would sound less dynamic if its spectrum would be limited artificially to the spectrum of the ear/brain.
I think it's the same with pixels. Although we can't see a difference when comparing pictures with different (high) resolutions we can "feel" that there's a difference.
The retina btw has some 125 millions of visual receptors ("pixels") in each eye.
If you're interested you can read further interesting details in the latest issue of TIME Europe (Feb12: "The Brain, A Users Guide").
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