Thursday, September 04, 2008

Sony A900

Somebody finally beat Canons looooong-standing king-of-the-hill position in resolution terms in the DSLR arena. Sony did.

The Sony A900 has over 24 megapixels. That is really packing them in, even in a full frame sensor. It will be interesting to see how it deals with noise.
It's also interesting that Sony seems to have kept the very boxy look of this camera, instead of going for the soft, "melted" look which has been in vogue the past many years. Good for them.

As you know, I'm not eager to get on board with all those megapixels, but I'm interested because developments like this always push technology further. Like back when Kodak invented that awful "Kodak Disc" camera/film with a negative the size of a quarter of a postage stamp (literally!), then they had to invent a film emulsion with grain fine enough that some kind of picture could be produced by the tiny negative, and these emulsions then came to the aid of more serious formats like 35mm.

Similarly, I would not be surprised if the breakthroughs in low noise that resulted in the brilliant Nikon D3 actually came from research done in order to make a 20+ megapixel sensor with reasonably low noise.

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