Latest Expert Witness News

Why we've reached the end of the camera megapixel race

Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging's SLR planning department, has officially thrown down the gauntlet and drawn a line in the megapixel sand. Twelve megapixels is, I think, enough for covering most applications most customers need," he told ZDNet this week at the annual Photo Marketing Association convention. But is he right?

Megapixels are the digital camera market's equivalent of horsepower, a single metric that consumers and marketers latch on to tenaciously, despite the fact that it hardly describes overall performance. Over the last several years, camera manufacturers have been pumping up the megapixels on each successive camera model, regardless of whether such increases offered any real benefit (hint: it usually doesn't).

Throwing more megapixels at the digital imaging problem is akin to bumping up the processor speed on a motherboard with a slow bus and small amounts of RAM, or adding a turbo to a small engine on a car with lousy brakes and wobbly suspension.

See, throwing more megapixels at the digital imaging problem is akin to bumping up the processor speed on a motherboard with a slow bus and small amounts of RAM, or adding a turbo to a small engine on a car with lousy brakes and wobbly suspension. The number of megapixels in a camera's image sensor is just one in a number of aspects that truly define how well a camera works.

In an image sensor, larger pixels mean better light-gathering capability. This translates to better low-light performance, better color accuracy, and in some cases better dynamic range. Sensors commonly come in a few different sizes: Full frame (24 x 23mm), APC-C (17 x 25mm), Four-thirds (13.5 x 18mm), and even smaller sensors on compact point-and-shoot models. As manufactures cram more pixels on a given sensor, those pixels get smaller and smaller.

Typically, this reduction in individual pixel size on a sensor reduces its ability to gather light, reducing its sensitivity. Now, manufacturers have devised a number of technologies to try and combat this problem, but jamming more and more pixels on a sensor quickly leads to diminishing returns in terms of image quality.

back