Denny Esterline wrote:
> You say "megapixel madness" like it's a bad thing...

In isolation, more pixels are better.  However, Canon seems to have gone fo=
r
quantity at the expense of quality.  Their megapixel madness craze seems to
have taken engineering focus from other areas that would be of more benefit=
..

> But you also
> suggested earlier that the test pictures should be at a specified size
> to prevent post processing to improve the signal to noise ratio.

No, not to prevent post processing, but to specifically require it so that
the noise can be evaluated apples to apples.

> As a (possibly naive) consumer, I don't really care about all the
> details to achieve it, I just want pretty pictures :-). Does it really
> matter if that comes from a superb 12mp sensor or is post processed
> from a 20mp sensor?

That was exactly my point.  A 20Mp sensor can have a little more noise per
pixel and still come out to the same equivalent noise when post-processed t=
o
the same resolution as a 12Mp sensor, for example.  This was also the point
I was making with the right image of the pairs in
http://www.embedinc.com/d3s.  Those are snippets of the picture after the
horizontal dimension was reduced to 1024 pixels.  You can clearly see this
effect at the high ISO settings on that web page where the left picture has
obvious pixel noise, but the right picture looks pretty much the same for
all ISO settings.  Another way to say this is that camera can easily do
clean ISO 12800 when your ultimate aim is 1024 wide picture.


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