The Race Continues...

This month’s issue of Digital Photo Pro just showed up in the mail. I'm semi-surprised it made it to my new address, but that's a different story all together. They have an article by Tim Grey on pixel counts, noise, sensor technology, and how many megapixels is enough. It is very much worth a read. They have the full article available on their site.

Megapixels: How Much Is Enough?

The release of this article is pretty timely considering that Canon just released the 50D - A 1.6 crop factor DSLR that has a 15MP image sensor. They claim that through the use of gapless microlenses and having smaller/tighter line width and space in their sensor fabrication process they are able to get 1.5 stops of better response over the image sensor used in the 40D. Now I've spend a fair deal of time with a 40D in my hands and while I'm skeptical of the 1.5+ improvement over the 40D, I know the 40D needs to handle light and noise better. It actually needs more than 1.5 stops of improvement in regards to high ISO performance.

Now the question - 15MP? Think about the file sizes that camera is going to generate. This is a camera geared towards the enthusiast. How do you store and even edit those thousands of pictures you just took while on holiday? I don't know what anyone, other than a select few professionals that deal in commercial photography, who needs 15 mega pixels (and those pros are not shooting with an SLR). The one saving grace to the 50D uber pixel count is the release of the 2nd sRAW format. This would basically cut the file and photo sizes down to a 7.5MP equivalent. sRAW will not improve noise it will make the file sizes more manageable however.

Over all this was a great chance to release a killer high ISO performer and maybe Canon has done it, but I'm not going to hold my breath...

Canon, you are still on notice - I'm still looking at you and holding up a sign that says, "D3 Noise and High Is Performance, Where's it At?

/Shoeless mutters something about having too much Canon glass and stomps off.../