On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 1:29 PM, Olin Lathrop w= rote: > Denny Esterline wrote: >> You say "megapixel madness" like it's a bad thing... > > In isolation, more pixels are better. =A0However, Canon seems to have gon= e for > quantity at the expense of quality. =A0Their megapixel madness craze seem= s to > have taken engineering focus from other areas that would be of more benef= it. > >> 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 tha= t > the noise can be evaluated apples to apples. > Ok, poorly phrased on my part. Let's try "prevent people from gaming the comparison". >> 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. =A0A 20Mp sensor can have a little more noise = per > pixel and still come out to the same equivalent noise when post-processed= to > the same resolution as a 12Mp sensor, for example. =A0This was also the p= oint > I was making with the right image of the pairs in > http://www.embedinc.com/d3s. =A0Those are snippets of the picture after t= he > horizontal dimension was reduced to 1024 pixels. =A0You can clearly see t= his > effect at the high ISO settings on that web page where the left picture h= as > obvious pixel noise, but the right picture looks pretty much the same for > all ISO settings. =A0Another way to say this is that camera can easily do > clean ISO 12800 when your ultimate aim is 1024 wide picture. > And I understand that, I'm trying to understand why a person would choose a specific 12mp camera that has been accused of being big and heavy (at least relatively) over a 20+mp unit if it can produce same or better picture quality with minimal post-processing? Or to put it another way, If a superb 12mp unit has a SNR of X, if I take a less than superb 20 mp unit and post process it to 12mp - is the SNR better or worse than X? -Denny --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .